NOBODY who earnestly cares about the tradition of honor at the University is excited that College third years Joe Schlingbaum and Lindsay McClung get to graduate with the rest of us and say "I have worn the honors of Honor, I graduated from Virginia." In last week's open trial, both were found to have committed an act of cheating by a jury of their peers. But they were found "not guilty" of an honor offense because the jury perplexingly decided that the offense was not "inconsistent with the values of our community of trust" -- that they did not satisfy the "seriousness" clause.
This frustrates me, as it has frustrated me many times before as a counsel in honor trials after which obviously guilty liars, cheaters and stealers were allowed back into the community whose trust they violated. Others similarly frustrated have used this unfortunate outcome as a chance to call for the end of the Honor Committee's 163 year-old single sanction. I think they are wrong.
Admittedly, our honor system and its single sanction do only a slightly better than adequate job at holding liars, cheaters and stealers accountable. In the academic years between 1998 and 2004, the following percentages of trials ended in guilty verdicts: 63.33, 62.5, 37, 60, 62.5 and 50. All these numbers do not include students accused of honor offenses who simply accepted their guilt and left the University without trials. These rates are adequate, but given that the evidence against accused students is usually so substantial that it's safe to assume they are most often guilty, they are not great. The single sanction makes a higher conviction rate hard to achieve because it is responsible for the incredible amount of due process afforded accused students. It is, I believe, because of the single sanction that a daunting four-fifths of jurors have to believe the evidence against accused students beyond a reasonable doubt to convict, a truly difficult standard of proof. If we want a system that excels in punishment, we should do away with the single sanction.
But I would submit that an optimally efficient penal system is not the honor system that generations of our predecessors at the University wanted, nor is it one we should aspire to. Our honor system has always been about chasing an ideal: building a community with the highest imaginable standard of academic and personal integrity. The single sanction is the embodiment and conduit of that ideal. Its simple, unmistakable gravity helps communicate the special place that honor and honesty have. Lying, cheating and stealing are always wrong. People who cannot see that do not belong here. And the single sanction seems to get the "high expectations" message across effectively. The last study conducted of our honor system by the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University suggests that the University and other schools with honor codes have lower rates of cheating than student bodies at other schools. Anecdotally, I know many people here who can proudly say that they have never witnessed another student commit an honor offense.
This singular level of student honesty has been accomplished with a system that works by emphasizing the presumption of high expectations rather than fear of certain and efficient punishment. To me, this suggests that most students at the University really don't cheat because they believe in or respect the ideals of honor, not because they fear a probable penalty. To transition to a retributively efficient system may or may not mean a different cheating rate, but it would mean that decisions not to cheat would be more a product of rational cost-benefit calculation rather than adherence to the prevailing ideal. Surely the status quo is preferable.
The obvious response to this is that we could communicate that same ideal, that this is a community of high expectations where honor and integrity are always expected without qualification, with another sanction system. I agree that this is possible, but I think a different system wouldn't do nearly as good a job. By introducing multiple sanctions we would be introducing gradations of wrongness and thus blurring the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Cheating is no longer just wrong, but sometimes only kind of wrong. This indisputably muddies our ability to communicate the same ideal of the highest possible expectations.
Some people will undoubtedly read this and roll their eyes at all this talk of ideals in a mostly cynical world. But please remember, we are students at a university founded by probably the greatest idealist among the founding generation. More than a century and a half of our predecessors have passed that ideal down. I think we owe it to those before us to try and stand to be idealists for the brief time we are students here.
Josh Hess is a fourth year in the College and is the vice chair of Students for the Preservation of Honor.
Read More
KURTZWEIL: True financial aid must be transparent
By Paul Kurtzweil | 4 days agoThe implications and revelations of the lawsuit should inspire greater transparency at the University in order to ensure that financial aid is properly and equitably distributed.
SULLIVAN: Ramp up physical accessibility on Grounds
By Scarlett Sullivan | 6 days agoThe University must take responsibility for the inaccessibility of Grounds and work to promote accessibility for all students despite misguided laws.
EDITORIAL: Scapegoating students will not stop hazing
By Editorial Board | April 25, 2024Instead of retroactively responding to extreme hazing allegations, we, and especially the University, must begin asking more probing questions about the role of fraternal organizations on Grounds.
