What's New - Winter 2004

RACU Launches Honors Program with Appointment of New Director

About three years ago, RACU began serious discussions about starting an honors program for outstanding students. Although the program was launched with a couple of honors courses offered by our professor of fine arts, Oleg Chernyshov, the program did not completely get off the ground. The academic leadership in Moscow is very happy to announce that this will soon change as a result of the appointment of Matthew Miller as the new Director of the RACU Honors Program. Matt is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern European History at the University of Minnesota, and he has worked in Moscow with his wife, Terri, (with a break for Ph.D. studies) since 1997.

The Honors Program at RACU will be a unique educational experience for our exceptional scholars. Students who are accepted into the honors program will attend special classes for part of their program, but they will also participate in monthly seminars, which will focus on discussions of classic works in different fields, and take part in academic conferences, where they will present their own research and creative work. The key missing piece for RACU in implementing this program up until now was that we did not have a person in place who could develop it and make it happen. Now we do.

Matt’s new responsibilities will include functioning as an academic advisor to the honors students, helping to organize new honors courses, and helping professors to develop new classes. This is a unique opportunity for RACU students, since honors programs have not typically been a part of the Russian higher education landscape. Students who graduate with honors at RACU will not just have another line on their resumes, but they will be students who know how to do original research and have a more extensive grounding in the liberal arts.

David Broersma, RACU’s provost, had the following to say about Matt’s appointment as the Director of the Honors Program: “Matt and Terri Miller have a vision both for the development of Christian higher education in Russia and for helping individual students reach their full potential. They are a wonderful addition to the team, and we welcome them to the RACU family. We are expecting great things.”