Reforming a perspective
In the last few weeks the Honor Committee’s Restore the Ideal proposal has sparked an unprecedented wave of conversation about the University’s honor system. Some of it has been constructive and enlightening; a great deal of it has been accusatory and unproductive. As a second-year honor advisor, I have been frustrated by the willingness of my fellow students to vilify the Honor Committee for its well-intentioned proposal, especially when much of the bombastic anti-honor rhetoric has its roots in common misunderstandings. One example is the Feb. 19 Cavalier Daily op-ed, (“Restoring an ideal community of trust,”) in which Batten School student Kyle Schnoebelen’s denigration of the Honor Committee represents a larger problem in the overall honor debate. The importance of the Restore the Ideal proposal in determining the future health of the honor system cannot be overstated, so let’s stop disparaging our fellow students and start talking about what the proposal actually is: a genuine attempt to reward honesty and punish dishonesty in a fair and consistent manner. Schnoebelen laments that the Honor Committee lacks an “elementary understanding of the purpose of juries,” and is thus trying to take a fundamental right away from University students. I’d like to move the conversation beyond this misconception so we can focus on what really matters.