You may think you know what an honor offense is: It's a non-trivial act of lying, cheating or stealing, committed with dishonest intent. But the definition leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and the secrecy surrounding honor cases makes it impossible for us to know how it is being interpreted. That's why I wrote the amendment to the Honor Committee Constitution on the ballot this week that would give us this information, while still protecting the privacy of all concerned.
Is it an honor offense to spend 40 minutes on a 30-minute take-home quiz? Or is that trivial? Does it matter how many points the quiz was worth? Suppose you forget where you encountered an idea, or mistakenly think you came up with it yourself: Is it an Honor offense not to cite it? Or is that unintentional, or perhaps trivial? Is it an Honor offense to steal your roommate's food after he tells you not to?
These should be issues we discuss, not silent mysteries. In an academic paper I'd be glad to share, I identified 11 reasons student courts should be open, but I'll mention just two of the most relevant here.
First, the standard we are expected to uphold should not be mysterious. No one should be taken by surprise when other members of the University community take what he thought was an innocent action to be an honor offense. Nor should anyone be surprised when what he thought was obviously an honor offense is deemed trivial.
Second, Honor is supposed to reflect the views of the current student generation. But without an active public discussion, those views are, at best, inadequately worked out - and to the extent that honor is supposed to reflect a consensus, that standard does not exist. You cannot have a consensus without a conversation.
Under the proposed amendment to Article II of the Committee's constitution, the Committee would publish an official summary of nearly every honor trial. The summary would include the key issues in the case and its outcome. The official summaries would not act as binding precedent; juries, and future student generations, would retain their discretion. But the summaries would enable us to engage in a University-wide conversation about the interpretation of honor, with several important advantages.
First, we would all understand better what is and is not considered an Honor offense; this would help us avoid committing offenses and reporting acts that are not offenses.
Second, participating in the conversation would enable each of us to influence the evolution of the standard of honor. We would learn from one another's perspectives and arguments, and in applying honor to cases as Committee members or jurors, we would be able to draw on what we have learned in this conversation. The outcome of cases would then depend less on who is chosen for a given jury or investigative panel, and more on how the facts measure up to standards that are, to a greater extent than currently, public.
Third, the conversation will, or so I hope, strengthen the connection between the student body and the honor system. The more we discuss what honor means, the more we strengthen our commitment to it. And this will, I believe, reduce the number of honor offenses committed, while increasing the percentage reported.
Some students may worry that the amendment would reduce the privacy of students accused of honor offenses. In fact, the amendment clearly provides that names and identifying information - any information from which a member of the community not already aware of the basic facts could identify the students involved - must not be released. And the by-laws the Committee passed Sunday night provide several mechanisms to ensure compliance. Both the acquitted or convicted student and one of his school's representatives on the Committee would get to review the summary to ensure that it did not compromise privacy.
More fundamentally, the public summaries are about the issues in the case, not the individuals. And the facts you need to understand the issues are rarely if ever the kind of information that raises privacy concerns. For example, if the question is whether cheating on a small quiz is trivial, the fact that the quiz was worth one percent of the course grade is relevant - but the name of the course is not, and there is no way to identify the course, let alone the individual student, from that information.
Honor is important to the University community. The issues we know enough to discuss, we frequently do: the single sanction and public trials, for instance. But public trials are too rare to give us the knowledge necessary for an informed discussion of the most important aspect of the honor system - what it demands of us. Official summaries would give us that knowledge and promote that discussion.
Alexander R. Cohen is a doctoral student in philosophy and an Honor Committee representative for the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.
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