DURING my third undergraduate year at the University, I decided that a wonderful activity to put on my resume for law school was to work as counsel for the Honor Committee. My intentions were not only self-serving; I was genuinely interested in the process, enamored with the idea that I would be able to be an advocate for the rights of others and excited by the prospect of so much responsibility, all for the cause of honor and a wonderful tradition.
I took the Committee's qualifying test, was interviewed by members of the Committee, and was invited to join a week-long training session before the semester began to prepare me for my work.
Both the qualification and training processes were largely banal and intuitive, once you had the honor lingo down. None of it prepared me for what an honor case would look like, nor what it felt like to have an innocent student's academic career in my hands. I doubt my experiences were different from that of many other advocates.
Indeed, what I witnessed during my year defending students against charges of honor offenses was consistently horrifying. It was one thing for me to be so young and to be entrusted with such responsibility; it was wholly different to realize that it was completely up to me to make vitally important decisions that would directly affect the outcome of a trial and person's life. These decisions included clearing up the many inconsistencies that resulted from a haphazard investigation; vigorously arguing for or against admitting evidence; identifying witness testimony that was out of scope; preparing for arguments before a jury; and, incidentally, bracing for the possibility that my student might actually be expelled. All of this over charges that, if true, were only rarely evidence of serious wrongdoing.
Still, I did my very best, expected that others would do the same, and that they would at least be honorable in the fulfillment of their duties.
Yet there were many instances in which I witnessed gross misconduct and utter incompetence among those who were supposedly trained to know better. One such case involved a student, set to graduate with a professional degree, whose professor had concluded that the cheating he was accused of never took place. Still, an especially aggressive student, who also was an Honor Committee member, decided to press honor charges and to do all she could to ensure the guilty verdict. She vacillated between her accounts of what happened, and, worse, made her opinions about the student and the case known to her buddies on the Honor Executive Committee -- that elite group of especially zealous students who are charged with overseeing the fairness of all honor proceedings.
It became clear that there were substantial inconsistencies with the evidence and the testimony against my student. My co-counsel and I submitted a formal complaint to the Executive Committee members. Their response indicated that, based on a thorough review of all the evidence -- an audio tape of the first hearing in the case in particular -- our concerns were unwarranted. The case would continue. Still curious, we pressed them and asked for a copy of the tape they claimed to have reviewed. The tape, it turned out, was full of hissing and beeping but no speaking. It was inaudible.
Five months after the case began (five months!), the case was dropped, and my student barely had enough time in the academic year to cram for finals. The evidence suggested strongly that the Executive Committee had apparently misled us to a degree far worse than any case of dissembling I saw brought before them for adjudication. We thought of filing honor charges against the lot of them, but procedures being closed as they are, we knew that their trials would be decided before they began. We asked the Board of Visitors to intervene, and, in a kindly and carefully worded letter, they responded to our concerns: "The matters raised in your letters are not issues appropriate for the Board to discuss."
The University's current, well-intentioned, and committed Honor Committee chairman can argue all he likes about how the law prohibits him and the University from revealing information about honor cases. He can cite federal and state law and privacy statues, and he can even point to recent court decisions that protect disciplinary records in the same way that student transcripts are protected from public viewing.
None of that changes the fact that I have just described an illuminating case for all to read about and consider in which nothing more was revealed than the bare facts. I was careful not to reveal any personal information or anything else that might identify the student caught up in that unfortunate mess. What I did reveal was the very real possibility of enduring callousness, misconduct, corruption, immaturity and, sadly, the potential for our revered honor system to fail us in its mission and practice. Opening honor procedures for the public would go far toward curing these ills.
The honor system must thrive and continue to be the model of conduct for so many. To ensure its success, the very best remedy is to release sufficient information about honor trials for the public's review -- information that also would allow later generations of student jurists to develop some sense of precedent, of how similar offenses were handled by previous juries, which is a cornerstone of Anglo-American jurisprudence and is entirely, and unforgivably, absent from our own. The University must appoint an independent review board to delete identifiable information and to disseminate appropriate information to the public. Those running the system need to feel the watchful eye of the public on their backs. Sunlight, as Justice Louis Brandeis observed, is the best disinfectant. This is the guiding light of our legal system, and of any system that aims for fairness and justice.
There is no reason to keep these procedures as airtight as they are except to immunize those administering the system from responsibility for their actions. Secrecy, in these matters, breeds carelessness, injustice and unfairness. It is time to ask what kind of values the University stands for. The very success and the future of the honor system depend on it.
(Erich Wasserman, CLAS 2000, is the Director of Development of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a
Philadelphia-based civil liberties group.)
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