THE UNIVERSITY'S honor system is strong. It is staffed by over a hundred enthusiastic students who sacrifice hundreds of man hours every year to ensure its upkeep. Empirical evidence suggests the system is successful in minimizing cheating. And it enjoys support from a strong (though not universal) majority of students and faculty.
But that is how the honor system looks today. It very well may not be how it looks 10 or 20 years from now. The system faces a number of problems that, if allowed to fester, may slowly drag it towards a dysfunctional whole.
The most critical problem -- shared by honor and judiciary systems other than the University's own -- is the abysmal lack of general student participation in actually reporting their transgressing peers to the system. Most years, a miniscule portion of all reported cases come from student witnesses. And in a survey conducted at the University by the Center for Academic Integrity last year, very few students who said they had witnessed an honor offense here also said they reported it to the Committee. This problem not only risks feeding faculty cynicism about a system they feel students have abandoned but also risks destroying the importance of the honor system and the impact it has in shaping the character of University students.
The system's approach to addressing these big problems has often been tepid. There is a sense in the honor community that we can creep towards success. But we can't. The problem is too big to be conquered by the usual approach: tweaking the presentation methods employed by honor educators. What is needed is an aggressive, forward-looking approach to dealing with student apathy.
It seems clear that students do not participate in the case reporting process as much as they should because they feel that they have no tangible stake in the system and that it is something distant from them. The keys to reversing this line of thinking are first communicating to the student body that they do have a responsibility for the system's upkeep and then maximizing the degree to which the average student can easily access the system.
Improving student access to the system should be relatively easy. The new Honor Representatives Program, which seeks to provide students in every academic department the contact information for members of honor on departmental syllabi, is a great start. Soliciting general student opinions through randomly formulated focus groups is another option. And finding ways to streamline the honor case-processing procedure so that it is more efficient and less daunting may help mitigate some alienation. Much more difficult is augmenting students' sense of ownership of the system.
That all students, not just a hundred or so in Newcomb Hall, are obligated to contribute to the honor system's maintenance is not really debatable. When the University's faculty handed the responsibility for upholding honor to the students, they didn't hand it down to just a few. For many years, the student "bureaucracy" of the honor system was very small. If a professor suspected a student of an honor offense, the professor was forbidden from taking the case to honor himself. Professors were required to pick two students at random from the student body and ask them to take responsibility for the case. This setup no longer exists because of newer laws protecting students' academic privacy. But those laws did not abolish the universal responsibility among University students to hold each other, in addition to themselves, accountable to the honor code they all signed. The Honor Committee should not shy away from communicating this ubiquitous responsibility to the student population of the University at large.
The most important thing that can be done to help address this problem is reshaping the honor system's message to new entrants in our community. This includes not only the script for student educators but also the green book, orientation, faculty speeches and convocation. For years, the Honor Committee has basically told newcomers that this is a proud tradition with a grave sanction which ultimately gives students the tangible benefit of living in a community of trust. The community of trust is an important feature of the Honor Committee's message. But our communications fail to mention that the existence of a community of trust depends on our ability to cultivate a culture of accountability at the University. That is, our ability to sustain a culture whose norms demand not only that each individual hold himself accountable to the honor code, but also that he holds his peers accountable.
Beyond restructuring the basic message of the system, it is worth exploring some changes to the shape of the institution itself. The reintroduction of a non-toleration clause as a UJC offense would work wonders for communicating student responsibility for participating in the system. Honor should try to find more avenues through which non-support officers can participate in the system. And exploring ways that the system could be redesigned to look more like the days when faculty had to give cases to random students -- ways which still meet the requirements of academic privacy laws -- may be worthwhile as well.
The University has a unique culture which distinguishes it from peer institutions. At the core of that culture is its honor system. If we hope to ensure that this stays the case for decades to come, we need to be aggressive now while the problems are still manageable.
Josh Hess is a Cavalier Daily contributor. He is a first-year Law student and a College graduate.
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