AS MANY returning students remember, it was not too long ago that the University acquired the academic rights to the Semester at Sea (SAS) program. There was a lot of discussion about the wisdom of this decision, and many expressed concern that the academic experience one has here at the University could not be replicated aboard a ship thousands of miles from Charlottesville.
Up on the fourth floor of Newcomb, the Honor Committee simultaneously began to consider the logistics of implementing the University's honor system on board the ship, a system that would have to retain its philosophy but be modified in process.
The questions that the Committee had to answer were numerous: What would happen if an SAS student who had a different academic home institution committed an Honor offense on board the ship? With our student investigators thousands of miles away in Charlottesville, who would investigate alleged offenses? But most importantly, would students and faculty who came from different universities support the honor system and see it as something that they wanted to flourish?
The Honor Committee spent a good deal of time thinking about these questions and ultimately came up with a solution in tandem with the University's academic administration and the ship's administration, headed up by the Institute for Shipboard Education. What we ultimately came up with was a modified version of our own honor case processes: The administration would conduct the investigation after going through training with a representative from the Honor Committee, and the results of their investigation would be sent back to Charlottesville where University students would compose both the Investigative Panels and, if necessary, the trial panels.
This solution, which had been created to respond to the specific challenges of the SAS program, actually made so much sense that we ultimately modified our Investigative Panel procedures back here in Charlottesville to mimic those for SAS, a decision which has already seemed to improve the speed and rigor of our investigations processes.
At the beginning of this summer, I was fortunate enough to get to visit the SAS Summer 2007 voyage on behalf of the Honor Committee. The purpose of my visit was two-fold: first, to give the administration, faculty, and students on board the ship orientations on the honor system, and second, to get a sense of the culture on board the ship, including the participants' level of support for the system. There had been some resistance to the honor system on previous voyages from both members of the faculty and students, so it seemed I had my work cut out for me.
The most difficult problem was reconciling the fact that the SAS program was designed to differ from a traditional on-Grounds education. Yet the more I thought about SAS, the more it made me realize that this discrepancy was only skin deep. In fact, the SAS program presented an environment much more akin to Thomas Jefferson's original envisioning of the Academical Village than anything else I could imagine.
For a period of several months, the students would be taking classes, eating, traveling, and living with their professors. As a result, the classroom was simply one of many forums where they would be learning new things. Their education would be a truly international one, where students would not just study a foreign country, but actually get the opportunity to visit it.
Finally, since access to the ship was limited, they would be doing this in an environment where everyone had agreed to support the Honor system -- they would truly be living in a community of trust.
The administration, faculty and students on board the ship who I got a chance to talk to really took this idea of a community of trust to heart and embraced the honor system just as we have back here in Charlottesville. Furthermore, it renewed within me my support for the system, as I was able to see once again the timeless and universal relevance of the standards it sets for its adherents.
Unfortunately, my time on board the ship was limited, and within a week and a half my journey had to come to a close. Yet from the discussions I have had with the voyage's academic dean, Professor David Gies, and University students who took classes with the program, that spirit which we hold to be so important to the University experience lived on. I hope the program continues to flourish and provide us with a substantive addition to the original Academical Village.
Ben Cooper is a Cavalier Daily contributing writer. He is the Chair of the Honor Committee.
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