Sunday night marked the third consecutive Honor Committee meeting at which the body discussed informed retraction legislation, which would give students accused of honor violations an opportunity to admit guilt and accept suspension rather than expulsion. There are several flaws to the proposal, and it may not ultimately be workable within the current framework of the honor system. Yet it offers a starting point for discussion about reform to the Committee's current single sanction policy, which has become an object of significant criticism from students and faculty in recent years.
It is disappointing, therefore, that only one student chose to speak at Sunday night's Community Concerns portion of the Committee meeting.
In fact, excluding the three senior honor counsels who spoke at the previous meeting, a grand total of two students from outside the Committee apparatus have made their opinions known during the Community Concerns segments held since the introduction of informed retraction legislation. This indicates that the Committee and the honor system as a whole are much closer to becoming irrelevant than might previously have been thought.
It has been well known that students are dissatisfied with the system's present state since a 2008 survey found that 85 percent of respondents who witnessed honor offenses did not report them to the Committee. But now that students are not even speaking up about a proposal meant to reform the very aspect of the honor system - single sanction - that has disenchanted so many of them, it seems they have opted to excuse themselves quietly from participating in the system rather than seeking to restore its fairness and effectiveness. Thus, if the Committee hopes to maintain the best qualities of a student-run honor system then it must act urgently to find a way to solicit student feedback about informed retraction, single sanction and the numerous other aspects of the system that necessitate improvement.
Fortunately, at least a few Committee members seem to recognize the honor system's present crisis and are hoping to use informed retraction as a way to re-engage the student body. "There is some sort of disconnect with what we do up here on the fourth floor [of Newcomb Hall] and what's going on in the larger community," Committee Chair Ann Marie McKenzie said Sunday night after noting that since January there have been only 30 honor cases initiated among a student body of more than 16,000 individuals. She had said previously that the Committee's goal in considering informed retraction legislation is not merely to pursue a potential procedural change but also to find out "what the [Committee] can do to make itself more relevant to the student body."
Vice Chair for Investigations Liz Rosenberg also has grasped that it is of paramount importance for the Committee to coax students back into both participating in the honor system and determining its future structure. "We are representing a constituency that voted us into office," she said. "We need to seriously think about going out into the community and talking about whether or not the student body wants this."
The challenge facing the Committee lies in the fact that the student body already is severely disillusioned with the honor system, as evidenced by the 2008 survey and the Committee's light caseload. As a result, it is insufficient merely to offer avenues for comment such as the Community Concerns segment of the Committee meetings since students will not take advantage of these opportunities on their own.
Rather, the Committee must find more active ways to involve students in the process of reforming its procedures and principles. Its other options - ignoring the statistics that show students' lack of faith in the system, as well as the evidence from its Community Concerns sessions that reveals the extent of student apathy - condemn the honor system to a future in which such reforms truly will be of no interest to students since they will have abandoned the system entirely.
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