IN THE past year, I have tried to be very vocal about this issue, and to many of you, it comes as no surprise when I write here that I believe the single sanction is wrong. I didn't feel that way when I entered the University.This is a belief I have developed over three years of involvement with the honor system. As counsel, I worked advocating the cases of professors and students in many honor trials. Now as a member of the Honor Committee, I am pursuing sanction reform.
The most compelling force driving my opposition to the single sanction is the personal experience I've had with accused students. As counsel, my role was at times to prosecute and at times to defend them. I found the students to be kind, intelligent and ambitious. They were proud, ashamed, apologetic and confused. They were very reasonable, and very normal, and truly devastated.
The central principle of the single-sanction honor system is that someone who commits one mistake is a dishonorable person and would forever contaminate a community of trust. But do we truly believe that a person guilty of a single honor offense is devoid of all personal integrity? From my experience with these students, I can say with the most sincere conviction that this view is wrong.
It is so disappointing to me that in this community, where we all come to get a liberal education and to grow up together, that struggling students are cast away. There is great opportunity to learn from a mistake. I would have much more respect for an institution that cared to educate a guilty student through some rehabilitative mechanism.Here we have a special opportunity to offer support and guidance, and to instill stronger ethics in our community members. Instead the single sanction is exclusive, and it violates the ultimate shared value of this community -- education.
To engage with the severity of the single sanction for just a moment, consider this: an honor charge has been brought against you. After six months of hellish uncertainty, you lose your credits. You lose your major, you won't walk the Lawn, you won't get your college degree. Athletes, you'll lose your scholarships. International students, if you're found guilty, you'll lose your scholarship and you'll be sent home. Do you have the money, do you have the VISA, do you have the spirit to start again?
I have seen students expelled and degrees revoked for one answer on a quiz originally worth 10 percent of the course grade. I have known students permanently expelled for working together on a homework assignment worth 2 percent of the final grade. I've known athletes, struggling under time constraints and GPA requirements, who made the wrong judgment call. I've seen international students surprised to know that what they've done is wrong. I've seen continuing education students with children of their own stand before the jury with tears in their eyes, and beg their peers to consider how the single sanction would change their whole lives.
To say the single sanction is the keystone to a culture of high standards is a joke. High standards are not preserved when students lie their way through an extensive trial process and then rejoin the community without penalty. A community of trust is never protected when offenses are ignored. This is the situation we have now. But high standards can be fostered if honor is appreciated and embraced. High standards of honor need again to be pushed to the fore of this community's ideals. But whatever push there is will not succeed if people look upon the sanction as unfair and are unwilling to enforce it.
The tradition that matters is the tradition of honor, not the tradition of the single sanction. It is arrogant and naïve to claim that students entering the University today are intrinsically more honorable than students at comparable universities. But here at U.Va., the honor system and its 160 years of proud tradition help establish a culture of honorable actions. A strong culture sets high standards and encourages our ethical growth. It enhances interactions among students and between students and faculty, and forms an exceptional community here. As such, honor at the University is a treasure to be guarded.I hope the single sanction debate will encourage students to claim a stake in the preservation of U.Va. honor. And I hope good ethics and reason will lead students to support sanction reform.
Sara Page is a fourth-year College student, an elected member of the Honor Committee and chair of the Committee's ad hoc Sanction Reform Committee.
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