After nearly a decade leading the University Honors Program, director Matt Bribitzer-Stull is leaving his role in June 2025.
The University Honors Program was only in its eighth year of existence when Bribitzer-Stull took on the role of director. From 2002-2008, prior to the formation of the Honors program, Bribitzer-Stull had been the honors advisor for music studies in the College of Liberal Arts. He had always been interested in pursuing administrative roles, so when he saw the posting for the directorship on LinkedIn, he knew he wanted to apply.
“I've always been very interested in liberal education and a very broad education,” he said. “I had not had many opportunities to work with students and colleagues outside of CLA, so that appealed to me.”
His interest in interdisciplinary studies can be traced back to his time as a sixth grader in Bloomington, Minnesota as part of the high achievers program, an enrichment program for high ability students.
“It was a lot of field trips, a lot of enrichment, and I loved it,” he said. “It made me think, how fun can education be if you give people a whole smorgasbord of things they want to do?”
This enrichment served as the inspiration for Honors NEXUS experiences. In August 2016, Northrop had donated 20 free tickets to the Honors Program for a showing of the Dracula ballet. Rather than simply giving away the tickets, Bribitzer-Stull decided to use it as an educational opportunity. He searched for faculty across the University who could speak on Dracula from a variety of disciplines. The end result was a semester-long experience with faculty from English, dance, and history.
“It ended up being so rewarding,” he said. “The students were really enthused, and the conversations every week were really rich."
Now UHP offers multiple NEXUS experiences a semester, ranging from Arts Exploration with Northrop to Knitting K(NEXUS). It is one of Bribitzer-Stull’s proudest achievements with the program, but it isn’t the only legacy he’s leaving behind. In 2023, he launched the Faculty Fellows program which invites faculty from the University to “live” in UHP for a semester or year. The Fellows lead NEXUS experiences, teach Honors seminars, present lectures at Nova, and cultivate relationships with Honors students at events and one-on-one meetings.
However, inviting faculty to the program meant a significant restructuring of the program budget. The primary cut was to the advising staff, who had previously served as both the collegiate advisor and Honors advisor for Honors students. Now they would only serve the Honors advising role; collegiate advising would go back to the college advising teams.
“Students are coming [to UMN] in part for the faculty, and I want to give them access to faculty," he said.
Since 2023, the Honors program has had 13 Faculty Fellows, with three more slated for the 2025-2026 academic year. Bribitzer-Stull hopes to see that number reach 20 in the coming years.
Despite the staff resistance during the implementation of the Fellows program, Bribitzer-Stull says his proudest accomplishment is actually the organizational and staff structure of UHP.
“The staff constituency we have housed in Jones right now - this group of people, in this place, with this structure - is a legacy I’m really proud to pass on to my successor,” he said.
All of these accomplishments - the NEXUS experiences, and the Faculty Fellows program, and the organizational structure, - reinforce what Bribitzer-Stull sees as the value of Honors.
"A lot of schools, it's all about a thesis at the end,” he said. "But I think the breadth, enrichment, and challenge model is, to my mind, what the Honors program has to offer."
After leaving UHP, Bribitzer-Stull will be taking a year long sabbatical to recharge and finish writing his book. He will then continue his work as a professor of music theory. After that, he says, is to be determined.
“I think the biggest thing for me - apart from a sense of accomplishment that I’ll take from this position - is that it’s taught me a lot of wisdom,” he said. “It taught me a lot about how communities make decisions and how power works and affects human relationships.”