FROM THE Honor Committee's "town hall" meeting the Sunday before spring break, one might have gotten the impression that honor is already dead. But by the time the break arrived, the student electorate sent a different message: We still want the honors of Honor. The question is not how to embalm the corpse -- how to build a modern, efficient bureaucracy under the name of Honor -- but how to revitalize the historic, impassioned cultural commitment to the spirit of honor.
Opening the Dome Room meeting, A.J. Aronstein quoted an old University catalog's description of the honor system -- he said it sounded as if cheaters were hauled off to Blacksburg in burlap sacks, and he noted that things had changed greatly. I followed up in the library and found this description, more than a century old: "Experience shows that the students themselves are its sternest guardians and executors." Cheating was rare, the catalog said, and cheaters were "quietly but promptly eliminated without need of Faculty action."
The results were impressive: "The spirit of truth and honor, thus fostered in the examination-room, has gradually pervaded the entire life of the institution, and all the relations between the student and professor."
Today, the honor system relies on faculty action: the great majority of honor cases are reported by instructors, and no more than a quarter are non-academic, Honor vice chair for investigations Andrew Siegel told me. Even the single sanction itself, according to the committee's website, is processed by the registrar's office, a method that needs neither passion nor burlap.
The community is further removed from Honor by the fact that the most important part of the system, the adjudication of cases, is conducted in secret by random panels. We are invited to watch the committee speak in general terms about changes to processes, but (committee members cite federal law, but show no desire to find a loophole or raise a legal challenge) we are denied the knowledge of what really happens when a student's career at the University is at stake.
Even the faculty does not work very well with Honor. In an Honor Committee survey, more than 30 percent of faculty and TAs said they had "clearly observed a student cheating or been quite certain that a student cheated" on work for their courses. But even when certain, only 16.4 percent said they had reported the case to the Honor Committee. When they merely suspected cheating, the figure was an outrageously low 1.0 percent.
In short, today's honor system, instead of being a mechanism by which a community based on honor removes unworthy members, is primarily a student-administered bureaucracy by which the faculty expels cheaters. Sometimes. The faculty, however, do not seem comfortable expelling cheaters. According to the survey, two major reasons cited for not reporting cases had to do with the single sanction.
But if we wanted people who deliberately ditch their integrity to be welcome within our community, we would have abandoned the ideal of honor. We have not. To the contrary, just before break a majority of student voters declared that we do not even want to see a binding referendum challenging the single sanction.
Yet given the present state of the Honor System, not weakening it any further is not enough. We must reinvigorate it. We must not merely threaten to remove dishonorable students from our community, but do so consistently, and not merely on instructors' initiative. Honor is private conscience publicly maintained, and an honorable community is one that affirms the value of honor by demanding honorable conduct of all its members.
To do this, we should increase student reporting rates. That means reporting lying, cheating and stealing whenever we encounter them at the University. Individually, we can and should simply decide to do this, but institutionally, more is needed. I propose that we bring back the traditional principle that the failure to report a breach of honor is itself a breach of honor. This would require a vote of the student body -- but a vote to make toleration of dishonorable conduct an honor offense, or even a referendum that failed with a large minority supporting it, would go a long way to reestablish a culture in which students who observe breaches of honor report them.
And we should enhance the community's connection to individual cases. I propose that we increase the size of trial panels so that every student spends one day a year as an Honor juror. This would give the community a clearer view of, and a firsthand involvement with, the trial process.
Strengthening honor may require courage and hard work. But the path of least resistance is not the way of honor.
Alexander R. Cohen is a Cavalier Daily Viewpoint Writer. He is a doctoral student in the department of philosophy.
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