THE ONGOING debate regarding the Honor Committee's proposed informed retraction legislation is a positive step toward achieving the body's goal of fostering a meaningful community of trust. The proposal, which would allow accused students to admit an honor offense and face two semesters' suspension, is a radical departure from the current rule of the single sanction, which removes from the University any student who is found guilty or who admits guilt while under suspicion of an honor offense. Though the proposal may still need refining, it would be a huge benefit to the University for informed retraction to pave the way for sanctions other than expulsion to be applied by the Committee.
I have written previously about the flaws of the single sanction: Most significantly, the policy does not discourage individuals from committing honor offenses, but rather from reporting them. We can see this from the fact that there were only 43 Honor cases brought to trial in 2008, the same year in which a survey of the student population found that 28 percent of respondents had witnessed an honor offense. The most frequent reasons survey respondents cited when explaining why they did not report offenses were because they felt uneasy about causing another student to be dismissed, or they did not think the offense was worthy of expulsion.
Informed retraction stands to change this norm by providing a lesser degree of punishment for students who were rightly accused of committing an honor offense. It seems that students would be more willing to report offenses if expulsion were not the only response. If more offenses get reported, students would be deterred from committing offenses. Thus, we have reason to believe that informed retraction would lead to less lying, cheating and stealing at the University. Informed retraction is a simple step toward this positive end.
That said, the proposed change is not perfect. Third-year college student and former honor counsel Emily Morrison, who opposes the idea of informed retraction, said in an email, "Honor already had difficulty processing investigations and proceeding to trial in a timely manner, and IRs [informed retractions] would add an additional layer of bureaucracy to further impede the process." It is true that the Committee would have a greater volume of cases to deal with if informed retraction brought about the benefit of more students engaging with it. This could result in potentially overworked honor counselors pressuring innocent students into giving informed retractions to cut down on the case load.
This is just one possible outcome, far down the road. Regrettably, if we do not take steps toward finding ways to solve honor violations without expulsion, there is the much more immediate problem of dramatic under-reporting. In fact, Honor Chair Ann Marie McKenzie has observed that there have been only 30 cases since last January among a student body of more than 16,000.
There may be some difficulty in adjusting the system to accommodate informed retractions and in making students aware of it, but if implemented correctly the reform could speed up, rather than hinder, the handling of future honor accusations. If more students make the retraction as soon as they are made aware of the charges, then it is possible that the trial burden will not become too unreasonable for the Committee.
There also has been some question in the Committee's discussions about whether the retraction would apply to only one instance of lying, cheating, or stealing as opposed to all the wrongdoing surrounding a single incident. The Committee's interpretation of this point would impact the handling of some acts of dishonesty such as the stealing of an exam answer key, which would count as both cheating and stealing. Letting students put in a retraction for the theft only to get expelled for cheating would seem to defeat the point of informed retraction. This would be particularly true if a student's informed retraction with regard to the theft were used as evidence against him in prosecuting the act of cheating. Therefore, a "single assignment" rule may be most practical, so that all the offenses related to a single midterm, for instance, would be treated as one.
Though informed retraction holds the potential to restore respect to the Committee and to deter offenses, the punishments handed down through the trial system deserve continued scrutiny. The informed retraction proposal's current "hard" suspension period may be inappropriate in some situations - is suspension for a year really necessary if someone stole a can of soda?
Likewise, if a student does not put in an informed retraction for a relatively small offense but is still found guilty, does he still deserve expulsion? Is removal from the community always going to be the most just alternative to suspension? These questions will demand consideration at a later date, but for now the Committee can do the University community a great service by accepting informed retraction as policy.
Sam Carrigan's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at s.carrigan@cavalierdaily.com.
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