With this year's revival of the perennial debate regarding the health of the honor system, these past several months have witnessed an impressive outpouring of student opinion and passionate discussion. Proponents of the single sanction argue that to change it would destroy a tradition at the heart of the University experience. Detractors fear that the honor system rests on an antiquarian ideal no longer compatible with the realities of 21st-century student life.
The actual history of the honor system is as complex as the questions students on both sides of the debate are trying to answer.
Of course, the traditional story of the honor system begins with the murder of Law Prof. John Davis outside of Pavilion X in November of 1840. For those who value the traditionalism of the honor system, the story has all of the trappings of a Shakespearean tragedy. In this rendition, Davis steps outside his Pavilion during a particularly rowdy student riot. He reaches to remove the mask of a disguised student, catching a glance at his face before the student fatally shoots him and then disappears into the shadows. When students ask the dying professor to reveal the name of his murderer, he manages to speak only a few words before passing away: "An honorable man would come forward."
Outraged and inspired by Davis' pronouncement, the students, with the help of Law Prof. Henry St. George Tucker, immediately set about the task of discovering the murderer and creating a system to discourage such behavior in the future.
Those more skeptical of the honor system dismiss this account as Hollywood melodrama. In this version of events, as recounted by eye-witness Dr. Robert Dabney, there were only two rioters remaining on the Lawn at the time of Davis's shooting. After they were warned that Davis was on the lookout, one of them proceeded to pull down a mask and shoot Davis in cold blood before slinking into the night. This suggests that Davis probably never knew the identity of his attacker and certainly never made any dying pronouncements on the nature of honor.
Whichever version of the "honor story" you might choose to believe, one fact is clear: there was no such thing as an honor system until the early 20th century, when students in the 1911-12 academic year created a formal procedure for handling charges of student misconduct.
Not all University students viewed the establishment of a permanent Honor Committee as a good thing. In its early stages, the Committee concerned itself principally with the breaking of formal pledges: oaths not to cheat, not to gamble, not to drink before, during, or after student dances, etc. Many viewed the notion of a permanent disciplinary bureaucracy as a potentially frightening invasion of student liberty.
Debate on the idea of the single sanction began almost immediately. In 1926, a student was expelled for saying "present" when the name of a tardy friend was called during a class roll call. In 1932, a student was expelled for breaking a pledge not to smoke as a member of the track team -- despite the fact that he'd quit the track team weeks earlier. And, in a 1971 case that launched the single-sanction debate into modern memory, a student was expelled for taking soda cans out of an open vending machine. Despite the reversal of the verdict the following day, the "Coke case" set the tenor for debate over the single sanction for decades to come.
This is, of course, not to imply that the honor system was somehow grossly arbitrary during its early history. The Honor Committee in fact oversaw a number of impressive achievements throughout the twentieth century. When the student population shrank dramatically during World War II, the Honor Committee assumed all powers of student government at the University after traditional student councils ceased to exit. When the ACLU threatened legal action against the honor system in the late 1970s, students immediately began drafting an Honor Constitution. Ratified in 1977, it was the first formalized attempt to protect the rights of the accused in the context of a student-run system. These and other accomplishments point to the dedication of those students who sincerely believe in the continued existence of a robust, student-oriented mechanism for preserving honor at the University.
In this past election, students voted on the "consensus clause," an attempt by proponents of the single sanction to permanently enshrine it as the cornerstone of the modern honor system. The referendum marked the end of a year-long debate on the single sanction, itself part of a dialogue that has continued here on Grounds for over a century.
The questions students must answer about the honor system are not new, nor have they ever had easy solutions. Each generation of University students must attempt to address them in its own way, in a manner appropriate for its own time.
Student self-governance has never been a simple endeavor. That is the great challenge of maintaining the ideal of honor at the University, and one which students will face long into the future.
Much of the information used in this article, and particularly information regarding the history of the honor system in the 20th century, is from a July 2001 cover story in the C-Ville Weekly authored by Coy Barefoot.
Dan's column appears bi-weekly on Wednesdays in the Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at danstrong@cavalierdaily.com.
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