The Case to Abolish Honor
A version of this essay originally appeared in the Spring 2019 edition of the Virginia Review of Politics Magazine.
Behind the Doric columns of Pavilion X, there is a commemorative plaque pressed into the sidewalk that reads:
COMMEMORATING 150 YEARS THE HONOR SYSTEM INITIATED BY STUDENTS AND FACULTY TO FORM A COMMUNITY OF TRUST AND INTEGRITY. 1842-1992
The plaque was placed here to root the Honor System in the murder of Professor John A.G. Davis. Davis was a UVa professor of law from 1830-1840 and resided in Pavilion X until his death at the hands of a masked student, who shot him on the Lawn after a confrontation. Distraught by his death, students created a system to hold themselves to a higher standard. “The student body’s response to the murder of Davis,” according to the library of the School of Law’s profile of him, “contributed to the creation of the Honor system.” In the wake of his death, the Honor System arose, binding the student community in trust.
This story is told in many UVa institutions, even though recent historical research suggests it is not true. Davis was murdered by a student, but the incident did not spur the creation of the Honor System. In an article published in the Spring 2008 edition of Virginia Magazine, historian Coy Barefoot notes, “A close reading of the faculty minutes [between 1840 and 1842], in addition to student letters and diaries, does not reveal any connection between the murder and the Honor Code’s inception (except that Davis’ replacement proposed the pledge).” Barefoot concludes that the faculty resolution passed in 1842 requiring an Honor pledge on assignments was not related to the Davis shooting, and that a permanent Honor Committee run by student presidents of the constituent schools of the University did not form until 1912.
If Honor’s own history can be so convincingly fabricated, other myths about the system undoubtedly persist. Indeed, this historic record contradicts what Honor (and multiple other UVa resources) pretends is its past. The “History” tab on Honor’s web page claims that after Davis’s murder, “Both students and faculty were shocked by this incident and the need to resolve the conflict became gravely apparent.” Two years later, Professor Tucker introduced a resolution that mandated students to sign a pledge on their exams: that they “derived no assistance during the time of this examination from any source whatsoever.” Apparently, this new Honor code was meant to be a “gesture of confidence” in students, and eventually they “unexpectedly assumed responsibility for the protection of this privilege.” Honor concludes with the following misleading statement: “Consequently, for 170 years the System has been completely student-run.” This statement contains two lies. The first is that students assumed responsibility for this system as a consequence of the Honor code’s introduction and the second is the system being exclusively run by students, although this was not the case until 1912. Honor makes these assertions despite an embedded video narrated by Barefoot at the top of its “History” page. In it, he dismisses the connection between Davis’s murder and the advent of Honor, reasoning that “the historic record tells a different story.” Barefoot’s piece also reveals that the resolution proposed by Tucker was not meant to be a “gesture of confidence” in students as Honor suggests. In fact, it was a response to rampant cheating. Honor has recently taken steps to reflect its true history, as its Bicentennial Report features a “History” section with an article called “Evolution” authored by Honor Representative Derrick Wang, who states:
While no historical evidence exists that the shooting of John A.G. Davis inspired Henry St. George Tucker to create the Honor Pledge, this incident marked a key turning point in relations between faculty and students, as well as the beginning of a more formal honor culture at the University.
The “honor culture” Wang refers to “was closely tied to the ideal of the Southern gentleman, as the student body consisted mainly of wealthy white men from Southern gentility.” It was this honor culture to which professors appealed in a desperate bid to curb collegiate perfidy. The debunking of this rumor is well overdue, and it would behoove Honor to correct the falsehoods on its website. Lying, after all, is an Honor offense.
In the years since these events, Honor has enjoyed a remarkable evolution, from a last-ditch effort to corral an entitled Southern aristocracy to a supposedly universal standard of conduct. Now, it faces new scrutiny, which Honor pledges it is equipped to address. Plagued by systemic issues, from inaccessibility, racial bias, elitism, lack of accountability, and more, Honor appears ill-equipped to effectuate necessary change. This is because the only appropriate remedy is abolition of the system, not reform.
The fantasy that Davis’s murder spurred the creation of Honor resembles other fictions Honor spins about itself: among them, that student self-governance is an ideal system. Findings from the Honor Audit Commission (HAC), released by Honor in February of 2018 after a year-long study, illustrate that several of Honor’s practices are unpopular in the University community. HAC found Honor’s most pressing problem is the Single Sanction, which mandates expulsion for students found guilty of an Honor offense by their peers. The following graphs from HAC, which feature student views on the Single Sanction, deterrents of reporting expressed by faculty and students, and faculty views concerning Honor, respectively, illustrate the community’s tenuous faith in the system.
21% of faculty cite the Single Sanction as their largest deterrent in reporting an Honor offense, and an additional 22% reference the time Honor takes to adjudicate an offense as a primary deterrent. HAC’s report also lists in its summary of findings that 75% of faculty agree “the sanction for an Honor offense should vary based on the significance of the offense.” Beyond divided views of the system, HAC says that “despite most faculty have [sic] an opinion about Honor, our survey results indicate a general lack of knowledge about the Honor System among the faculty.” According to HAC’s data, the Honor System’s structure deters familiar parties from filing reports, since the second set of graphs shows nearly a third of students say a “personal relationship” deters them from doing so. That 45% of students admitted the Single Sanction alone discouraged them from filing an Honor report is significant, as it is a notable increase from a survey conducted in 2012 that found the Single Sanction deterred 36% of students from reporting an Honor offense. The available evidence shows that support for multiple sanctions is growing. Students came close to effectuating this vision in 2016, when 58.88% of voters approved a referendum to amend the Honor constitution to allow a multi-sanction system, just shy of the 60% threshold required for amendments.
A report about an alleged Honor offense, filed by a member of the University community, begins the Honor process, the full path from report to trial. An Honor offense can be avoided if one submits a Conscientious Retraction, where a student admits to an Honor offense before coming under suspicion. If a student chooses not to file a CR, they will be contacted if an Honor report is filed against them. After a first contact, the initial interview with the reporter is completed where the offense is detailed. Once Honor receives a report, the student under suspicion of an Honor offense is contacted within 24 hours. A student can then choose from three options. If the student feels they have a “medical or mental disorder that contributed to the commission of an Honor offense,” they can file a Contributory Health Impairment (previously called Contributory Mental Disorder, or “CMD”). If accepted by a panel of psychologists and the Dean of Students, a student’s Honor offense can be dismissed. If rejected, a student still has an option to submit an Informed Retraction (IR) or undergo a full investigation. After the first contact, the student under suspicion is provided a packet that reviews the details of the alleged offense, and the student is given one week to decide whether to take an IR from the information compiled in the report. If the student foregoes the IR, an Honor investigation proceeds, where an investigative panel, or “I-Panel” forms. This I-Panel can drop the alleged Honor offense if the standard “more likely than not” is not met. If this standard is satisfied, then the student is accused of an Honor offense, and the case proceeds to an Honor trial. The below helpful chart on page 20 of HAC illustrates the various paths an Honor case could take.
Members of the Honor Committee are quick to tout the IR in response to concerns about the Single Sanction. Implemented in 2013 and recently amended in 2018, the IR allows students to admit guilt for one or more Honor offenses in exchange for a two-semester leave of absence from the University. Though this structure could plausibly cause a plea-deal problem, wherein innocent students afraid of facing trial take the IR, the evidence indicates otherwise. Charlotte McClintock, who chaired the Assessment and Data Management Working Group for the Bicentennial Report, stated in a February 20, 2019 interview with the Cavalier Daily, “We actually see that the proportion of students who [face] some type of sanction ... relative to students who face no sanction ... has actually stayed relatively constant [since the IR’s introduction].” Therefore, the IR is not being treated as a plea system in most cases. If it were, the proportion of students facing a sanction would rise, which would be the natural consequence of students pleading guilty to offenses they did not commit. For those who do not take an IR, a grueling trial most likely awaits.
An Honor hearing reflects the many responsibilities of defendants in criminal trials — but none of their privileges. Honor panels use the reasonable doubt standard for two criteria: four fifths of the jurors vote that act and knowledge were present, while a simple majority votes that the offense was significant. According to the Executive Vice President & Provost “The Honor System and Faculty” web page, an Act is defined by the question: “Was an act of lying, cheating, or stealing committed?”; Knowledge is defined as, “did the student know, or should a reasonable University of Virginia student have known, that the act in question was or could have been considered lying, cheating, or stealing? (Ignorance of the scope of the Honor System is not considered a defense.)”; and Significance is defined as, “Would open toleration of the act in question be inconsistent with the Community of Trust?”
The Community of Trust itself is a nebulous idea, and applications of it are prone to abuse. Honor’s website defines the “Community of Trust” as a pursuit where students:
Seek to conduct ourselves with integrity, respecting the work and property of our fellow students and the wisdom of our professors. We aim to cultivate habits that will inform our work habits long after we graduate; to assume the best in each other; and to hold fast to notions of right and wrong, even when doing so comes at personal cost. Through this collective effort, our ultimate end is to live and work in a Community of Trust, where honesty and mutual respect are the baseline for all our interactions and academic endeavors.
In the absence of a concrete definition for the “Community of Trust,” panelists interpret its meaning in each case when determining significance. Making matters worse, Honor trials do not operate off of precedent. The Community of Trust necessarily functions as a Rorschach test for panelists, who are guided through their deliberations by the chair of the trial. Juries in a criminal justice system must unanimously concur in order to convict. Honor juries, on the other hand, can convict an accused for violating a subjective standard with a simple majority. When errors in a trial arise, few steps can be taken to correct them since very little holds Honor accountable. The accused typically elect to make trials secret before they commence, but this makes public accountability nearly impossible when trials are poorly conducted. Students are able to appeal their ruling to a panel consisting of members of Honor. These students are not removed from the system’s biases, though they possess the sole power to overturn or affirm a conviction. All involved with the process, including students randomly selected to be part of a panel, are warned that disclosure of any elements of the process can constitute an Article 11 University Judiciary Committee offense. This makes it nearly impossible to publicly discuss details gone awry to anyone besides Honor.
Democratic accountability hardly functions in response. In the University-wide election in March of 2019, just under 13% of students voted. In this election, voters also approved an amendment that permits the Committee to remove its members by a four-fifths vote. Representatives can be recalled as well, but removal by recall election, where ten percent of a school signs a petition to remove an officer, is nearly impossible to achieve. According to HAC, approximately 78% of UVa students do not know who their Honor representative is.
The system’s distance from students exacerbates the problem, as an enduring critique of Honor is its elite culture. It enjoys a series of privileges, as representatives such as the Chair of Honor serve on the Lawn selection committee, and indeed, according to the Office of the Dean of Students, “Room 37 West is assigned to a student selected by the Honor Committee and is traditionally the Chair of the Honor Committee.”10 Honor is also an Agency Organization, meaning it performs functions that would otherwise fall under the University’s purview, granting access to administrative resources. These privileges make Honor an elite group that enjoys relatively unparalleled prominence at the University. This also makes Honor seem out of touch. As HAC asserts, “There is a sense that the Honor System is not representative of the entire student body” that leads many students to “feel disconnected from these processes,” which in turn “feeds into the narrative that Honor is elitist.” Honor attempts to rectify this problem with greater outreach to students, CIOs, and other organizations. But this outreach does not diminish the apathy towards Honor that abounds in the community, one that the UVa aristocracy frequently fails to acknowledge.
The UVa aristocracy encompasses a variety of institutions, ranging from student government (Student Council, Honor, the University Judiciary Committee) to leaders of incoming students (U-Guides, Orientation Leaders, University Programs Council). Due to the familiarity enjoyed between the students who comprise them, the orbits of these groups often overlap, creating a broader web of student influence that can ensnare those maneuvering it. This creates a clique-like culture within the student body, engendered by the existence of exclusive organizations. The University fosters these hierarchies through institutions like the Echols and Jefferson Scholar programs, as well as encouraging the existence of secret societies by allowing their symbols to vandalize various places around Grounds. Further still, there is a perverse incentive to join groups like Honor, particularly for students whose good intentions are clouded by higher ambitions. These ambitions manifest in desires for perks like a lawn room. For others, a recommendation letter, resume padding, or even an opportunity to attract the attention of secret societies. Like other student systems, lack of accountability and questions of elite, sometimes secret, student networks of power make the Community of Trust elusive.
HAC enjoyed other achievements beyond revealing multitudinous problems in the system and facilitating banal conversations about “refram[ing]” the Community of Trust. It inspired the release of one of Honor’s proudest publications: the Bicentennial Report.
On February 11 of 2019, the Honor Committee published its Bicentennial Report. It is the most comprehensive analysis Honor has ever conducted, complete with smooth web design and creative artwork. It begins with a message from Ory Streeter, the Chair of the Honor Committee at the time of the Report’s release. He notes that, “At times, our Bicentennial Report is celebratory, and at others, somber. But it is always honest. We are proud of our approach and look forward to engaging the community’s response.” Its harrowing tales of Honor trials and systemic issues is a testimony to the need for Honor’s abolition. Though the committee suggests nothing near as much.
The report’s most important section, labeled “Experiences,” describes cases of individual students who were either expelled, took an IR, or were found not guilty. Their stories illuminate the harms the Honor System reaps in the community. The first story concerns expulsion, entitled “Succisa Virescit,” Latin for, “That which gets cut down grows back stronger.” The Honor offense in question involved a 12-page capstone paper, where the professor:
noticing a formatting error in one of my citations, believed that my paper was too similar to a source I cited 10 times. She emailed to let me know she was turning my paper in to the Honor Committee. "I have to think this was intentional" she wrote, based solely on the fact that I was a third year student, had completed the required research courses for Psychology majors, and some phrases were "reshuffled."
The author (who submitted this piece anonymously) faced a traumatic experience. After being reported, she recalls:
Because of the timing of the semester, my case was on hold until the fall. The summer of 2008 was the hardest time in my life. I lost my hair. I couldn't eat or sleep. I developed kidney infections and panic attacks. I could not focus on my classes or friends or extracurricular activities. I seriously considered taking my own life. Quite frankly, I felt like I had no one to turn to at the University, and I began believing my professor’s words: I was an enormous disappointment.
Her trial did not make things better.
Two jurors fell asleep during my trial, and only one was removed. The Trial Chair rolled her eyes during my testimony. I was constantly interrupted while testifying. I was barred from presenting key evidence, including an email from the author I was accused of plagiarizing (for the record, he believed my errors were unintentional and he was given appropriate credit)... After nearly 3 hours of deliberations, the jury returned a guilty verdict.
Behold the efficacy of student self-governance. The Honor process humiliated this student, then inflicted cruel and unusual punishment. Summers between semesters allow students to take a break from stressful academic expectations and provide a window for professional experiences. Yet this student was beset by kidney infections, hair loss, panic attacks, and suicidal thoughts. How the Single Sanction advanced any interests of the community in excessively punishing this student remains to be seen. The University is aided when students are productive, correct their faults, and strive to never repeat them. The Single Sanction afforded this individual none of those opportunities.
She was eventually able to forge a path ahead for herself, transferring her credits to another school, graduating, and earning a master’s in higher education administration. She currently serves as a director overseeing reports of student conduct, where she is tasked with supervising the expulsion of students. “This past October marked 10 years since my Honor trial,” she wrote. “On that day, I got a tattoo: ‘Succisa Virescit’. While the scar will forever remain, I have emerged stronger. Others may not be as lucky.” If anything, this story shows that this student was redeemable and could clearly have been rehabilitated during her undergraduate career and allowed to reenter the community. Tales like these show how Honor’s retributive policies hinder the community, since they can expel students who commit forgivable faults.
The “Not Guilty” story in the report is somewhat more encouraging. It recounts the experience of Johnathan S. Perkins, an alum of the Law School. In 2011, Perkins was the victim of police harassment. He published the incident in the Law School’s newspaper to share his experience as a black student in a racist society, where he learned most students “were blithely unaware of the black experience and that many of them even harbored overt animus toward black people.” He notes that, “On more than one occasion, students and other members of the Charlottesville community openly and with impunity called my friend and me n-----s and other racial slurs.” After his story was published, Perkins was confronted by an FBI agent, who, with two University Police lieutenants, pressured him into recanting his statement. He relented. The University subsequently announced his recantation, and a wave of Honor reports were filed against him. Reflecting on Honor’s racially disproportionate reporting, he notes:
Unless one genuinely maintains the racist belief that minority and international students lie, cheat, and steal with 3-5 times more frequency than white or American students, then one is left with two explanations for the disparity. Minority students are monitored more closely and reported more frequently (known within Honor as “spotlighting”) and the violations by white American students are being overlooked, the reporting standards applied to them elevated (known within Honor as “dimming”).
This phenomenon Perkins identifies invites questions of accountability. Spotlighting and dimming are further examples of systemic racism within Honor. This includes Perkins’s panelists, who asked questions like, “Why didn’t you just tell the police to leave you alone?” and “Why would the police have stopped you, if you weren’t doing anything wrong?” The ensuing trial included testimony of UVa professor of law Kim Forde-Mazrui, an expert on racial justice. Perkins was subsequently acquitted. But he would not have been exonerated “without making certain that all those involved in the proceedings confronted their own racial biases as well as the historic racial tensions that persist in America’s institutional adjudicative processes.” Stories like these echo across the American legal system, where the burden is often placed on victims to reveal their judges’ own shortcomings. And Honor is no exception.
In the third story, an anonymous student recounts their experience taking an Informed Retraction. The only thing more painful than this story’s prose is the ceaseless privilege exhibited by its author. “Life is filled with shortcuts,” they begin, “[like the] urge to splurge on mouth-watering gruyère popovers rather than pushing through the 27th day of your 30-day cleanse” and “the temptation to rely on Google rather than our memory.” The shortcut in question occurred during “a typical UVA afternoon in the fall of 2017,” where, in room 120 of Monroe Hall, they sat “brain stumped, pencil in my clammy palm, under the surveillance of not only my professor, but also, the great founding fathers of the University of Virginia.” The author subsequently committed the student’s original sin: “like Eve sitting in front of the mouth-watering apple, I bit. I cheated off of my neighbors’ papers.”
Eventually, the author received a phone call, informing them that they were under investigation for an Honor offense and faced a decision: “Fight my case and risk expulsion, or make an Informed Retraction.” Seized with fear, the author took the latter. “Though absolutely frozen and barely able to think, my decision was easy. Informed Retraction it would be.” It is great the author found it so easy to leave the University for a year, when for others taking an IR means forfeiting important opportunities, foregoing a lease, and possibly returning to an unsafe home environment, among other obstacles.
The author enjoyed many financial privileges, inaccessible to many students, during their leave of absence. They:
Connected with Dr. Russell Grieger, the renown [sic] behavioral cognitive therapist and clinical psychologist who studied under Albert Ellis and served as an adjunct professor at UVa. Dr. Grieger became a savior from my demise and, more importantly, a mentor. With his help, I gained mental stability, improved my personal strength, and discovered a new passion for cognitive processing and mental health.
It is fortunate that this student received professional help from an expert, but such resources are out of reach for many. Low-income and middle-class students disproportionately suffer from the sanctions of Honor, which disrupt financial aid, loans, work schedules, job opportunities, and living accommodations. Besides gaining professional support, the author harnessed their network of connections, becoming a tutor, program coordinator, and leader for a program called Horizons Upward Bound. Whether they disclosed that they were on academic leave for cheating while preparing low-income students for future success in secondary education is unclear.
Near the end of their story, the author shares the epiphany that, “Each event in life is a dot. Good or bad, once the event occurs, it is over and the dot becomes one of many that have already occurred.” The statement is bizarre, but its purpose soon comes into focus as the author asserts, “The Informed Retraction allows students to transform a mistake into one of life’s many past dots rather than the final punctuation on an experience.” The author concludes with a solemn reflection of the system they found “so cool. So special” by stating “thanks to the Honor System at UVA, I possess an extreme readiness to return to the University.” Rebounding from a year off of school is difficult for most students to do, particularly those who come from middle and working class families. This experience, then, resonates only with those who enjoy the same privileges this author does.
Unless the author omitted something, the Honor System had nothing to do with their “extreme readiness” to return to the University. The growth this student experienced during their Honor leave of absence was the product of their privilege. But this story discloses far more about Honor’s publishers than the author, since they championed this experience as a defense of the IR. Those who take an IR must make amends with all “affected parties,” but this is about the only step towards rehabilitation that the IR takes. The IR is touted as a rehabilitative process, but this story shows how little effort Honor actually puts into it, suggesting that the system is still disposed to punish rather than to restore. That Honor’s officers are so out of touch, however, should not be surprising. On February 12, 2019, Honor Committee members Julia Batts and Lillie Lyon, who was recently selected as the Honor Committee’s chair for the 2019-2020 term, published an article in the Cavalier Daily entitled: “It’s Time to Celebrate Forgiveness By Listening to the Six Chapel Bells Ring.” In a vapid attempt at community outreach, the article’s subhead reads: “Considering the Informed Retraction is one of the most monumental aspects of the Honor System, celebrate its institution Thursday by listening to the Chapel bells ring.” Perhaps the author of the IR story was in attendance. Others who did not experience as smooth a time with an IR were likely not.
Honor’s sanctions are not only ineffectual; they are racially biased. According to the “Data” section of the Bicentennial Report, “On average, international students were 18 percentage points more likely to face some sort of sanction outcome than domestic students.” Since this can jeopardize the visas of international students, the stakes are exponentially high. The race of those reported to Honor is unknown for 29% of cases, but for statistics that are known:
White students make up 29.7 percent of students reported to Honor, but were 58 percent of all enrolled UVA students in 2017. Asian students are significantly over-represented among students reported to Honor relative to their representation at the University. Asian students constitute at least 27.1 percent of reported students but are 12 percent of the UVA domestic student population (for whom race is identified by the IPEDS standards), a difference of 15.1 percentage points. Black students are over-represented by 2.7 percentage points, at 8.7 percent of reported students and 6 percent of UVA students. Hispanic students are underrepresented, making up 6 percent of UVA students but 3.6 percent of reported students.
Thus, white and Hispanic students are underrepresented in reports to Honor, whereas Black and Asian students are overrepresented. Moreover, “Students who were reported by other students, as compared to students who were reported by faculty members, were on average 41 percentage points less likely to face a sanction outcome,” and “Fourth year students, as compared to first year students, were 27 percentage points more likely to face a sanction... Graduate students, as compared to first year students, were 37 percentage points more likely to face a sanction.” For a system that preaches peer accountability, the data suggests endemic racial bias and dissimilar standards for students of differing years.
The report includes other revealing information, such as a letter from a secret society, the Society of the Purple Shadows. Its peculiar, self-serious prose features no capitalized letters, except when referring to itself (“THE SOCIETY”). It notes that “THE SOCIETY has continually supported the Single Sanction as it has proven to instill the virtues of honor as a way of life, embodied commitment to the common good, [sic] rather than as a disciplinary measure.” The notion that the Single Sanction produces and supports a larger moral system is cited by the Purple Shadows, though they do not offer evidence as to how. For Honor to include the letter’s reasoning contradicts HAC’s recommendations, as it says:
In order to reframe the discussion around the Community of Trust, it should no longer be used as the primary justification for the Single Sanction. It also no longer makes sense to rely on this justification given the advent of the Informed Retraction – Honor now facilitates a process by which those who have violated the Code can return to the community.
The most revealing part of this letter’s inclusion is that a relatively unaccountable student institution incorporated statements from an even less accountable student organization—an elite secret society—to justify its own existence. This letter also reveals exactly how power operates at UVa. Student networks of power operate in plain sight, because they are friend groups. This is true for groups that are known and those that are not. Surely, this letter’s inclusion by Honor was influenced by a member of the Purple Shadows. At the very least, it proves that the Purple Shadows can influence Honor to the extent that it would include a message that contradicts HAC’s recommendations. Events like this embody inextricable elements of student self-governance. This is why it is imperative to form a new system bereft of student oversight.
Honor has changed several times in the years since its inception, and it can change more still. The system that once policed an entitled, Southern aristocracy now binds students in a system that disproportionately affects peers with less privilege. Problems like these that plague Honor are not defects of the system. They are its essence. The edifice of student self-governance causes Honor’s shortcomings, as it besets the system with elitism, racial bias, incompetence, and a host of other flaws. Honor’s irremediable problems also stem from its foundational assumption of retributive justice, as Honor only considers punishment, not growth. An Honor sanction wholly reflects this attitude. With an IR, students must forego thousands of dollars in tuition and rent, suffer an incredibly disruptive time off their academic career, and in some cases, risk returning to an unstable home environment. These problems are only magnified by the Single Sanction, whose core assumption is that conviction of lying or cheating in all cases is equitably punished by losing thousands of dollars, tearing asunder supportive social connections, and restarting an academic career at a new university — if ever. Lying and cheating harm the community, but there is no good reason why those convicted cannot rejoin it if they are trained not to repeat their transgressions. Presently, Honor punishes students, but never seeks to correct the conditions causing their mistakes.
An ideal Honor System has wide participation by members of the community, who report students to Honor when they commit offenses. This should be so that the accused can grow — not simply be punished. To ensure that Honor upholds the Community of Trust, it is imperative that students and faculty participate in it, but approximately half of students express uneasiness about reporting and a third of professors avoid using Honor altogether. The most jarring phenomenon Honor creates is the glaring social asymmetry that exists in student life. Students play no role in deciding who can enroll at the University, but they have the final say in expulsion for offenses of academic integrity. This is a decision better reached, without eye-rolling or racial bias, by hired specialists. Other colleges typically leave disciplinary measures to professionals, but at UVa, expelling students is an extracurricular activity for those without expert credentials. Beyond vague sentiments of a sense of trust, little evidence suggests that Honor works well.
The abundance of other systems suggests there are better alternatives. Envisioning a future beyond Honor is daunting, but several other universities provide good places to start. One thing all favorable substitutes share is that their academic integrity systems are not exclusively student-run. An example nearby is Virginia Tech. Hoos may be reluctant to admit it, but Tech’s policy on academic dishonesty is much fairer. Their system features a range of sanctions administered by a process involving faculty and students, including an “F* Sanction,” which indicates on a transcript that a student failed a course due to an honor code violation. Additionally, other sanctions are a lowered course grade, an academic integrity education program, suspension, expulsion, and revocation of a degree. This range of sanctions allows Tech’s honor system to make the punishment commensurate with the offense; Honor, meanwhile, resorts only to draconian measures like a disruptive, yearlong leave of absence at best, permanent dismissal at worst. HAC asserts that “a multi-sanction system may feature rehabilitative/educational opportunities;” “Sanction[s] can be tailored to match the offense;” and “[a multi-sanction system] recognizes developmental needs of college students.” HAC also lists Tech as an example school with a possible multi-sanction alternative. Currently, Honor’s Alternative Sanction Working Group is studying possible changes to Honor’s sanctioning system. Its recommendations are welcomed, and a multiple sanction system would be an exceptional improvement. The most meaningful improvement Honor can make, however, is not one it is equipped to do, because it entails erasing its own existence.
Eliminating the student-run Honor System ensures students no longer have exclusive oversight of offenses like cheating and lying. However, moving past Honor does not mean eradicating every element of student input. It is fair for students to have a voice in the decisions that affect their community, and there is no reason why a new sanctioning body cannot include elements of student representation. Pervasive influence of groups like secret societies, and other networks of power, will likely endure. But their relevance stems from the symbiotic relationship they share with student organizations: as Honor’s Bicentennial Report shows, these groups support each other’s missions. Entrenched interests among students and faculty alike will make this change difficult to achieve, but that does not make it impossible. A passionate student body can create a new system, one that the community can trust.