After almost nine months of debate and two postponements, the Honor System Review Commission released its comprehensive evaluation of the honor system Friday afternoon. The report calls on the Committee to make a number of drastic procedural modifications and six constitutional changes to "save the system before it is too late."
The report consists of 15 proposals - six of which seek to change basic tenets of the Committee's constitution and will require a University-wide student referendum.
The six proposed constitutional changes would eliminate random student juries, oral advocates for accused students at trials and the seriousness clause in cases of academic cheating.
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The proposals also call for lowering the requirement for a guilty verdict from a four-fifths majority to a two-thirds majority. The last two potential constitutional changes involve removing an accused student's right to abstain from testifying against himself and removing an accused student's right to confront and to cross-examine witnesses against him.
While the rest of the Commission's proposals can be enacted through Committee vote, the six constitutional changes must be passed by a 60 percent majority of voters in a referendum election in which at least 10 percent of students vote.
"The passage of all six [constitutional] proposals would form a system which returns to its roots as a truth-seeking system, not a criminal system within the University but a system that seeks the truth in the most fair and efficient way possible," Committee Chairman Thomas Hall said.
The Commission recommended that students no longer be able to request completely random student juries in honor trials. The Commission suggests students be able to either have a jury made up completely of Committee members or have a nine-person jury made up of five randomly selected students and four elected Committee members.
The second major proposal seeks to "replace the current legalistic and adversarial model for honor trials with an administrative model." This proposal would eliminate the role of honor counsels as advocates for accused students. Thus the accused student would assume the active and direct role of speaking for himself whenever possible at an honor trial.
The elimination of the seriousness consideration in cases of academic cheating originally was proposed by Education School Rep. Jim Haley last year. The proposal never made it to a referendum vote because last year's Committee did not meet the deadline to get the proposal on Student Council's spring ballot.
Last night the Committee discussed how to proceed with these recommendations and how best to educate students on the issues they raise. They asked students in attendance what they felt would be the best way to proceed.
Specifically, the Committee debated whether to send the Commission's constitutional recommendations to the students all together or to focus on passing a few proposals of particular urgency and importance.
Former Honor Executive Committee member Scott Sottile, who resigned from the Committee earlier this year, said the proposed changes have little chance of passing and that they seek to remove student power in the system and give it back to the Committee.
"There was no student input from the beginning, and by putting [the report release] off twice the Committee lost student interest. They are fighting a losing battle," Sottile said.
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