Everyone screws up sometimes. But that's not catastrophic; the important goal is not to avoid making mistakes, but rather to learn from them when they do happen. The Honor Committee needs to do exactly that.
Committee members made a mistake over the last few weeks by pushing their proposal to get rid of the seriousness clause in cases of academic cheating. Before they realized their folly, they even went so far as to schedule a paper-ballot, University-wide referendum when they couldn't hold a special election on the Student Council Web server. But they did recognize their error before holding an election that likely would have had embarrassing low turnout. Last week, they voted almost unanimously (15-0-2) to scrap plans for the referendum.
The mistake has been made and identified as such. What needs to happen now is that the Committee and the community as a whole need to learn from that mistake.
The first lesson to be learned is that, like it or not, Council's Web server is currently the only place to hold a successful University-wide student election. Paper ballots simply won't cut it - they require too many resources to administer, and their success depends on the participation of students who don't care to respond.
This highlights the more fundamental problem with the Committee's first efforts: Students don't care about honor because they take the honor system for granted. The ability to take such a system for granted indicates that, for the most part, it's doing its job. Only when the honor system functions reasonably effectively can we forget it's there. But while that should be encouraging, it shouldn't foster complacency.
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While the Committee bears a large degree of the responsibility to educate, it shouldn't be solely their project. Every member of this community has an obligation to begin the dialogue about seriousness - to defend it or criticize it, but in any case, to do it loudly, publicly and often.
The first attempt to put this issue before the students failed, in part, because no one was talking about it. If we learn anything from that botched first attempt, it should be that a discussion about seriousness needs to start now.
If we're going to start talking, we need to understand what's at stake, and what getting rid of seriousness would change. At present, seriousness is one of three criteria necessary to determine guilt - the other two are act and intent. This means that if a student is found to have cheated on, say, a minor homework assignment, he may not be expelled if the jury votes against the seriousness criteria. This allows them to draw a line between less serious and more serious cheating.
Eliminating seriousness would mean that this student would be expelled if he were found intentionally to have copied anything, regardless of how serious or extensive that cheating was.
All academic cheating undermines the community of trust, no matter how serious. The seriousness vote merely clouds the honor process, and eliminating seriousness will allow the Committee to focus its efforts on determining guilt.
There is a difference between cheating on a minor assignment and cheating on a major one. Someone shouldn't be expelled for copying a single answer on a minor problem set, but they should still be punished, so we need punishment options less serious than expulsion to punish these offenses.
The system is working just fine now, and the single sanction should be retained. Therefore, the seriousness clause is necessary to avoid expelling students for minor indiscretions. Expulsion should be reserved for only the most serious forms of cheating.
The arguments, of course, are much more complex than this. But those complexities can be dealt with as the debate works itself out.
The death of the Committee's resolution that would have eliminated the seriousness clause isn't the end of the debate - it's the beginning. So start talking.
(Bryan Maxwell is a Cavalier Daily associate editor.)
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