RECENTLY, the Honor Committee announced that it would soon be reevaluating the single sanction. Darden School Rep. Lamont Soverall proposed that once students leave the community of trust, we should not shut the door permanently, but instead be open to the possibility of re-enrollment. Although we constantly should be evaluating the place honor holds in our culture, this debate is headed in the wrong direction. Instead, the discussion should center around the single sanction itself. Because of a lack of student participation in the honor system, the Honor Committee should revoke the single sanction.
The honor system is a glorious ideal for which alumni and students alike hold a great amount of esteem. However, the system has become threatened over the years by an increasingly litigious society and a changing demographic of students at the University itself. The first threat has been defeated in the courts time after time, as suits against the student-run system fail to win the support of the law.
The second threat results from a change that the University has sought with incredible vigor: a diverse and eclectic student body. The University today welcomes students from every imaginable background, culture, geographic region and socioeconomic sphere. Our institution has come a long way from the finishing school where white landowners of the Commonwealth sent their sons. Even in the time since our parents' generation matriculated, the University has increased in size by a third and admitted women and minorities. The student body has gone from holding a homogeneous ethic of southern chivalry, where an honor offense might include insulting a lady, to a culture of diverse belief systems. This evolution challenged the honor system to the point where a formal constitution had to be drafted in the late '70s to map out exactly how the system would function.
As a result of this ever-diversifying environment, it is much more difficult to find similar ideas of honor among students. What to one student might validate expulsion for dishonorable conduct might to another seem overly draconian. Herein lies the dilemma within the honor system.
Although random students on a jury panel are encouraged to first judge whether a student has intentionally committed a dishonorable act, Honor Committee Chairman Thomas Hall believes that some simply judge whether the act warrants dismissal from the University. This, combined with the lack of precedent in honor cases, could lead to inconsistent decisions. Students accused of cheating on petty homework assignments or quizzes are acquitted, if they are even reported to the Committee in the first place.
Teachers and graduate assistants only will endure the frustratingly long process of initiating a case for a short period of time when the accused are acquitted so frequently. Students initiate less than 25 percent of cases because they do not want to be responsible for the dismissal of a peer.
Ideologically, it makes sense that our system acknowledges honorable conduct as universal and implies that such a concept cannot be broken into a continuum of small infractions versus large infractions. However, this is unrealistic. The idea of a single response to dishonorable conduct is pleasing and may have functioned well in an earlier time at the University, but the all-or-nothing system of a single sanction is only a hopeful relic at the University today.
Let us retune the Honor Committee to a system that engages students to encourage honorable conduct among themselves. The honor system should drop the single sanction and employ a range of verdicts appropriate to the "seriousness" of a given case, already a criterion in honor trials. Then students will be held responsible for all implications of honor. This will actually achieve what was intended in the single sanction: Students will begin to hold their peers responsible for a range of honorable conduct. A student will have the ability to bring a peer up on honor charges, thereby helping the accused student learn from a transgression, instead of potentially terminating the student's academic career at the University.
As the Committee begins to debate the single sanction in the coming months, let us hope that the focus of the discussion will stay at the central issue to preserving our honor system: dismantling the single sanction all together. That way the honor system will still be in existence long after we leave this institution, and it will be the same source of pride and inspiration as it is to the alumni of today.
(Preston Lloyd's column appears Wednesdays in the Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at plloyd@cavalierdaily.com.)
Read More
PATEL: Personal development courses support students beyond the gradebook
By Heer Patel | 17 hours agoThe University must rethink its approach to education beyond traditional major-specific requirements and mandate personal development courses.
EDITORIAL: Commercialization threatens U.Va.’s educational mission
By Editorial Board | YesterdayAfter all, measuring the University’s worth in terms of accrued capital, operational efficiency and numerical rankings molds this space into just another cookie-cutter institution.
YOUNIS: Why every U.Va. student should say yes to English
By Ayat Younis | 6 days agoEvery student at the University, regardless of their primary field of study, can professionally and academically benefit from engaging with the English department.
