The Honor Committee's recruitment of advisors, counsels and educators this year drew a group of students closely representative of the University's student population, according to statistics the Committee released Sunday night.
Facing a longstanding concern about the role of minority groups in the trial process -- racial minorities, international students and athletes traditionally are over-represented as accused students and under-represented on Honor -- Committee members said they made an effort to target those minority groups in their support officer recruitment this year.
For the first time in its history, the Committee released statistics reporting the demographics of students attending support officer tryouts. The information was compiled from optional surveys given to the more than 250 students who attended, 237 of whom responded. More than 95 percent of those students answered every question.
"A big thing in our Committee is having tangible goals, and we had never tracked this before," Vice-Chair for Investigations Logan Moncrief said. "We needed to increase diversity, not only on the Committee but also in our support officer pools."
Moncrief said he was pleased with the turnout at this year's support officer tryouts, adding that although there are no previous statistics available for comparison, he noticed a dramatic difference in diversity.
"I've been involved for four years now and it's been a pretty homogeneous group," Moncrief said. "It definitely was not that way this year -- the numbers aren't outstanding and there's certainly more room for improvement, but it's definitely a first step."
The statistics showed the composition of the potential support officer pool only narrowly falling short of matching the demographics of the University.
Almost 7 percent of the students identified themselves as African-American, compared to 8.9 percent of the University student population. For Asian students, a category that encompasses students of East Asian, South Asian and Middle Eastern descent, the gap was even smaller, with 10.5 percent placing themselves in that category and the group representing 10.8 percent of students at the University.
African-American and Asian students traditionally have been over-represented in Honor case initiations. Last year, 19 percent of investigated students were African-American and 42 percent were Asian.
Nearly 4 percent of the recruits identified themselves as international students, a group that comprises 4.5 percent of the student body.
The international population at the University also has been disproportionately investigated for Honor offenses, with 42 percent of initiations last year occurring against international students.
Athletes also comprised nearly 4 percent of the prospective support officers. The percentage of student athletes at the University was not available.
"We're happy that the numbers in terms of the total representation of international students, Asian students, African-American students and athletes passed our goal of more than 30 percent," Honor Chair Carey Mignerey said. But "there's still a lot of work to be done."
Committee members stressed that the numerical goal was set for recruitment, not the actual selection of support officers.
"We don't look for numbers, we look for people -- we just want the best," Moncrief said.
Still, Moncrief added that a larger turnout from minority groups translated into a class of support officers more representative of the University.
"I've got my advisor pool selected and it will be the most diverse we've had in a long time," he said.
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