ON SUNDAY, the Honor Committee considered a proposal to remove the seriousness clause from its constitution, which provides that acts of lying, cheating and stealing must meet a certain standard of severity in order to be considered honor offenses. The proposal, which failed by a vote of 8-12, would have eliminated such considerations of seriousness except in pre-trial motions.
Although the proposal was defeated, it was, nonetheless, a significant episode in the long running debate about the future of the honor system. Like the 2002 proposal to eliminate the consideration of seriousness in cases of academic fraud and the ever-present controversy of the single sanction, Sunday's proposal was essentially a question of principle versus pragmatism -- if all acts of dishonesty are considered honor offenses, whatever their seriousness, students will be reluctant to charge and convict perceived offenders. But if the University agrees to tolerate some level of dishonest activity, the community of trust will be compromised.
When should a system of black and white morality make the pragmatic decision to see crime and punishment in shades of gray? And to what extent should Honor compromise its principles in order to survive in an age of moral relativism?
In the University's younger days, the answers were never and not-at-all. When the student body was a homogenous group with common standards of conduct and common expectations of punishment, should those standards be violated, an honor system of moral absolutes worked. But in an age when the University accepts students of widely varying backgrounds and prides itself on their diversity of viewpoints, Honor cannot stand on social convention.
The new face of honor was reflected in the 2002 Honor System Survey, which polled students on a wide range of honor issues. In one revealing section, 194 of the survey's 778 respondents reported witnessing an honor offense. But of those 194, only four had initiated an honor case against the alleged perpetrator. When asked why they failed to bring charges, 56 percent said that they did not want to be responsible for dismissing another student, while 61 percent did not think the perceived offense was serious enough to warrant an initiation.
There are two important conclusions to be drawn from this data. First, whatever the content of the Honor constitution, students believe that acts of dishonesty must meet a certain standard of seriousness in order to be considered honor offenses. And secondly, whatever our insistence on the single sanction, most students are unwilling to expel their peers for perceived acts of dishonesty.
In the face of such popular sentiments, any insistence on absolute standards of crime and punishment will push honor still further into the realm of Jeffersonian mythology. And if such a future is acceptable to those who view honor with misty eyed reverence, it is regrettable to those who view it as a living system with real life benefits for those who embrace it. If honor is to be more than an historical curiosity, it must accommodate the social norms of modern students just as it did those of its founding generation.
The first step is to reconsider the single sanction, which calls for the expulsion of every student convicted of an honor offense. In an ideal world, the University could dismiss all liars, cheaters and stealers who dared violate the community of trust. But in the real world, many students simply do not believe that minor acts of dishonesty warrant a student's expulsion from the Academical Village. In order to make the system accessible to the majority of students who cannot abide such draconian punishments, Honor must consider a range of penalties short of expulsion.
Inherent in a multiple sanction system is Honor's second concession to reality, the continuing consideration of seriousness in all cases. Petty thefts and silly scams are distasteful and dishonest, but they cannot be punished as honor offenses when so many students are willing to permit them. The open tolerance of low-level offenses may be traumatic for a system that has long failed to recognize degrees of dishonesty, but the simple fact is that our honor system already leads most students to tolerate the offenses they witness.
An honor system that depends on student participation can only survive to the extent that it reflects students' nuanced perceptions of crime and punishment. And while a system of stark morality is well suited to the communication of values, it is poorly suited to the real-life maintenance of a community of trust. In a society that is increasingly fearful of moral absolutes, Honor has two choices: It can become a complex, flexible system that reflects the values of today's student body, or it can fade into the dusty world of educational antiquity.
(Alec Solotorovsky's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at asolotorovsky@cavalierdaily.com.)
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