A referendum on the spring ballot to amend the Honor Committee’s single sanction system was deemed valid by Honor Committee Chair Jess Huang last night. Several Committee members questioned the referendum’s validity because of ambiguity in the deadlines to submit referenda to the University Board of Elections to be placed on the spring ballot.
According to Article VII of the Honor Committee’s Constitution, an amendment “may be proposed by a vote of two-thirds of the entire Honor Committee or by a petition signed by ten percent of the entire student body.”
The referendum must also be “held from two to six weeks of regular session classes after receipt of the proposal.”
Because the proposal was submitted to the UBE before that organization’s Feb. 8 deadline, it will be part of the Spring 2009 ballot.
The proposal involves changing the current single sanction policy into one of multiple sanctions. The controversy is not, however, in the content of the amendment, but in its timing. The Committee debated whether the two to six week time frame provided by Article VII should occur before the start of elections or include the election period.
The proposal in question was received by the Committee from Sam Leven, President of Hoos Against Single Sanction, with the appropriate amount of signatures Saturday night, Leven said.
“There’s a lot hanging on this because of what this referendum is,” Vice Chair for Trials Sophie Staples said. “But this debate would happen regardless of what the amendment was.”
UBE, Huang said, does not deem whether the referendum is valid; rather, that decision is left to the Honor Committee. The decision on the validity of the proposal, though widely discussed by the entire Committee, was left to Huang to decide.
If Huang, on behalf of the Honor Committee, decided that the proposal was invalid, then the referendum would have remained on the ballot but would have simply been treated as student opinion. Had a majority of the student body voted in favor of it, then it would have been up to the Committee to decide what action to pursue, Huang said, adding that the Committee may have held a special election or discussed the amendment with its legal counsel.
The proposal had been circulating and evolving since last fall, when Leven presented a similar proposal.
According to the previous proposal, if a student were found guilty of act, intent and triviality, then they would be expelled. If, however, a student were to be found guilty of act and intent but acquitted of non-triviality, then they could be punished by a lower sanction, decided upon during a sanctioning trial.
At the time, Committee members had certain concerns about the amendment. As a result, Leven and Hoos Against Single Sanction edited the proposal and re-presented it before the Committee after receiving the necessary signatures.
The two to six week period required by Article VII is to allow time for the referendum to circulate throughout the University and to offer students the chance to debate their views on the amendment.
The language of the article is left ambiguous, which gives the Committee chair the opportunity to interpret the constitution as he or she sees fit. The vague nature of the provision, however, led to heated debate about how to interpret the article.
“The provision is a little unclear,” Leven said in regards to the language of Article VII. “Honor should clarify it for the future but shouldn’t apply it retroactively to this year’s election,” he added.
During the Honor Committee meeting, many members argued that allowing the two to six week period to include elections would not provide students with enough time to educate themselves about the referendum before they had to vote on it. Other University community members, however, disagreed.
Fourth-year College student Bonnie Carlson said, “after two weeks the election will still be going on and I think that’s ample time for students to vote and be aware of the issues.”
Graduate Rep. Adam Trusner agreed.
“The actual referendum may not have been out there but it has been in discussion and reported on,” Trusner said.
Many of those in favor of allowing the two to six week time period to include elections argued that the precedent set by previous cases left the Committee no choice but to validate the referendum.
In fact, each of the past two most recent amendments to the Constitution have involved similar situations. The Committee placed a referendum on a ballot last year to change the representation in the College from three to five members. The Committee voted to place that amendment on the ballot less than two weeks before the start of the elections and more than two weeks before the end of elections, and the precedent set by that referendum was one Leven and others focused on.
Still, other Committee members, including Staples, disagreed with the precedent argument.
“I don’t think we should be too strongly considering precedent,” she said.
Staples argued that while the other two amendments were in fact decided upon only one week prior to the election, they were brought up and discussed widely by sources such as The Cavalier Daily before that week.
“I feel strongly that the student body has not had enough time to debate this,” Staples said. In addition, Huang said, though the Committee decided to validate the proposed amendments in 2006 and 2007, she said last year’s Committee Chair Ben Cooper in 2008 “clearly interpreted” the two to six week time frame “to be the start of elections.”
“What I took out of the meeting was there are merits to both sides of the argument,” Huang said later. “Obviously this is something that the Honor Committee will be working on in terms of revision and clarification, but unfortunately there is a decision that needs to be made now.”
Since there was a great deal of debate during Honor’s meeting about the lack of clarity of the language within Article VII, Huang said she has decided to maintain the validity of the referendum. Students can look at and vote upon the referendum during the upcoming Spring 2009 election, which will take place from Feb. 16 through Feb. 22.
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