I’m no stranger to being told what to do. Throughout my childhood, a variety of teachers and family members taught me to respect my elders, to treat others the way I want to be treated and to abide by a variety of other mantras from over a decade of operant conditioning — all of which successfully engineered my moral compass into that of a “proper” American citizen. In other words, my childhood was relatively normal.
I came to the University excited to end this ongoing indoctrination of values, to be treated more as a curious intellectual than a developing citizen, but the system into which I entered wound up being exactly the opposite: a “student self-governed” body regulated by the honor code — perhaps the most infamous and rigid self-imposed psychological pressure in the entire country. Seeing as we’ll soon be voting on reforming the honor system, I thought I would share what I think of it as a whole.
Our “community of trust” was, and continues to be, devised by an inherent distrust of members of our community; if you don’t conform to the idea of being “honorable,” then you don’t deserve teachers, classrooms, books or any of the opportunities that arise from a college education. This notion is fair, but only if we define acceptable behavior correctly, which the Honor Committee has largely failed to do with regard to the idea of “cheating.”
In my view, people don’t cheat because they lack “honor;” they cheat because our system of education encourages them to do so. When measures of our intelligence are whittled down into arbitrary letters and numbers, human nature compels us to do anything in our power to stamp the most precious symbol onto our résumés. In a previous article, I discussed the negatives of our traditional, GPA-based system, in which I argued college students have grown “apathetic toward true intellectual expansion,” corrupted by career prospects that encourage them to focus more on test scores than knowledge itself. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni expressed a similar sentiment in a column from last year, arguing it is “impossible to put a dollar value on a nimble, adaptable intellect.”
Bruni and I would agree that learning has become a potential side effect — not the goal — of a traditional college classroom. As teachers lecture to seas of faceless Facebook addicts, they disregard students’ capacities as intelligent human beings, weeding out those who don’t care (i.e., the Facebook addicts, who often should be weeded out), but also discouraging those who struggle to conform to our antiquated system of learning. Current college students, who are often not-so-fondly referred to as “millennials,” are among the first to grow up in a society where simple information can appear at the whim of our fingertips, where collaboration is quick, constant and immensely efficient. Naturally, when our classrooms transport us 50 years into the past, we feel uncomfortable and intellectually repressed, with the answers to test questions burning holes in our pockets and the true synthesis of ideas completely forgotten.
It is easy to impart blame on students for failing to abide by the golden rule of the traditional classroom. The Honor Committee seems intent on doing so, and its representatives are quick to mention fewer people cheat in our “community of trust” than at other universities. This may be true, but I take issue with our supposed pinnacle of student self-governance when it merely reaffirms the precedents of the past 200 years in this school’s history. The honor code is antiquated. It is no longer an idealistic, Jeffersonian view of what an appropriate college campus should look like, but a subtle indication of insecurity about the way our students are being manufactured. Instead of pushing for real change, the Honor Committee has accepted that our community is entirely distant from true education, defining “honor” as a measurement of the degree to which students are consumed by career goals rather than knowledge.
Maybe it is idealistic to say, but shouldn’t “student self-governance” imply regulation that supports the rights and desires of University students, not those of 19th-century collegiate administrators? If the Honor Committee actually wanted a “community of trust,” it would strive to repress the cutthroat, competitive pressures that have completely poisoned the educational experience. If the Honor Committee governed as a partner in learning rather than a disapproving parent, its elected officials would break down the barriers to intellectual expansion rather than build them up. And, if our social contract truly encouraged student development, it would push administrators to adapt to the modern accessibility of information rather than pull the students back to a less productive past.
Above all, the honor code should represent what the students want, and if it fails to do so, then it shouldn’t exist. I don’t need psychological pressure to understand morals anymore — now I just want to learn.
Ryan Gorman is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at r.gorman@cavalierdaily.com.
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