About
The Business Honors Program (BHP) in the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame is not only rigorous and demanding, but it is also distinctive in its mission, in its conception, and in its design.
Mission
The BHP’s mission is to help students understand their full natures as human persons, to help them practice virtue and avoid vice, and to help them form plans for their lives that enable not only professional success but integral human development.
The BHP engages students as complete and unrepeatable souls, as human persons created in the image and likeness of God as purposive moral agents. They are qualitatively different from other creatures, not only because they have faculties of reason and speech, but also because they have aspirations and goals, they imagine futures for themselves, they deliberate on their purposes, they freely choose courses of life filled with plans and projects, and they are morally responsible for the choices they make.
Concept
The BHP is a comprehensive formational community that aims to enable students to integrate core aspects of their lives—professional, personal, social—into a coherent, unified life of meaning and purpose.
In the BHP, we want our students to find not just a job but a calling, to find not merely things to do but their unique vocation. Business can be, as Pope Francis argued, a “noble vocation,” but only when “directed to producing wealth and improving our world” and when oriented to the “universal destination of goods.” In the BHP, we understand this as a mandate to engage students in examination of what constitutes “honorable business”—and, of course, “dishonorable business”—and to encourage them to seek the former and avoid the latter in their professional lives as one crucial element of their integral human development.
This mandate includes encouraging students to understand all human persons as possessed of intrinsic dignity, to respect and promote that dignity in all their professional dealings and relationships, and to proactively develop and use their unique gifts to create genuine value in the world.
Design
The BHP’s design thus rests on three core “pillars:” Academic Rigor, Formation in Virtue, and Community.
First, we seek to provide enhanced academic challenge for our highest-achieving students. Second, we seek to provide sustained opportunity for students to contemplate and practice virtue in all aspects of their lives, including in their (prospective) professional careers. And third, we seek to create a genuine, mutually supportive community of charity and solidarity, in which we understand the success of any of us as the success of all of us.
All the BHP’s programming, activities, and events—from required Honors courses to colloquia with invited speakers to individualized mentoring to tutoring and service opportunities and social events—are informed by this mission and conception, and supported by these three pillars. The BHP is a three-year, multifaceted, curricular and extracurricular, integrated program. Its members commit not only to the program itself but also to one another, as the faculty and staff similarly commit to the students.
Distinctiveness
We want our graduates to become ambassadors to the world for honorable business, to be good not only at their jobs but at leading a flourishing human life.
Honors business programs elsewhere may focus on GPAs and on helping students secure high-level internships and jobs. The BHP believes that academic performance, and mastery of technical skills required to prepare students for excellent careers, is an important part of our mission. But it is not the only part. Our other two “pillars”—virtue and community—are equally important.
We wish to enhance all aspects of students’ experience at Notre Dame. We want them to find their callings and find meaning and purpose in their lives. We want them, in other words, to be not only business graduates but Notre Dame business graduates. And we want them to carry this identity purposefully and proudly wherever their lives may take them.
A North Star?
The BHP’s North Star logo is an intentional choice. As students engage in rigorous studies, grow in virtue, and participate in community, we believe we are setting them up for success in all areas of their lives. We expect them to contribute to the good of society and become models of integrity and purpose—north stars for business leadership.