I am not on the Honor Committee, but I consider all of us stakeholders and co-stewards of Honor. Honor doesn’t belong to the Honor Committee or the officers who work on their — and our — behalf, and it certainly doesn’t belong to Phi Delta Theta; the Honor system belongs to all of us who live in and are governed by the Community of Trust. In fact, as someone without formal experience with Honor, and free of its shackles on ideological diversity, I hope I can better represent the silent majority at the University.
The single sanction should be repealed. It is the principal reason for the Honor system’s most pressing problems — namely, staggeringly low reporting rates, wildly inconsistent verdicts and widespread distrust of the system from faculty.
The Honor Committee has long been aware of abysmal reporting rates but hasn’t dared tackle the problem in a substantive way. Nebulous calls for cultural change, Conscientious Retractions and Informed Retractions or increased education will do little to fix the problem, as they glaze over the primary deterrent for reporting: that thousands of us, myself included, refuse to report someone for cheating on a test because of the possibility of the disproportionate punishment of expulsion. Indeed, a majority of students readily admit that repealing the single sanction would boost reporting rates.
Inconsistent verdicts are blamed on the unqualified student body who comprise the jury on almost all Honor trials when they should be blamed on the single sanction. The inconvenient truth is that jurors are less likely to convict clearly guilty students when expulsion is the result of their findings.
Faculty disengagement with the system stems from the problem of inconsistent verdicts, making so many faculty members, even entire schools, prefer to deal with Honor offenses internally. The Honor Code, which should represent unifying collective ideals that we all hold each other accountable to, has been fragmented and dismantled by the continued existence of the Single Sanction.
Contrary to the Honor Committee’s opinion, electing a third consecutive Phi Delta Theta brother as Chair will not help along serious change or substantive solutions. The Honor Committee’s “answers” to these problems will be three-fold: increased outreach and education efforts to promote some intangible sense of community engagement, propose unpopular jury reform again and amorphous cultural shifts in the community. Unfortunately, these efforts will merely follow in the Honor Committee’s tradition of affirming the merit of placing proverbial Band-Aids on the aforementioned problems. For example, in response to these systemic issues the Honor Committee proposed Restore the Ideal, which, while it made the decision-makers look busy, was doomed to fail, as its conservative jury reform did not appeal to the public opinion which desires the liberalization of Honor.
Though there are many independently-minded people involved in Honor who oppose the Single Sanction, there are institutional safeguards to preserve the status quo. The problem isn’t cronyism (though it’s easy to make that argument); it’s that ideological homogeneity has become a prerequisite for advancement within Honor. Ambitious support officers who oppose the single sanction, fearing they will be denied entry into the upper echelons of senior support or the Executive Board, either tone down their rhetoric or change their beliefs. Thus, in true reflexively conservative style, Honor effectively shackles intellectual diversity and real self-governance within it.
Thus, the solution has to come from us, as it did last year when law-student Frank Bellamy proposed a successful counter-measure to Restore the Ideal. Next spring let’s see a petition to end the single sanction and replace it with common-sense, intermediary reforms. The thinly veiled rationale for opposing this will be that there have been referendums in the past and they have failed. Not only were these almost successful in achieving the 60 percent threshold needed for amendment, but the results were also adversely affected by obfuscating poll language. Were an independent author to present the student body with a simple choice — and the Honor leadership didn’t squander thousands more dollars, or its political power, promoting the status quo — the outcome will be very different.
Repealing the Single Sanction would not precipitate a cataclysmic shift in the tectonics of the community of trust. Introducing common-sense, intermediary sanctions in its place would reinvigorate a system that is slowly perishing by increasing reporting rates, streamlining jury verdicts and focusing on rehabilitation, not punishment.
Ben Rudgley an Opinion Columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at b.rudgley@cavalierdaily.com.
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