The Eckardt Scholars Program is a highly selective and unique honors program in the College of Arts and Sciences. The program emphasizes deep intellectual curiosity, independent work, and close mentoring relationships between the very highest achieving students and faculty at Lehigh.
Students in the program are exempt from the Arts & Sciences distribution requirements and work with their major advisor and the program director to create a personalized curriculum that best suits their academic interests and ambitions.
This flexibility leads students innovate on the traditional academic experience, allowing them to develop into future leaders through unique opportunities that are not offered to most students.
The program includes participation in two Eckardt Scholar Seminars, and completion of a large capstone project (in the form of a thesis, artistic creation, or other cumulative project) during the senior year.
Although exempt from Arts and Sciences distribution requirements, students will complete the requisite number of credits for their degrees and all correlative requirements for their departmental or interdisciplinary majors.
The program is named in honor of A. Roy Eckardt (1918-98). Having earned a B.A. at Brooklyn College, a master’s at Yale and a doctorate at Columbia, Roy came to Lehigh in 1951 and served as chairman of the Department of Religion from then until retiring in 1980. A prolific author of books and articles on moral philosophy and the theology of politics, Roy was one of the world’s leading authorities on the Holocaust and relations between Christians and Jews. As an administrator, editor, and writer, he had an enormous impact on the study of religion both at Lehigh and throughout the United States.