The 2017-18 Honor Committee chose their Executive Committee this weekend as part of their transition retreat, in which the outgoing Executive Committee trained incoming Committee members for their upcoming term. Third-year College student Devin Rossin was elected to serve as Honor Committee chair.
“We’re entering a weeklong transition period during which myself and the other four members of the outgoing Executive Committee will be working closely with our successors to prepare them to take on the roles when they officially transition in on April 3,” said Matt West, the outgoing Committee chair and a fourth-year College student.
The new Committee also elected third-year College student Jeffrey Warren as vice chair for hearings, third-year Nursing student Tamia Walker-Atwater as vice chair for education, third-year Engineering student Brandt Welch as vice chair for community relations and third-year College student Sarah Killian as vice chair for investigations.
“I think a large, over-arching theme is making Honor a lot more relevant to the lives of students,” Rossin said. “Making sure that Honor is a lot more present in their communities, having a lot stronger education, outreach focuses … [and] making sure that there’s this reciprocity of trust between Honor and the rest of the community,” Rossin said.
Welch said he decided to run for Honor Committee over winter break after considering it for a while. He became involved as a support officer his second year.
“Honor is a system that should be serving the students,” Welch said. “I think Community Relations is what serves as a liaison between the students and the Committee and holds the Committee accountable for addressing the needs and concerns of the student body.”
At their meeting Sunday evening, the Honor Committee voted unanimously to pass a proposal to expand the Informed Retraction.
“We ultimately decided on a proposal that focused on expanding the IR to allow a student to take a single IR for multiple offenses when those multiple offenses involved ‘substantially similar conduct and circumstances,’” West said. “That ‘substantially similar conduct and circumstances’ language became a core component of this expansion that we sought to achieve and that we’ve been discussing for the past few weeks.”
Warren said he is looking forward to implementing the reformed IR.
“In our retreat, we talked a lot about what would become of this IR reform should it not pass, so we were planning to work on that,” Warren said. “Fortunately, it did pass today, so we don’t have to. I know that I’m looking forward to working closely with Sarah Killian, the vice chair for investigations, on implementing the new IR reform and coming to agreement with her on how to apply it.”
Killian said she might revisit previously-proposed IR changes.
“The implementation of what they just passed tonight is going to largely fall to me to make sure that it’s consistently and fairly applied across cases,” Killian said. “I’ll be largely implementing that. I might also take a second look at some of the other IR changes that were proposed at one point in time to see if we might want to implement some of those in the future.”
Walker-Atwater, who has served on the 2016-17 Committee, said she will be working to reach out to marginalized students.
“My plan to focus on for next year is having to do with outreaching to individualized who are marginalized by our community,” Walker-Atwater said. “This includes students with disabilities, our deaf and blind population, individuals who are international students and so on. It’s about defining the role of Honor in their communities and not pushing an agenda.”
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