When we told the candidates for Honor Committee College representative we were taping their interviews, they seemed unflustered; apparently this is standard procedure on Newcomb's fourth floor. Very little is known about how the Committee works internally, and even those candidates who we openly endorse - Justin Pierce, Owen Gallogly, Mark Gruetzmacher and Stephen Nash - said much of the Committee's work this past year took place behind closed doors.
Anyone who reads the papers saw that informed retraction (IR) legislation was slammed Monday in a near shut-out vote, a 19-2 box score. Ahead of time, we knew this; because IR, aka "the get out of jail free card," aka "playing the card," was known on street level among non-executive Committee members as a made deal, unwanted and dead on arrival. Three out of four candidates we endorse favor the conscientious retraction, but agreed that students could be granted a larger window of forgiveness to turn themselves in. The other wanted forensic data before jumping to conclusions.
Anyway, here's the line-up:
Justin Pierce left a card, but we remembered him without it. Pierce said person-to-person meetings with students would be the best way to set the story straight on the Committee: "If you have 75 people in honor t-shirts serving dinner at Newcomb one night, then you have a face-to-face interaction ... and, over scooping ice cream, maybe we can talk about [the Committee] and recognize what their problems are."
Owen Gallogly, meanwhile, packed rhetorical heat. The former Committee had some lapses, he said. They didn't do dorm talks. They did things behind closed doors. You have to start early, in April, and not wait to the fall to start getting things done, he said. Gallogly proposed regime-building by a pyramid scheme: Start talks at the base, at town-halls and the community level. Only then, he said, could we funnel up proposals to the general body and the executive committee.
Next came Mark Gruetzmacher. Enough said. But he said more, taking aim at the sanctions Honor Chair Ann Marie McKenzie recommended in her IR proposal: "Maybe two semesters out of the school and a mark on their transcript ... maybe that's really us coming up with legislation for the sake of coming up with legislation," he said. A man of principle, Gruetzmacher quoted T.S. Eliot to dismantle a convenient "scale of honor" which would adapt to each generation. Instead, his ideal Committee would uphold its mission and "believe in at least right now what [principles] we're standing on," and defend single sanction.
Stephen Nash - not the basketball player - runs point on honor's new project, a student-wide survey he helped develop and scheduled for release next week. Nash, a self-titled realist, quoted statistics. He talked deliberative polling. If there were not more diversity of input from both the student body and the Committee as a whole, then "I think we have to be afraid of Honor being isolated to the fourth floor of Newcomb," he said.
We ended by gauging the candidates' stance on confidentiality. We asked about Article V, the Committee's five sentence bylaw paragraph on confidentiality. This, it is known, was the cause of some controversy last semester. We were confident in the above candidates' answers, which kept confidentiality focused on the students, and not the proceedings.
But the issue remains. We'll have to sort it out sometime, behind open doors. Until then, we have only encouraging words from these candidates. On their honor.
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