CONTROVERSY ensued last week when Honor Rep. From the School for Continuing and Professional Studies, Thomas Bird, tried to invalidate the informed retraction petition. He claimed that SCPS students should be counted, and that the petition therefore did not meet the at least 10 percent of the student body necessary to appear on the ballot. Bird is wrong. Only full time University students should vote on honor referenda.
The Honor Committee has been considering the proposal since last week. While Student Council and Honor did decide to allow the petition to appear on the ballot, the issues of SCPS students being allowed to vote will be considered by this year's Committee. It will then make a formal recommendation to next year's Committee. Currently, for a petition to get on the ballot or for an honor referendum to pass, 10 percent of students must support it.
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Honor Chairman Thomas Hall said in an e-mail interview, "I strongly feel that SCPS students should be able to vote in Honor referenda, especially because they are bound by the system." Hall thinks SCPS students should be allowed to vote on honor decisions, as long as voter participation standards are changed.
But the real issue is whether SCPS students should be voting on honor referenda to begin with, and the answer is no.
The situation is made more confusing by the fact that no one is sure how exactly SCPS students voted in the past or would vote in the future. According to Bird, last year members of the Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies, which is the undergraduate part of SCPS located at the University, received ballots over e-mail as well as paper ballots. Bird does not believe that members of the SCPS outside of BIS at other campuses voted. This fact was confirmed by Hall, who said that only the students in BIS voted. This does not seem like a proper representation of student governance for SCPS students.
The idea that SCPS students must be allowed to vote on honor referenda because they must follow the honor code sounds nice, but fails to take many things into account. By analogy, people who live in the United States on green cards, and who are not citizens, cannot vote. But these same people must follow laws, made by people who they did not elect. Out of state students at the University must follow Virginia laws, even though they certainly did not vote for the Virginia governor or legislators. Simply having to follow rules does not give someone the right to vote.
In terms of practical concerns, it is too difficult to make SCPS students part of the voting system. Many would argue that Honor already does a poor job of educating students at the University about the referenda, and it is entirely unreasonable to expect them to be able to expand their educational methods across satellite campuses of part-time students throughout the state.
Honor also would have to revamp the voting system to include all 11,000 SCPS students. This would take time, considering that only about half of the 11,000 SCPS students have an e-mail ID, which is needed to vote under the current system. Assuming that this were to occur, making the necessary changes to Honor's constitution would require an aggressive educational campaign and time commitment. And while Hall asserted that the trials would not be slowed down even more, it still shifts Honor's valuable time from other matters.
Allowing SPCS students to vote would also generate large logistical problems. No petitions ever would get on a ballot, to say nothing of them even getting passed if the number of people necessary to sign petitions increased. Committee members cannot be expected to travel throughout the state trying to get students to sign a petition.
Full-time students know more about the honor system simply because they hear about it constantly. Stores throughout Charlottesville are supposed to accept student checks because the honor code pervades the Charlottesville community.
This is not to say that SCPS students are not as honest or intelligent as University students. But they are outside of the system. They will get University degrees of some kind, must follow the honor code and pay tuition, but that is the extent of their connection to the University. SCPS students get the advantage of having the University name somehow attached to their degree. This is not a right to vote for honor referenda.
(Harris Freier's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at hfreier@cavalierdaily.com.)
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