These past weeks you may have noticed two frazzled students running around Grounds, thrusting clipboards into peoples’ laps. As third-year College students Jaeyoon Park and Ian Robertson have come to realize, it takes this sort of massive, shameless thrust to get people engaged with the honor system — or more appropriately put: our “community of rust” (to quote myself). However, the most recent issue surrounding the system seems to stem not from student apathy, but from a select few who have been proactively inhibiting others' ability to address the first.
Last Monday second-year Richard Yoder published a rebuttal to Park and Robertson’s campaign entitled “The moral failures of the honor referenda.” To recap, the referenda detail three basic changes that collectively aim to encourage productive, inclusive conversation about the honor system. With student discontent toward the system on the rise, it would seem appropriate to take measures to bridge the growing gap between the student body and the Honor Committee. Just a few weeks ago a team of Curry School graduate students published comprehensive data that clearly demonstrate this divide. Researchers concluded that, “additional future research [would] help the Committee better gauge student engagement with honor” and that “it would be beneficial to compare this study to one at a school with a multi-sanction honor system, as many University respondents felt the single sanction was too harsh.”
Undoubtedly, Yoder cares deeply about the integrity of our honor system, at least enough to publish an article and launch a “Vote No” campaign against the proposed changes. Barring potentially problematic notions of integrity, I respect his effort and the intentions governing it. But I think he could have tried a little harder to engage the substantive content of the referenda and the critical conversation that undoubtedly shadows the Committee. Plenty of thoughtful pieces on the topic have recently been published, such as here, here, here and here. And yet Yoder touches on none of them. He admonishes the campaigners for threatening to undermine nearly two centuries of system sanctity with their “post-modern moral philosophy.” But to displace the dedicated and well-meaning efforts of your peers with a shallow, three-word slap in the face is to jump aboard the very train of thoughtlessness Park and Robertson are striving to derail. After all, the sweeping assumption that postmodernism is inherently problematic is problematic in and of itself.
Although the referenda do not directly propose a multi-sanction model, to join the conversation is to realize that single sanction serves as a disincentive in encouraging students to honor the system. After all, the fates of accused cheaters and liars should not be determined by a moral code that was instituted following the slaughter of a professor back in 1840. Such punishment more accurately reflects a severe attitude necessitated during the earliest stages of our institution’s development, and not the true interests of our current community. As my fellow columnist Sawan Patel argues, how can any community of trust maintain a moral truth that upholds and acknowledges past realities at the expense of the present? The referenda serve to remind us that when we abstract truth from the will of the student body, we often forget that truth — when stretched over time — takes on new meanings.
I would hope Yoder understands this apparent difference between preserved moral ideals and practical cultural realities. He, along with current members of the Honor Committee, claims to uphold a certain truth that simply cannot be conflated with that of the past. To ignore the facts of past circumstances is to do a disservice to our current community, which may be more inclined to identify with “postmodern moralities” than antiquated conceptions of a just order. One such morality is certainly more sensitive to different ideas of truth as conceived by people of different cultural backgrounds. University alumna Chelsea Jack explores this point in her undergraduate thesis “Pursuing the Truth: An Ethnographic Analysis of the Honor System at the University of Virginia.” Comparatively, the idea that a select few students are somehow “keepers of the truth” seems inappropriate at best.
A famous Christian theologian once said that “a realist conception of human nature should be made the servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges.” Yoder’s apparent unwillingness to explore these ideas suggests he champions an antithetical philosophy, namely one that promotes a form of moral absolutism that goes against our inclination to seek meaningful change through careful, considerate argument. Progressive justice is not guided by our adherence to conventional moral principles, but rather by our healthy questioning of them. If we fail to question even our most treasured traditions, then the delivery of justice through the current honor apparatus could very well transmute into another “unjust privilege” — one bestowed to certain students at the expense of others. Yoder misses the point that honor will inevitably be a resume-building means for any member who sticks around for a mere several years. That’s okay. The real question is — how perverse do we want that privilege to be?
Clearly the honor system, as is, needs tweaking. We can at least begin by constructing a cooperative, meaningful platform for enabling that discussion. With their proposed referenda, Park and Robertson have made an admirable motion to take us in this direction. And yet Yoder resists without once acknowledging the strong justification for this move. A productive system of honor is one that acknowledges the voices of the living, not one that honors the dwindling ideals of the dead.
Will Evans is an Opinion Columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at w.evans@cavalierdaily.com.
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