Enough things are pointless in this world without Eastern having an Honors College.

We have an Honors Program. The proposer of renaming it the Honors College said it will be only that: A name change. Oh, and his title will change to dean.

Aside from some paint to change the sign in front of the building, Eastern will add a fifth college at no extra cost.

Even if I believed that, I still don’t see the point. Honors Program officials think the name change will draw talented students to Eastern, like the difference of one word will turn Eastern into Yale for some students.

I spent my junior year of high school in suburbia, conferring with fellow nerds on where we wanted to go to college and why. Never was the phrase “honors college” or honors anything mentioned, and we were all on the honors track in high school.

But that’s a big difference between high school honors and college honors. By and large, most students don’t have a choice about which high school they go to. You’re stuck somewhere, you make the best of it and sometimes that means taking honors classes.

The point, I thought, was to get into college. College itself is the honors program. Going to a college that has a good overall reputation, as Eastern does, removes the need for honors anything.

Whether a college has an honors program is irrelevant to most prospective students. Transfer students like myself would have to take most or all of their general education classes over again to meet the requirements. Other people just don’t care, or want to focus more on the classes in their major than some souped-up gen eds.

And more than a few little birds have told me that honors classes are often their easiest, or no more difficult. Maybe we should be looking at, oh, results, to see if this Honors Program is anything that ought to be drawing anyone.

Calling the Honors Program an Honors College is mostly a big headache that probably won’t change a whole lot. Why is it a headache? The implications, not all of them financial, could cause real problems down the road.

So there are more than 200 people in the Honors Program. Big, hairy deal. Some majors, like elementary education, have many more students than that and seem to be doing okay without cocooning themselves in a name change and bursting out as the big bad butterfly of academia.

But what would stop them? Why not, as some in Faculty Senate mentioned Tuesday, begin a College of Political Science? Maybe I’d like to go to the College of Journalism, so we could get more students and I’d have a little more help around here.

And unless inflation freezes all around the Honors Program and they want to stay in a stage of suspended animation forever, it will cost money. No doubt. And whoever takes over for the current director when he retires, which he has spoken of doing, may have a very different idea of what it means to be dean of the Honors College.

If the director of the Honors Program wants to be a dean so badly, why not call it the Honors School? The Graduate School and the School of Continuing Education both have deans. And I doubt a prospective student is going to lay an egg over the difference between “school” and “college.”

And if they are, who needs them.

Enrollment managed to shoot off the charts this year without an Honors College. Even if it could promise results in the form of students dying to get into Eastern, planners aren’t exactly looking for another giant enrollment increase at the moment.

Show some results, Honors Program, or give it a rest.