University of Virginia Library

Clarifying Honor

In a sense, honor exists at the University
only in the minds of those who feel
themselves honorable; but the open manifestation
of it comes in the working standards of
the Honor System. Thus, the concept of
honor and its relation to the University may
have been subtly but substantively redefined
in the letter that the Honor Committee put in
the mail to students this week. By changing
and clarifying some of the tenets of the
System, the Honor Committee has once again
clarified that honor is not an absolute virtue,
that it is contingent upon the prevailing values
of the students and the extent to which they
are willing to let a standard of honor govern
their lives.

Essentially, the Committee made no real
changes. It merely recognized what it felt to
be the de facto scope of the system, and
clarified two definitions concerning lying. The
new definition of scope limits offenses to
Albemarle and situations where one acts as a
University student. Limiting the scope in this
manner was in one sense a codification of the
existing standard, since the committee has
not, in recent years, been called upon to try
an offense occurring outside the county. More
than this, however, we feel that it represented
a recognition of the true limits of the Honor
System. A student may carry his personal
standard beyond the University community,
but the system cannot go beyond the area of
the community in which it has been made a
matter of mutual trust among the people
involved.

The clarification of the lying offense is a
comparatively minor addition to the Committee's
work. Few could argue that the only
lies which ought to make the teller liable for
an honor offense are willful misrepresentations
with the purpose of establishing an
unjustified reliance in the perpetrator. The
provision for spontaneous withdrawal of a
false statement protects the student from
having to continue to falsify in order to cover
up the first misstatement.

Those who feel that the Committee is
tampering with something beyond their
ability or right to change would do well to
reread the first section of the Committee's
statement concerning the history of the
Honor System. A student generation, in
residence at the University for only a short
time, may draw the erroneous conclusion that
the Honor System is something that has been
handed down, static and inviolate, from
generation to generation. In retrospect, this is
clearly not the case.

The tradition of Honor at the University is
a legacy of change. This week's statement is
the latest part of that legacy, and one which
indicates that the Honor System is still vital
and alive and has the capability to remain that
way. We only hope that next year's
committee and those that follow it will seek
to improve and refine its capabilities in
gathering and evaluating opinion on the
Honor System and to preserve the legacy of
progressive amenability to change embodied
in the work of this year's members.