WE SWING the doors open every Sunday night. And noone comes.
About five minutes before every Honor Committee meeting, I get the feeling that someone is going to walk in and sit down. Someone with an idea, a question, an opinion, maybe even an angry rant. But then we start and it's just the Committee and a Cavalier Daily writer (who, admittedly, has to be there given that she covers honor).
Honor meetings are always open to the public and they always happen on Sunday nights in the trial room on the fourth floor of Newcomb Hall.
One of the chief criticisms that I have heard about Honor stems from the location of our offices. Honor "huddles inside Newcomb Hall." Who knows what we're up to in there! Within our Fortress of Solitude (and Honor), we might regularly bow down to pray at a shrine to the single sanction, for all the rest of the University knows.
For an organization that involves almost 200 students, the actual body of honor remains almost invisible, bound to confidentiality by federal law and exiled into obscurity by the architecture of Newcomb Hall.
We hope to address these transparency issues this Sunday evening. Rather than hold our meeting in Newcomb Hall, we will be in the Dome Room of the Rotunda, which holds up to 150 people and offers comfortable leather chairs for any visitors.
This is an experiment for us, but one that comes at a critical point in the semester, when case reports have begun to filter into the office after midterms, and it becomes harder to focus on issues outside of case processing. We have to maintain a balance between the adjudication of cases and the commitment to visibility that many of the elected Committee members promised during their campaigns in March.
Friends and faculty alike have expressed their desire that honor engage in a more open dialogue, and this meeting represents the first big effort to respond to their request. In my four years at the University, it marks the first widely publicized opportunity for students to speak directly with their honor representatives.
It represents an important step toward more effectively engaging in conversations with the University community as we look to address questions about honor's place at the University. Although it seems that we consciously hide behind the walls of Newcomb Hall, we want to be more open about our processes and our debates. For students and faculty in the University community who have concerns and questions about honor, faculty and students alike, this is both an invitation and a challenge to speak openly in public about the issues.
In a Sept. 18 Cavalier Daily Opinion column "Hammurabi's Code for a New Age," Marta Cook writes, "Honor has morphed into a system buttressed by a fringe group of ideologues rather than a conduit for moral accountability among students."
I aim to prove this point wrong at the meeting. The Committee is not a deranged group of single sanction defenders with accusatory stares fixed on the student body and fingers pointed toward a sign marked "Exit." When it comes down to it, we are just students trying to engage our friends in meaningful discussions about an ideal that has been central to the University for more than 150 years.
At this meeting, the executive committee will introduce itself, and each member will give a summary of his or her responsibilities. They will provide an update of the previous two weeks (we did not meet this past Sunday due to the reading day). The five subcommittee chairs will then provide similar synopses and take questions from other members.
The Committee has chosen to address four concerns this year with its subcommittees: academic integrity, the single sanction, community relations, diversity and faculty relations. The Diversity and Faculty Relations subcommittees are standing subcommittees, while the remaining three grew out of perceived issues facing honor this year.
In addition, Vice Chair for Education Kendall Fox will kick off the publicity push about conscientious retractions. This campaign, conceived in response to general confusion about what constitutes a "good-faith" and "complete" conscientious retraction, aims to inform the student body about the process and purpose of filing a retraction with the Honor Committee.
Our meetings are not held according to strict parliamentary procedures; they are not overly formal, and they generally last about an hour. At the conclusion of the meeting this week, we will have an extended period of question and answer in place of the community concerns portion of the meeting.
Cook writes, "Honor still has a place at the University, but it must respond to the community it professes to serve."
I agree. And I respond with this invitation. Come Sunday night at 7:30. We're ready to talk.
A-J Aronstein is vice chair for community relations on the Honor Committee. He is a fourth year in the College.
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