Student leaders, faculty and administrators discussed issues facing today's honor system during a town hall meeting hosted by the Honor Committee last night in Minor Hall. Over 50 students and community members attended the meeting which served as the main event for Honor Awareness Day. While the panel began by discussing the single sanction and continued use of random student juries, the conversation quickly turned to accusations of race discrimination in the honor system.
M. Rick Turner, dean of African-American Affairs, said recent statistics and anecdotal evidence strongly suggest that minorities are accused of honor offenses at a disproportional rate.
"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out something is amiss," Turner said.
But Board of Visitors member Henry Valentine said he did not believe the honor system is biased against minorities.
"It is hard for me to believe our faculty or TAs are singling out African-Americans or athletes," Valentine said. "If what Dean Turner says is true, what we ought to do is cancel the system."
After the panel discussion, several Committee members asked members of the panel what they could do to solve to problem of race and the honor system.
Faculty Senate Chairman David T. Gies encouraged Committee members to get minorities involved in the system.
"Don't sit there passively, but actively recruit," Gies said.
Brandi Colander, Black Student Alliance director of issues, said the University should educate students about the system with a mandatory honor and ethics seminar for first-year students.
Such a course would force students to learn about the system when they first come to the University, Colander said.
"You don't feel the wrath of the honor system until you are brought up on charges," she said.
The issue of expulsion as the single sanction for an honor offense was debated as well.
Gies said some of the faculty are becoming frustrated with the honor system because juries are unwilling to expel guilty students.
He cited a recent case where two students turned in identical exams. Both students went to trial and were found not guilty.
Gies attributed the verdict to the juries' inability to determine which student had copied off the other and the juries' unwillingness to expel the students.
Incidents such as this involving the honor system frustrate the faculty, Gies said.
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