After a semester filled with open trials, amendment proposals and a good deal of discussion, Honor Committee members reflected on the past year and discussed goals for next.
To help fund new initiatives, the Committee has been granted a maximum approved amount of $84,000 from the Alumni Endowment fund, Committee Chair David Truetzel said. He said while the commonwealth provides the Committee with money for operating costs such as office supplies, the endowment fund of alumni donations allows the Committee to explore ”special or additional initiatives.”
One such initiative is the creation of an online case processing system, which will improve the efficiency and expediency of case processing, Truetzel said.
Vice Chair for Investigations Mary Siegel added that she hopes to “work closely with the technology ad-hoc committee to develop ideas as to how Honor should best outline the investigation process once it gets online.” Siegel noted though that the module may not make it online this year.
In addition to the possible online case processing system, a large amount of the funds from the Alumni Endowment fund will be directed toward education and outreach efforts. The amount of funds has been “beefed up” from previous years in hopes of pursuing more events and projects on education, Truetzel said.
Truetzel said he hopes to build on the previous Committee’s education successes such as the “revamping” of the educator pool. Before the change, educators worked in a few large groups and could not oversee many outreach projects at one time. The change in the educator system created about 17 smaller groups of educators to carry out several outreach projects at once.
“This made [the educator pool] a much more effective group,” Truetzel said.
In addition to the revamped educator pool, Vice Chair for Education Rob Atkinson said he believes one of the Committees’s most successful endeavors this past term was an education campaign informing the University community about conscientious retractions.
“Before the campaign only two conscientious retractions were filed, [after] we had something like 18 filed,” Atkinson said.
Siegel hopes to continue this effort on conscientious retraction education. She said she hopes to collect professors’ overall opinions about conscientious retractions as well as discuss the positive and negative aspects of a conscientious retraction with them.
In connection with education, outreach will also continue to be a major goal for the Committee. In the coming year, Committee educators hope to target international students in particular. As more and more international students come to the University, it has become an important goal for the Committee to educate them and ensure they do not commit offenses. With $7,000 to spend toward diversity initiatives, Truetzel said he also hopes to reach out to other minority groups. He said he recognizes that while the Committee can form relationships with minority group leaders next semester, they will have a limited time to work with these groups before the Committee members graduate in the spring. He said he hopes, though, that the committee can form lasting relationships that will carry on as leaders and members change.
“We want to get to know these different communities better and on a more personal level” Atkinson said, adding that he believes reaching out through co-sponsorships and dialogue will help promote personal connections between the Committee and these groups.
Vice Chair for Trials Alex Carroll added that reaching out to these groups will hopefully increase diversity in the committee as well.
“One thing we work on every year is diversity,” Carroll said, citing diversity improvement within the committee and officer pools.
JJ Litchford, vice chair for community relations said while he plans to continue dialogue with minority communities, he also hopes to reach out to other groups, such as alumni and businesses on the Corner.
“So many of the restaurants have a Virginia Honor sticker,” he said, “[They should know what] their role is in the community of trust so that the sticker is meaningful.”
In terms of trials, Carroll said past Vice Chair for Trials Sophie Staples made “great strides towards improving our system procedurally” before the end of her term.
Carroll cited, for instance, the bylaw amendment enacted this semester that created the 10-day “Trial Request Period,” and required accused students to choose a trial date from a list of possible dates provided by Honor. The amendment is meant to improve trial processing efficiency and expediency, Carroll said.
The Committee also discussed another amendment this past semester that would no longer require two students from an accused student’s school on their jury panel.
These initiatives “are great steps in right direction” Carroll said.
After two open trials this semester, there has been a good deal of discussion regarding the Committee’s transparency.
“Transparency is going to be a big issue for us [over the next term],” Honor Chair David Truetzel said.
Truetzel said he plans on inviting members of the University community who work with the Family Education Rights and Prvacy Protection Act, a program that restricts the Committee from releasing certain information about students, to speak to the Committee. He expressed hope that this opportunity will give Committee members a foundational knowledge of the law so that they can then begin discussing the relationship between protecting students’ rights and making the Committee more transparent.
For the summer, Truetzel said there will be a time set aside for the Committee to learn all the details and nuances of their positions without the added stress of schoolwork that is present during the year.
“We’re setting all of this up now so that when we do want to start we’ve already got the wheels in motion,” Atkinson said.
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