Unfortuantely, the issue of Single Sanction reform never seems to seize the student body for too long before it fades. When a person is ejected from the Semester at Sea program and left in Greece, or when a fourth-year student is convicted in his final semester, the publicity generated by these sensational cases raises the question of whether the Single Sanction is too extreme a punishment to be administered in every instance of alleged Honor violations.
I believe it is. That is why I am advocating for the Single Sanction to be abolished and replaced with a set of rational, responsive penalties for lying, cheating, and stealing based on the nature of the offense. It is ludicrous to think that a zero-tolerance policy for academic fraud will deter Honor violations, as not all Honor offenses are created equal.
It is disingenuous to establish a moral equivalency between wanton and intentional acts of plagiarism or answer-copying versus the inadvertent omission of a citation in a ten-page research paper. I think the Honor Committee has the yearlong responsibility to reform the Single Sanction to make Honor rational and flexible, rather than simply talk about the need to improve relations with the student body and make the Honor System more transparent.
The Committee often emphasizes the need for dialogue with the University community, believing that if only students were more "educated" about the Honor System, there would be fewer people arraigned on Honor charges. That kind of attitude is minimally effective at best and completely misguided at worst. Those students who are determined to cheat and think they will get away with it will, notwithstanding any amount of outreach, cheat. I have no reservations about expelling those students who think that the standards of academic integrity do not apply to them.
However, for the students who stand accused of Honor offenses on grounds of laxity in their academic conduct, it is also questionable whether "education" about the Honor System would benefit them. What message does the current zero-tolerance policy send to someone who knows how to reference sources in a research paper, but may have carelessly omitted a single citation and is now facing Honor charges? Does it say that second chances are out of the question, and that all mistakes warrant punishment, rather than a chance to redeem oneself?
I see no reason why a student whose offense is not an overwhelming affront to our school's academic integrity (what is now called "non-trivial") should face only two options after being brought to trial and receiving due process: acquittal or the maximum punishment possible. Let's establish a range of sanctions that a jury can recommend to punish Honor offenses - perhaps including outright expulsion, failing the class in which the offense was committed, or failing the assignment in question.
One of the characteristics of honorable behavior is to show forbearance and leniency in instances where offenses are relatively minor and where the accused student is contrite. Due to the nature of the Single Sanction, if a student is brought to trial for an Honor offense, the incentive is for the student to prove his innocence to avoid expulsion, even if he realizes in retrospect that an Honor violation occurred. If the student could instead admit guilt in exchange for a lesser sanction, I feel that the Honor System would become less of an inflexible and unforgiving aspect of University life.\nLast year, when the student body voted on a referendum to reform the Honor System, the Committee claimed to be sympathetic to the desire to end the one-size-fits-all penalty while simultaneously seeing its members lobby heavily against the initiative. This concerted effort - including the claim that the proposed policy would allow a student to be arraigned on Honor charges for stealing her roommate's Pop Tart - served to defeat needed changes to the University's peculiar institution.
I do not call into question the various benefits that accrue from having an Honor System, and I fully support punishing academic fraud when it surfaces in order to protect the integrity of the University's reputation. But even at this tradition-laden institution, not all practices can resist change forever, and the Single Sanction is one that must be reformed as soon as possible.
Michael Karlik is a candidate for the position of Honor Committee representative for the College of Arts & Sciences.
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