THE FIVE seconds of awkward silence that tore through the presidential oath of office last Tuesday seemed to have awakened the entire country to the knowledge of grammatical rules that most have never bothered to enforce. Word order never appeared as important as it did when Chief Justice John Roberts went without written notes at the inauguration of President Barack Obama.
Yet the uproar over the oath flub got me thinking about the importance we place on getting age-old pledges and traditions exactly right — word for word, step by step — rather than on thinking about the reasons they exist. In other words, we care more about whether President Obama placed the word “faithfully” in the right place and care less about the substance of his vow.
The same applies to our own honor pledge, a time-honored tradition at the University, a 16-word sentence most students are required to write and sign before handing in any graded assignment: “On my honor as a student I have neither given nor received aid on this assignment.” It’s pasted, nailed, or taped to practically every wall in every academic building at the University, and it is firmly etched into the minds of most, if not all, students.
Failure to write and sign the pledge on graded assignments can result in a zero, some professors warn — always the kind of threat you want to hear before cracking open that blue book. Yet because of this threat, students write the pledge, not out of a sense of duty to uphold the code’s meaning, but instead out of a fear that they will fail their midterm. The pledge is a reflex, not a reflection.
And so, like the pledge, the president’s oath of office last Tuesday was more ceremony than anything else. Chief Justice Roberts’ belief that he could memorize the entire thing without any textual or visual aids is evidence of the meaninglessness of the oath itself. It could have said anything just as long as it was the same anything that 43 presidents before Obama had sworn to obey.
According to NBC’s Pete Williams, although the oath was eventually retaken — this time with “faithfully” in its rightful, though apparently grammatically incorrect, place — none of the executive orders signed by the newly inaugurated president were re-authorized following the second oath. In other words, the man had been president all along, and the re-swearing-in was nothing more than a ceremonial effort to comfort the doubtful minds of the American people and of the pundits at Fox News.
If professors find this same amount of comfort in the fact that students have taken 10 seconds to write one sentence on the front of their exam and sign it, so be it. But the pledge has obviously not done enough to deter people from cheating, nor does it even make sense in some cases. What does giving and receiving aid really mean, anyway? We use study guides issued by professors to cram for tests, we meet up for late-night study sessions before a big final, and sometimes we even offer our notes to friends who missed a day or two of class. We give and receive aid all the time.
So perhaps it is time to get rid of a pointless pledge and to trust that students who are supposed to be part of a community of trust are adhering to its values. This adherence should be implicit, not explicit. The pledge isn’t likely to deter anyone who has cheated from turning in their assignment out of guilt or shame. And the ubiquitous nature of the pledge makes the idea of honor less convincing. Do we really have to be reminded to be honest students every time we walk into the classroom? Shouldn’t we be aware of these expectations beforehand?
The same goes for the presidential oath of office. President Obama promised a lot of things in his inaugural address, and these promises were more profound and comforting than anything he said in an oath that lasted less than 30 seconds. Sure, it was appealing in its ceremonial power, in its symbolism and its official-sounding tone. But when it was over, more people paid attention to the placement of a single adverb than to the substance of what was said.
Oaths and pledges survive as symbolic traditions, not as substantive reminders of why we do something or of how we should govern our actions. If we all had to come up with our own promise that we didn’t cheat, or that we’ll adhere to the principles and laws of society, then maybe we would think a little more about what we say and a little bit less about how we say it.
Amelia Meyer’s column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at a.meyer@cavalierdaily.com.
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