President John Delaney welcomed the honorees and acknowledged the level of difficulty students face in qualifying for this award. Delaney said the challenge of achieving an untattered GPA requires incredibly hard work.
The President's List is compiled in recognition of students achieving a certain standard of academic excellence and is distributed by the Office of Academic Affairs. Students who earn a 4.0 GPA with at least 12 semester hours of graded credit are named to the President's List.
In his ceremonial remarks, the Vice President of Academic Affairs, Art Vanden Houten, congratulated students on what he considers a remarkably hard-earned accomplishment.
“It is an incredible individual accomplishment,” Vanden Houten said. “As the president appropriately noted, many of you are carrying four, five classes. Many of you are working, and many of you have leadership positions on campus... And of course, I couldn't even begin to mention the individual stressors that you all face during the course of a semester”
Vanden Houten spoke on why this impressive academic achievement “captures so much” of what Flagler College is all about, underscoring the “communal nature of higher education” no matter how “solitary” the academic work to achieve this honor may seem.
“First, we’re in conversation with the books that we're reading, the papers that we're writing, the math equations that we're studying,” he said. “That alone is kind of a conversation with others. But for a student to really be successful, it takes support of many, many, many other people.”
He also pointed out the friends, family, peers, and professors who attended the ceremony in support that afternoon, taking a moment to acknowledge the dedication of Flagler’s professors and the bar he encourages them to set in the classroom.
Vanden Houten said he “particularly” emphasizes the need to challenge students who have earned a spot on the President’s List.
“Challenge your best students,” Vanden Houten tells faculty. “Because when students walk into a classroom, they often don't know what they're capable of achieving. And as that bar is set higher and higher, and they see themselves accomplish more and more, their confidence, their sense of self, and their sense of empowerment grow.”
As an Associate Professor of Political Science, Vanden Houten knows how much faculty value the presence of strong, “exceptionally accomplished,” students in the classroom. With Flagler’s small class sizes, he said their high-level contributions to dialogue and quality engagement with the materials encourages academic excellence in their peers.
“Having students in the classroom who are really committed to excellence, who can exhibit excellence in their performance, who can really establish a high threshold for other students, motivates other students, it gives them something they can aim at and aspire to, it gives them a sense of what excellence looks like, and truly is an important piece of the classroom,” Vanden Houten said.
