University of Virginia Library

Living
Honor

must we from then on live in
an atmosphere of distrust
requiring elaborate keys and
theft protection? Must our
academic integrity rely only on
similar defensive measures?

The argument is often put
forward that in the life of the
outer world there is no honor
system, so why would there
be one in a university? One
partial answer is that, to the
best of my knowledge, all
commodity or stock exchanges
drop immediately a man who
fails to carry through a
transaction that he had agreed
to, even if this agreement had
been given orally or otherwise
informally.

Another partial answer is
that we almost all have, in
effect, mutual trust acting as
an honor system within our
families, without destroying
our ability to protect ourselves
in a predatory world.

A university, being
composed of individuals
specially qualified, can also
share the benefits of this
irreplaceable mutual trust by
means of a live honor system,
without reducing its members'
defenses against the rest of the
world or their knowledge of
procedures there.

We have seen, however, that
this is feasible only where the
system can remove those not
capable of living up to it and
thus preserve the atmosphere
of absolute confidence which a
sound system creates.