Aligning the TEI in the Wild essay series with the colleges the W.A. Franke Honors College serves.
The TEI in the Wild series is published in the order it is written — newest first, as a working notebook. That order serves a reader. It does not serve an academic adviser. This page re-sorts the same essays by the question an adviser actually has to answer: which department signs the form, and under which existing mechanism.
It proposes no new courses, no new units, and no new administrative structure. Every placement below runs through a mechanism Franke Honors already operates.
This alignment is prepared for the W.A. Franke Honors College at the University of Arizona, where the Mensch Prize is already institutionally present. Each essay is given one primary home. An alignment that listed every essay under every plausible department would not be an alignment — it would be a concordance, and it would hand the adviser back the work it was meant to do for them. Cross-listings are noted in the essay descriptions where a second college has a real claim.
The Three Doors
An alignment that ignores mechanism is a wish list. Franke Honors offers exactly three doors through which outside material can enter a student’s degree, and they are not the same size. Everything below is sorted with these in view.
Lowest friction, highest volume.
A student adds honors depth to an existing non-honors course in the major. No new paperwork at the college level. An essay becomes the frame for the contract’s deliverable.
The departmental X99H and X92H numbers.
Franke requires that the work be demonstrably different from an ordinary independent study — not more assignments, but deeper and more intense engagement with the subject. A single essay used as a structured lens on a discipline’s own literature is close to a textbook instance of that requirement.
Six units across the final two semesters.
A prospectus and a project of at least one year’s duration. Only the essay clusters — the trilogies and companion pairs — carry enough weight to seed one.
Alongside those three sits Franke’s own curriculum: the one-unit Honors seminars, and the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation, which can only be earned in combination with another major and whose capstone is designed to align with the Honors Thesis requirement. That last fact is the most important structural detail here. It is the seam through which a framework can enter without anyone being asked to build a new course.
A theory that requires an institution to reorganize itself before it can be taught has not been made teachable. It has only been made expensive.
How This Page Is Organized
The essays are grouped by the size of commitment they can support, not by subject matter. Franke Honors Core essays need no host department — they are about the formation of intelligence itself, and belong in the one-unit seminars, in BCII challenge-question framing, and in thesis-prospectus preparation. The discipline sections that follow are sized for an honors contract or an independent study, each essay in one primary college home. The thesis-scale clusters at the end are sequences, written to be read in order, and are the only entries with enough weight to seed a six-unit thesis.
The page updates itself as new essays are published and placed, so it does not go stale between revisions of the source essay.
College of Engineering
Franke engineers carry their own track: seven honors units for design work in the major, and the interdisciplinary senior capstone may fulfil the honors thesis. Governance embedded in the fabric is a design problem, which places this cluster inside the capstone rather than beside it.
College of Information Science
Data science, machine learning, and cyber operations. The strongest natural fit outside Engineering, and the one where an honors contract on an existing course requires the least translation.
College of Science — Physics, Astronomy & Mathematics
The heaviest concentration in the series, and the one most likely to be read sceptically by faculty — which is the point of assigning it here.
College of Science — Neuroscience, Cognitive Science & Psychology
Three essays that make empirically checkable claims about where intelligence resides.
College of Science — Lunar & Planetary Laboratory / Arizona Astrobiology Center
The Foundation's Mensch Prize is already present at the Arizona Astrobiology Center, which makes this the shortest institutional distance of any cluster here.
College of Science — Chemistry, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Where chemistry crosses into life.
College of Social & Behavioral Sciences — Philosophy
The seam where the framework is most exposed and therefore most usefully tested. An adviser should expect these to come back argued with.
College of Social & Behavioral Sciences — Government & Public Policy
Self-government read as the same cycle at national scale. Six essays, enough for a sustained sequence.
College of Social & Behavioral Sciences — American Indian Studies
These require the most care in placement. They should be taught with Indigenous faculty leading, not applied to Indigenous lifeways from outside — a caution the second essay makes explicitly, which is the reason it can be offered here at all.
College of Social & Behavioral Sciences — Anthropology, Sociology & Linguistics
Conflict, meaning, and the life of signs.
College of Humanities
Religious Studies and Classics is the natural host; Public and Applied Humanities is the alternative for students wanting an applied capstone.
Eller College of Management
Management information systems, entrepreneurship, and business ethics. Thin in count, strong in fit — and reinforced by the Engineering cross-listing of the fabless licensing story.
James E. Rogers College of Law
The University's undergraduate law major makes this live rather than aspirational. One primary assignment, but four strong cross-listings: the patent essay, the organizational-blindness essay, the constitutional essay, and the executive-order essay all belong in a law reading list.
College of Education
Educational psychology and sociocultural studies. One primary assignment; the Tier One formation essays and the fifth-hijacker essay all cross-list here, and in practice this college draws on five.
Colleges of Public Health, Health Sciences & Nursing
Franke's own Human Health and Values minor is the most natural landing place for the third of these.
Thesis-Scale Clusters
Six units and a year of work need more than a single essay. These clusters each carry that weight — written as sequences, to be read in order.
What This Alignment Does Not Claim
The framework’s own First Law holds that intelligence wants to know itself through an unbounded continuum of phenomena. A page that mapped a theory onto every college of a university and reported a clean fit everywhere would be evidence of a closed cycle, not an open one. So the honest accounting:
The fit is uneven, and the unevenness is real. Engineering, information science, philosophy, and government take the material naturally. Law and education are thin on primary assignments and are carried mostly by cross-listings. Optical sciences, veterinary medicine, applied science and technology, and architecture have no primary placement here at all. Those gaps are left visible rather than filled, because filling them would mean manufacturing an affinity to protect the appearance of completeness.
Placement in a department does not constitute the department’s assent. Everything above is an offer, made from outside the University, describing where the material would sit if faculty found it worth their students’ time. The faculty decide that, not the Foundation — and an adviser who reads a cluster and declines it has done exactly what an open cycle looks like from the inside.
The test of this alignment is not whether every college finds a home for the work. It is whether the colleges that do can correct it.
The mechanism that makes this easiest — the honors contract, added to a course the student is already taking — is also the mechanism with the least faculty oversight. Material that enters a curriculum through the path of least resistance enters without being tested by it. Where a choice exists, the independent study and the thesis are the better doors, precisely because they are harder to walk through.
Published by The Bill and Dianne Mensch Foundation. Theory of Embedded Intelligence © William D. Mensch Jr. and The Western Design Center, Inc.
Drafted in collaboration with Claude (Anthropic). Offered in good faith as a serious application of the theory — not infallible scholarship.
Freely shareable with attribution — for the benefit of many.