The Honor Committee here at the University has recently begun to look at the Back-to-Basics proposal for restructuring the honor system, which has received support from numerous members of the Committee and the community at large. The proposal has two primary components: the first would allow an accused student to opt out of the trial process and serve a year of academic suspension away from the University, and the second would change the jury selection pool from the possibility of student juries to exclusively those of elected Committee representatives. I think the first proposal is excellent and would do a lot to increase the effectiveness of the system, especially in the frequency of reported infractions. But the changes to the jury pool, in my opinion, are counter to the ideals of the University.
The most pressing issues facing the Committee today are related to the sizable gap between the number of students who admit in anonymous surveys to cheating or observing cheating by others and the number of reported honor offenses brought to the Committee. The single sanction system is widely seen to be the cause of this disparity, because it makes potential reporters reluctant to inflict such a heavy penalty on a fellow student. This is why allowing for students to plead guilty and have a less severe punishment is an excellent idea; it allows infractions to be addressed without the certainty of expulsion. While I doubt the problem will disappear entirely, I’m confident that if implemented, this change will increase the number of reported offenses.
The change to the jury, as far as I can tell, seeks to address another issue caused by the single-sanction. Jurors are often unwilling to sentence another student to expulsion if they do not believe the alleged infraction merits the punishment, leading to guilty students escaping punishment. By only having jurors who are fully committed to the system and its rules, the scale of the offense will presumably have less of an effect on the verdict. This change would also ensure that jurors were taking their job seriously, which is not always the case with a randomly selected student.
While I agree that having elected committee representatives on the jury would reduce the frequency of apathetic jurors and would at least partially curtail the influence of the scale of an offense on sentencing, I do not support the change to jury structure for several reasons. The first and most important reason is that the honor process must always be an endeavor of the University as a whole. The ideal of student self-government that is so central to the University is embodied at its purist in the honor system. For the system to be effective, every member of the community of trust has to be committed to making it work, and be part of the process. That sounds corny, but the reason we have a student run honor system is to uphold these ideals. While it could be argued that even with the change, students not affiliated directly with honor will still be involved when they report offenses, that’s simply not enough. The accused have the right to be judged by a jury of their peers, which includes not only the small subset of students who are part of honor but the student body as a whole. Shrinking the jury pool in any way disenfranchises not only the accused but also every student who believes in self-government. Honor cannot become a system that only a select few can participate in and remain legitimate. While the problem of the apathetic juror would remain, I think that is a problem better solved through education about the importance of the honor system. I would rather have a few lazy jurors than make honor a process controlled entirely by a small group of people.
Not only is this amendment counter to the ideals of the University, it’s unnecessary to solve the problem it’s meant to address. If the first change is implemented, and the single sanction is no longer a guarantee, then most cases where a student is guilty of an offense that might not be deemed serious enough for conviction by a juror would not even reach a trial. Having the option to take a year’s suspension will not only be a popular option for the accused, but will allow the jury to act with less guilt. Knowing the accused is there of his or her own discretion and could have avoided the trial altogether would make it much easier to allow the evidence to speak for itself.
Change to the honor system is clearly necessary to increase its effectiveness and legitimacy on Grounds. But this change cannot come at the cost of other central tenants of the University experience, especially when the change is redundant. The jury selection process is central to the involvement of the entire student community with Honor, and therefore cannot be altered in a way that diminishes this relationship.
Forrest Brown’s column normally appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at f.brown@cavalierdaily.com.
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