The Honor Committee hosted a town hall panel in the Chapel Thursday afternoon to discuss informed retraction and the future of the honor system at the University.
In late February, the student body approved a referendum that added informed retraction to the Committee’s constitution, which allows students reported for an honor offense to admit to lying, cheating or stealing and subsequently take two semesters off from the University as punishment.
Panelists at the event included Dean of Students Allen Groves, Darden Prof. Sherri Moore, Student Council President Eric McDaniel, Honor Committee Chair Evan Behrle, Cavalier Daily columnist Forrest Brown and Rachna Pathak, the former president of the Asian Student Union.
The panel began by answering a series of questions about informed retraction. Moore noted that informed retraction was important in the context of moving toward a system more students believed in.
“In one of my classes, we took a clicker question poll and found that 98 percent of my students had at one point suspected a student of cheating,” Moore said. “Only 1 percent of those students had reported what they saw. IR is a first step in correcting that problem.”
McDaniel also said student buy-in to the honor system was an issue, but he was unsure if informed retraction would do enough to solve the issue.
“I don’t know how IR will impact how our honor system is perceived,” McDaniel said. “One of the big questions the committee faced was whether people had faith in the system at all — I don’t know if IR really fixes the problem.”
To address the issue of faith in the system, the panel turned time and time again to jury reform. Honor proposed a provision in February’s election as part of its Restore the Ideal Act that would have made honor trial juries consist solely of committee members, but the proposal was voted down by students.
“I’d really love to see jury reform tackled,” McDaniel said. “There’s a lot of pressure on student jurors … They have to turn their attention to the trial at either the expense of their studies or the expense of the trial, and that’s not a fair decision to force on students.”
The panel proposed creating mixed juries that would consist of committee members and randomly selected students, or creating an opt-in jury system, where students would submit themselves to a pool of possible jurors, allowing students to decide whether they are up for the responsibility themselves.
Groves noted that while skepticism about the reform would likely be prevalent among legal professionals and alumni, what really matters is what works best for students.
“I think for people outside of the University, the reputation will take a big hit,” Groves said. “But to me, that’s fine, because what really matters to our system is that the current students find what works for them.”
Groves noted that one of the biggest blows to the honor system was when the “toleration clause” was removed decades ago, which held students who saw an honor offense and did not report it to the same standards of those committing an offense. Brown echoed the benefits of this provision when addressing how to incentivize reporting.
“Dean Groves hit on the point earlier about the old provision that required students to report,” Brown said. “I think reinstating that would be the best way to solve the reporting problem.”
Also discussed was the issue of sexual misconduct. Behrle pushed for more conversation about how to punish offenders, claiming sexual misconduct fits into the same category of lying, cheating and stealing — all of which “undermine the community of trust.”
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