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.
“You do it the old-fashioned way,” Delaney said. “Which is to earn it.”
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, underscored what an “extraordinary and remarkable,” accomplishment this is for students. He spoke about the invaluable role President’s List recipients play in the College’s mission to foster an academically robust culture at Flagler.
“We want Flagler to be a place where students can flourish,” Vanden Houten said. “We want Flagler to be a place where students recognize we are standing with them and standing behind them. We also want it to be challenging.”
In this challenging environment, Vanden Houten said the classroom presence of students who excel academically is “enormously valuable to the way the course unfolds.”
As an Associate Professor of Political Science, Vanden Houten has first-hand experience working in a classroom setting with students that maintain such a commitment to their academic standing. He said President’s List recipients raise the academic bar for courses at Flagler, set the tone for classroom conversation, and inspire engagement among their peers.
“You play a role that I think is more important and more impactful than perhaps you may recognize,” he said to the students being recognized.
Rather than being an indicator of solitude, this academic success is something that Vanden Houten said sets President’s List recipients up to be positively influential members of Flagler’s campus community.
“Studying, test taking, writing papers- those things can often seem like solitary endeavors,” Vanden Houten said. “But colleges really are, at their fundamental level, a community. A kind of conversation. A group involved in a common endeavor.”
