Last week, the Honor Committee encouraged University students to participate in its annual Honor Awareness Week with the hope of engaging and educating the University community about what the honor system entails.
After hosting a series of forums and distributing flyers, the Committee concluded last week’s activities by hosting an “Honor benefits benefit” Thursday night. According to the Committee’s Web site, the benefit was intended to give faculty, students and other members of the University’s community of trust the “opportunity ... to interact with those who are most knowledgeable of the honor process and to ask questions and voice concerns.”
Students in attendance Thursday were handed orange flyers on which were printed the words, “I BENEFIT from the Community of Trust.” Below these words was a list of five different ways honor benefits students, including how the Office of the Dean of Students grants students interest-free loans and how a student has the right to file a conscientious retraction if the student believes he or she has committed an honor offense.
Beyond these brief explanations, though, various members of the University community say the honor system benefits — or fails to benefit — the community of trust in more complex and debatable ways.
“I BENEFIT from the Community of Trust”
When asked, “What are the benefits of honor?” University students and faculty gave a variety of different answers.
Some members of the University community said tangible rewards are the most important benefits of honor. For example, second-year Architecture student Lauren Ulmer, who attended the honor benefits benefit, said she believes “it’s really nice that you can leave stuff out at places” and not have it stolen. Other students at the event said some of the more concrete benefits of honor include being able to tell a professor about an absence without providing a note, and also being able to pay a taxi fare at a later point in time by charging the ride to the Office of the Dean of Students.
“What students want in the end is to point to one small story of how honor has affected them,” said JJ Litchford, the Committee’s vice chair for community relations.
These actual benefits are manifestations of the philosophical concepts that the Committee is based on, outgoing Committee Chair Jess Huang said.
It is the “smaller and more tangible benefits that go to represent honor as a whole,” and the two concepts are ultimately interconnected, Litchford said.
Several structural elements of the Committee also help to promote honor as an ideal, incoming Chair David Truetzel said.
One such procedural element was the elimination of the “non-toleration” clause from the Committee’s constitution, Truetzel said. According to this clause, it was not only an honor offense to commit an act of lying, cheating or stealing oneself, but it was also an honor offense to see such an act occur without reporting it.
While Truetzel acknowledged that many people — especially “old-time guys” — preferred the inclusion of this clause, the removal of the clause made reporting cases less about following the rules and more about enhancing the community of trust. Now, the motivation for reporting cases should be more “about doing it because it is the right thing to do,” Truetzel said.
More than just students
The benefits not only affect students, but also the relationships they have with faculty and other members of the University community.
Astronomy Prof. Charles Tolbert said many of the benefits students experience in the classroom stem from the fact that professors believe in and follow the honor system as well.
“I find that on the whole, relationships are friendlier between students and faculty [because professors] don’t feel like they have to be a policeman,” Tolbert said.
In addition, honor extends beyond a student’s time at the University. Some believe students do not learn to fully appreciate the benefits of honor until they leave the community of trust.
“I found that the alumni community at the University has an even stronger affinity for the sense of honor than the University inculcates in its students,” third-year Law student Carey Mignerey said.
Mignerey, who served as the 2003-04 Committe chair, said students take for granted that they can trust one another, which makes “the fondness for the honor system [grow] stronger once [they] leave.”
Commerce Lecturer Lucien Bass, who is also a University alumnus and previous member of the Committee, reiterated this idea.
“If you ask alumni about their experience at the University, the vast majority bring up honor,” Bass said. “Once you get away ... it may have more meaning to you.”
The notion that the honor system will continue to benefit a student long after he or she leaves Grounds is, however, a concept that is difficult for Committee members to convey to students, Truetzel said.
“It’s hard to describe, but it’s very real,” Mignerey said.
Outside the benefits
It would, furthermore, be difficult to argue that honor at some point in a University student’s career does not affect him, Huang said.
“No one can say there are no benefits,” Huang said.
Despite the belief that honor offers benefits to everyone in one form or another, however, many groups — especially minority groups — on Grounds feel that the benefits of honor are not what they could be, and that the Committee has yet to actualize the honor system’s potential.
As part of Honor Awareness Week, the Committee, its Diversity Advisory Board and various minority contracted independent organizations on Grounds held an honor diversity forum to generate conversation about how honor fails to benefit minorities in certain ways.
Several University minority groups on Grounds came together to discuss issues such as Committee recruitment and the alleged “spotlighting” of minority students and “dimming” of white students.
Many minority students feel that they suffer from a double standard in the reporting of honor offenses. Even if minority students are treated equally during the actual honor trial process, they are much more likely to be accused of honor offenses than white students, Tolbert said at the forum, citing trial statistics.
Students often claim that spotlighting, or the idea that minority students are reported for honor offenses at a much higher rate than white students, is an issue that needs to be resolved within the system, Tolbert said. Meanwhile, students said there simultaneously exists a process of dimming, through which some University community members tend to look the other way when white students commit offenses.
These racial and ethnic issues can affect how students perceive the University’s honor system and can mask the potential benefits the system offers. Addressing these issues and reemphasizing the benefits of honor, though, is a complicated problem.
Fourth-year College student Sterling Elmore added that it is difficult to encourage students that do not resemble the Committee’s members to become and remain involved with the Committee. Because the Committee itself is not very diverse and struggles to maintain diversity, fixing perceived problems within the system can be difficult.
“The Committee to a certain extent is not entirely representative of the University as a whole,” Elmore said. “Honor tends to be an insular community.”
Some students believe, however, that it will take more than just making the Committee physically look like the rest of the University to ensure that all groups on Grounds equally feel the benefits of honor.
“Just because something looks like you doesn’t mean they are working for you,” said Khalifa Sultan Lee, vice chair of the Minority Rights Coalition.
Because the Committee is elected by the student body, it should be representative of the student body — but in more ways than just physical appearance, Lee said.
Elmore — who helped run the diversity forum — hopes that events such as the forum will create incentives for the Committee to acknowledge these issues, reach out to minority groups and create solutions for the future.
“This [forum] gave different groups an opportunity to hold Honor accountable to these improvements,” Elmore said.
Other criticisms
Minority groups, though, are not the only University community members who have criticized the honor system and the Committee. Students and professors both voiced concerns about honor and made suggestions to help increase both the actual and perceived benefits of honor.
Both Tolbert and Bass, for example, said in the past if a student saw another student lying, cheating or stealing, he or she would almost immediately report that student to the Committee. Each believes, however, that this is no longer the case. Today, reporting and upholding the honor system has been left up to faculty members rather than students.
“The student body as a whole is more tolerant of cheating,” Tolbert said, noting that this lack of student involvement may be perceived as damaging the community of trust and limiting the perception of benefits that extend from it.
Sam Leven, president of Hoos Against Single Sanction, agreed that students have chosen to participate less in the honor system.
“I would not say that students are less trustworthy, but rather they are less trusting,” he said.
Leven said he believes that the University’s single-sanction policy has diminished student reporting, which “has made cheating and stealing a little more commonplace,” Leven said, adding that he believes a multiple-sanction system could help to increase reporting rates. A change in sanctioning, however, is not enough to make the benefits of honor more readily available to students, he said. The Committee must also reach out to the student body and encourage students to report cases, he said.
Mignerey also noted that while he respects the honor system, it has some fundamental flaws that must be addressed if University students are to continue perceiving honor as beneficial in their daily lives.
When he first chose to join the Committee, Mignerey noticed the fact that the system “was not understood as widely as it should be ... I thought it was too procedural, and to a large extent I think that’s still true,” he said. This emphasis on procedure makes it more difficult for students to access honor and see the system’s benefits.
Third-year Law student Robert Baldwin also said he believes one reason the Committee has failed to fully realize honor’s benefits on Grounds is the fact that the honor system is so entrenched in history.
“In some ways, U.Va. has an unhealthy reliance on tradition which prevents you from questioning things,” Baldwin said.
If members of the University community do not question the honor system’s current practices, little potential is left for improvement and an increase in benefits, Baldwin said.
“In the ideal, the system makes a lot of sense,” Baldwin said, but the reality is that there is a “difference between the institutional bubble of being at school and the real world” that complicates issues, raises difficulties and ultimately can diminish benefits.
Plans for the future
Though every member of the community of trust wants to believe that the honor system benefits them to the best of its potential, the reality is that it is a person-run system and is “imperfect,” Huang said.
These debates and raised issues leave room for improvement by the Committee, she added.
“No one can say it’s the same as from 1842 when it was a gentleman’s code,” Huang said, adding that, “Much of my time ... has been spent in educating everyone on not just what these procedures are but rather what are these values and why do these values exist.”
Changing the way students view the honor system could have an impact on how or whether students perceive the benefits of honor.
“Students are often unhappy or have misconceptions because the tendency is to understand honor as a punitive system rather than taking the time to reflect on the philosophical background [of honor as an ideal],” Huang said.
Moving forward, with Truetzel as its new chair, the Committee is looking to reemphasize and help University community members pursue these philosophical ideals.
“Part of my job is to get a feel for what the general consensus [of the student body is],” Truetzel said. By recognizing student and faculty needs — including minority groups’ concerns — Truetzel said the Committee can work to educate and include these students within the Committee. In time, the benefits of honor may become more real for these University community members, who currently are unhappy with the way parts of the system work.
“With continuous education,” in conjunction with “community relations and outreach to groups that have concerns,” the Committee can help alleviate problems and increase benefits, Truetzel said.
Improving relations with those associated with the University and groups dissatisfied with the Committee takes more than just e-mails or “a letter once a year,” Litchford said. He said he hopes that he can make personal contact with these groups to help promote the Committee and the honor system’s benefits.
The effort must be shared, though, not just by the Committee, but by students themselves, Leven said.
“Instead of the Honor Committee focusing on the benefits of honor, the student body should stop relying on the honor system to provide these benefits” and realize these benefits for itself, Leven said.
Huang also said students must work with the Committee to recognize the advantages honor offers, in addition to the ways in which the system could be improved.
“Part of it’s going to be a change in the attitude of the student body” to fully engage in and recognize these benefits, she said.
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