In a recent Cavalier Daily article, Honor Committee Chair Matt West expressed his hope that the University community would find the committee’s plans for the rest of the current term “ambitious” yet “realistic.” They include updating the Informed Retraction, or IR, to make it a “more expansive option,” in West’s words, with specific recommendations expected in the spring. These include addressing spotlighting, rewriting Honor plaques and proposing changes to the by-laws that would give Honor the authority to defer or decline jurisdiction over reports, mainly those involving offenses in Title IX cases. These are all important efforts, and the Honor Committee is right to pursue them vigorously, with more detail as they proceed. But they skim the surface of the philosophical divide at the heart of Honor’s contested future. At this pivotal moment in Honor’s history, the University community needs an organized effort to promote student-led debate that helps lead to greater engagement with and mastery over the fork in the road we face.
By historical standards, the honor system has changed at a breathtaking pace over the last five years. In spring 2002 (8-9), a ballot proposal for an informed retraction garnered only 39.9 percent of the vote. In 2013, the student body adopted the informed retraction with 64 percent support, and in spring 2016, the student body voted 58.88 percent in favor of amending the constitution to allow the Honor Committee to consider a multi-sanction system. While the vote failed to clear the supermajority threshold required, the lines of argument that framed the referendum were focused on the excessive and unwieldy nature of the single sanction and the extent to which its universality hampered “proportional justice.” With a clear majority voting for consideration of a multi-sanction system, it seems these arguments were broadly persuasive to the student body, or the 34 percent who bothered to vote at all. Where in 2014 every single candidate running for Honor representative positions voiced support for the single sanction, now seemingly only 31 percent of the student body feels similarly. And so the Honor Committee hums along, pursuing incremental reform, weighing an IR for multiple offenses to be considered in spring 2017 and waiting for the 13-person Honor Audit Commission to produce its ruminations on where we go from here.
The Audit Commission is necessary and proper — the University community should have a group of dedicated students and faculty providing us with original research and well-documented conclusions on how to proceed with reform. But that conversation needs to happen beyond the confines of this group and beyond the regular bursts of enthusiasm in the context of immediate reforms to the honor system. What was and remains at stake in our developing debate over the fate of the single sanction is the legitimacy of both the philosophy at the heart of honor and the institution that embodies its precepts, the community of trust and its administrative organ. Viewpoints in favor of retaining the single sanction emphasized it fostered a community of trust by way of holding students to a higher standard. Those in favor of the multi-sanction consideration emphasized Honor’s judicial duties, with the Option Two campaign running under the slogan, “Let the punishment fit the crime.” These are disparate visions of honor, its purpose and its future that need further probing and consideration, and the Honor Committee needs to help lead a meaningful conversation beyond surveys.
As someone in favor of retaining the single sanction, my fear is the tiny margin of defeat for Option Two has provided the Honor Committee with a de facto mandate to begin the slow slide toward a multi-sanction system. The IR Working Group’s recent focus on providing an IR for multiple offenses seems to augur deeper changes whose full implications have not been examined in any real sense. Do we then, as a community, muddle along towards the precipitous decline of this vaunted institution of student self-governance, beset by questions of elitism, aloofness and homogeneity, debilitated by the lost confidence in its underpinnings, and soundly defeated at the ballot box in a few staggered terms?
At a meeting of the Honor Committee on Sept. 11, Landon Wilkins, a former Honor Committee representative, called on the committee to “dedicate its term to education,” citing it as a paramount and persistent issue over the past couple decades. I agree, and I would add the need for productive discourse has never been as pressing as it is now. I believe that this Honor Committee should help educate through the Socratic method, instigating and leading the University into a wider discussion of the philosophy of the community of trust, asking how best to bridge the gap between the ideal and the reality. This means using the upcoming “Honor Week” to engage in more than just the typical outreach events, encouraging informed students to debate the philosophy and practices of the Honor system and continuing to maintain the community of trust on the basis of student self-governance through CIOs and dorm-sponsored events. Without such an effort, there is a real danger that issues surrounding Honor fade into the background and become forgotten by the majority of the student body.
Olivier Weiss is a Viewpoint writer.
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