AS AN HONOR Committee Member, former Honor Advisor, and involved student at the University, I often have engaged in conversations about the honor system. Primarily, the single sanction has been critiqued in three ways: being overly harsh, arbitrary and fallible. The response to such criticism usually entails citing tradition and the desire for a genuine community of trust. I believe that relentlessly holding on to the tradition of the single sanction is preventing our University from truly attaining this desired community of trust.
One question that has been posed to me is how can someone who has committed a crime as awful as rape be allowed to return to the University, but an overall good person who had one moment of moral weakness is sentenced to leave the University permanently? I believe firmly that people are capable of learning from their mistakes. This the defenders of the single sanction concede, except they believe those found guilty of an honor violation should practice what they learn elsewhere. Are we that self-righteous and unforgiving? We easily look past our friends lying at the local bars about their age, but ironically we still view ourselves as morally without fault.
In order to have a true community of trust, a significant number of people must participate in the system. In an honor survey taken last year, 40.2 percent of those people surveyed said that they "See many [honor] offenses go unreported," and 15.3 percent said that they would not initiate an honor case they had witnessed. Seventy-three percent either didn't support the sanction at all or supported it with reservations. Only 20 percent of students fully support the single sanction.
Because many professors and students alike disagree with the single sanction, they refuse to initiate a case. Therefore, many students who are guilty of committing honor offenses never see the inside of a trial room. How can we claim to have a community of trust when a large number of students who have committed honor offenses "prowl" our University unfettered? Are we not arbitrarily excommunicating some students while many others who have committed the exact same deeds go free?
Another thing to consider when evaluating the fairness of the single sanction is the fallibility of the Honor Committee. As a Committee member, I personally know that we give our all to the pursuit of truth, but it would be incredibly naive to think we have never made a mistake. Undoubtedly, students who have committed honor offenses remain at this University because we (or a jury) did not find the evidence convincing enough to satisfy the criteria of act, intent and seriousness. Can we ignore the possibility that innocent people have been wrongly convicted? I have spoken firsthand with a professor who believes he witnessed such a case. The single sanction is an incredibly high stake recognizing that the judges merely are fallible college students, not trained professionals or deities.
With all this evidence regarding student opposition to the status quo, I believe the Committee behaved irresponsibly when, by a vote of 14 to 9 to send the referendum to the students, it failed to reach a two-thirds majority. This proposal gave students the opportunity to confess to an honor offense after being accused and leave the University for three semesters in order to reflect and reaffirm their commitment to our community of trust.
Under the current system's operation, once an investigation has begun, if the student behaves honorably and admits to wrongful actions, their case becomes as open and shut as the suitcase they will be packing as they depart from the University permanently. One's only hope of remaining at the University is to lie and hope that you are a good enough actor that the Committee and the jurors believe you. The best liars remain in our community of trust while those with guilty consciences are excommunicated. Our honor system hardly seems to foster honorable behavior.
I believe that the informed retraction proposal will mitigate the common criticisms of our system. An initiator, or juror, no longer will bear the weight on his or her shoulders of potentially changing someone's academic life by kicking him or her out of school. Thus more initiations will occur, making the system more widely used and effective, thereby helping us attain the community of trust we desire.
The Committee confused its role of being "representatives" of the students with being "wards" of the single sanction. The vote to bring a referendum to the student body should not have been based on our personal feelings about the single sanction. Instead, we should be eager to allow the students who elected us to office the opportunity to have their voices heard. The Honor Committee constitution states that the Committee "shall embody the interests and attitudes of the current student generation of the University of Virginia."
Last year the student body rejected most of the honor proposals brought before them. Ostensibly, an alternative to the single sanction was not among those proposals.
It is time that the students make the decision to either reaffirm their commitment to the single sanction or create a new system that will propel us one step closer to our ideal community of trust. If anyone is interested in working on a campaign to bring the Informed Retraction referendum to the student body, please contact me at maj4j@virginia.edu.
(Michelle Jones is a fourth-year College student. She is an Honor Committee representative.)
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