HONOR is a word constantly debated around the University, as it means so many different things to so many different people. At its heart, honor is what we, as students, are supposed to live by because upon entering the University we promise not to lie, cheat or steal. Yet honor has other implications as well. Being honorable also refers to your interactions with friends, classmates, faculty, family, etc. Thus, it is no wonder that the honor system at the University is under such criticism and that so few trials are initiated by students when the only possible sanction is expulsion. After all, no rational person could truly justify initiating a case for a minor offense knowing what conviction would bring under the single sanction.
On Monday, April 25, The Cavalier Daily reported on a proposed change to the University honor system. Under this proposal, "Modifying the Initiator," "the title 'initiator' would be changed to 'reporter' in all honor cases." This change was proposed in an attempt to "lower the mental burden as well as the time burden for the reporting student" according to Commerce Rep. Matt Miller.
The problem, as the Honor Committee seems to recognize, is its own contradictory nature under the current system. A student who witnesses an honor violation must make a choice: Is it more honorable to report the incident and risk having the violator thrown out of the University, or if is more honorable to ignore the incident, especially if it is trivial in nature? Regardless of what the student chooses to do, he or she cannot be acting completely honorably, and within the U.S. legal environment it is deemed better to assume innocence and to err on the side of the accused.
In addition, "the initiator is required to attend and give a statement at the Investigative Panel, to testify at the trial and to sit at a table with the opposing counsel." As the recent proposal indicates, this puts a huge burden on the initiator on top of actually filing the charge. Without a doubt, this double burden reduces a typical student's willingness to initiate a case, but despite the proposed change the original problem remains: Is it truly right to initiate a case for a trivial offense and in doing so risk getting the student expelled from the University? The evidence seems to say no.
During the 2004-2005 Honor Committee term, sixty-four incidents were investigated, of which twenty-nine were dropped for one reason or another. During that same period, twenty-eight total Honor Committee trials were conducted, of which only ten students were found guilty. Now it would be great if we all truly did live up to our predecessors' goals and never broke the honor code, but out of an undergraduate population of nearly 13,000 students, those numbers seem incredibly low. In fact, as the 2004 Faculty Advisory Committee Report on the Honor System from 1998-2003 indicates, the total initiation rate for honor cases (initiations divided by total student population) was a mere 0.31 percent, with a conviction rate of 32 percent.
This second number brings up another, very much related issue: The same questions that come up with initiating cases also apply to honor trials. The randomly selected jury that makes up an honor trial contains the same average University student who seems to question initiating cases in the first place. Thus, even if a case manages to be initiated and comes to trial, the data shows it is still unlikely that a student will be found guilty because under the single sanction, there is only one punishment.
As the 2004 Faculty Advisory Committee Report agrees, the data seems to "indicate that a majority of honor offenses are either not being detected or, if detected, are not resulting in initiations." Measures such as the "Modifying the Initiator" plan propose to fix this problem by lessening the role of the initiators, but they do not address the fundamental problem that is the single sanction.
As long as the status quo remains expulsion for even the most minor offense, the honor system cannot truly function at the University. The simple fact that case initiations, especially those made by students, are so rare, and that even then actual convictions are unlikely, shows the student opinion on single sanction. It may not be honorable to ignore a violation, but it is even less honorable when that violation is minor but nonetheless might result in the student being expelled. The point of law and rules is not just to punish violators, but to reform them and above all to deter future violations. How can this be done when no one believes in the justice of the punishments to begin with?
Allan Cruickshank's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at acruickshanks@cavalierdaily.com.
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