University of Virginia Library

Colloquium

'Skepticism' Of Community Honor System

By Dave Bowman

Charles C. Calhoun, a past editor
of The Cavalier Daily once wrote:

There is growing steadily in the
minds of students a healthy
skepticism, or unwillingness, to
accept as sacred anything simply
hallowed by age...

This trend is certainly prevalent
at the contemporary University,
and is nowhere more evident than
in student attitudes toward the
Honor System, a fixture at Virginia
since 1842. Numerous objections,
both conceptual and procedural,
can be raised against the System,
and have been raised with greater
frequency and intensity since the
controversial restrictions in scope,
or geographic jurisdiction, of May,
1969, including the hotly-contested
elimination of "lying-for-liquor"
from the System's purview.

Attacked

In recent years students have
attacked in particular the Honor
Committee for its apparent
seclusion and aloofness from a
student body growing in size and
diversity. The Committee is often
censured for its failure to
"Communicate" - that is, to
conduct a meaningful dialogue -
with the student body. More and
more students are asking for a
justification of the Honor System's
existence in a contemporary
multi-university, for a rationale
which extends beyond questions of
tradition, prestige, and morality - a
rationale which for most students,
if it exists, the Honor Committee
has failed to communicate. But
there certainly do exist, plausible
and positive reasons for the
preservation of the Honor System
at the University, or the System
would have collapsed of its own
weight long ago.

Mr. Charles Whitebread,
Assistant Professor of Law, offered
in his Orientation speech in
September the single most cogent
rationale for the Honor System I
have ever heard, and my
presentation here is certainly
indebted to his approach. Mr.
Whitebread rejected the moralistic
justification that says lying,
cheating, and stealing are "bad," as
opposed to faith, hope, charity as
"good." The Honor System does
not rest on the presupposition that
Virginia "gentlemen" are more
righteous than other less morally
acceptable college students without
the benefit of an honor system. The
Honor System was established, and
has continues to function for over a
century, simply because its
presence provides the University of
Virginia with a more pleasant and
relaxing environment in which to
live and study.

Not Moral

The Honor System does not
exist to make life on the Grounds
morally acceptable to God, Billy
Graham, or Margaret Mitchell or to
make sure that Alumni
contributions continue to bolster
the University's endowment. It
exists because the absence of
cheating, stealing, and lying from
the University community makes
this institution a better place in
which to pursue an education, an
education in which one learns from
his contemporaries as well as from
lectures and textbooks. And a
prerequisite for any meaningful
exchange of knowledge is the
assumption of mutual integrity of
word and deed among all parties
concerned. Otherwise, the term
education is but a cynical facade
for the student whose motivation is
opportunism rather than truth.

It is a common misconception, I
believe, that the Honor System was
established body and soul in the
distant past when Southern
idealism and Victorian morality
pervaded the Grounds of the
once-aristocratic University, and
that since those days the System
has experienced a steady decline. In
fact, however, the Honor System
was constituted in 1842 to apply
only to written classroom
examinations, primarily as a means
of easing hostility between faculty
and students which had already
resulted in the murder of a
professor on the Lawn. An official
and permanent Honor Committee
did not appear until the early
1900's. And the Honor System was
not given unlimited geographic
jurisdiction, and not made
applicable to the purchase of
liquor, until 1956, during the era of
crew cuts and Joe McCarthy.

Each of us has his own concept
of honor, or personal integrity -
some more inclusive and more
stringent than others. But a
community honor system can not
function without some sort of
consensus among the persons
involved as to what constitutes a
dishonorable act. The Honor
Committee, as democratically
elected representatives of the
contemporary student population,
interpret that consensus of honor
and apply it in trials held before the
Committee. Perhaps the Honor
System's greatest single strength has
been the students' willingness and
ability to adjust the System's
jurisdiction to changing student
norms of conduct, to define and
redefine a concept of community
honor according to evolving student
standards.

Liquor Lies

The Honor Committee of
1968-69 thus felt it necessary to
re-exclude "lying-for-liquor" from
the System's scope. For the
members of that Committee felt
that the majority of students did
not wish the purchase of alcohol to
be within the System's jurisdiction,
and knew that its retention in the
scope would serve only to weaken
the accepted core of the System.
The Honor System cannot and
should not legislate into the
University community behavior
values which it does not hold.

The single penalty of permanent
dismissal is a frequent bone for
contention. The single sanction is
the one objective standard available
to both the Honor Committee and
the student body for determining
what types of conduct should be
included under the Honor System.
If a consensus of student opinion
does not deem an act of dishonesty
so reprehensible as to warrant
permanent expulsion from the
University community, then that
realm of conduct should be
excluded from the System's
jurisdiction.

The Honor System is often said,
somewhat pompously at times, to
represent a spirit of honor rather
that a codified system of morality.
If this claim is true, it is because the
single penalty of dismissal provides
a standard of judgement so
unmistakably resolute as to
maximize the possibility of
determining a consensus among the
various student elements as to what
should be included under the
Honor System.