 | The Cavalier daily Thursday, March 16, 1972 |  |
Lying for Liquor
The 1969-70 Honor Committee was at
first preoccupied with interpreting and
justifying the two changes in the System
announced by Attaffer's Committee in
May of 1969. It is ironic that a change
without precedent in the System's
history—i.e., the institution of geographic
limitations on jurisdiction—should have
stimulated much less public controversy
than a change—i.e., the exclusion of lying
for liquor from jurisdiction—which in fact
was supported by much greater precedent
than the opposite stance in effect from
1955 to 1969. The somewhat
embarrassing question of how to response
to the 2000 signatures on petitions
protesting the liquor ruling forced the
1969-70 Committee to concern itself
with the questions of student initiated
change in the System and the developing
of reliable means of interpreting student
opinion—problems which have not to this
day been satisfactorily solved.
In October of 1969 the Committee
was confronted by a scholarship athlete
accused of plagiarism, during whose trial
a widespread lack of support for an even
understanding of the Honor System
among recruited athletes became
apparent. In his orientation address of
1960, Harrison Flippen had foreseen such
a potential threat:
The University must, on the pain
of losing its soul, continue to regard
athletics as sport and not business,
where a student body still places
amateur spirit above mere victory.
And in a presentation before the
University's Board of Visitor's in June of
1965, Hardy Dillard had concerned
himself with problems which could arise
from extensive recruitment of athletes:
While training tables may be
necessary adjunct to the toughening
job, any other tendency to segregate
the athletes should be resisted and
finally, the whole trend toward
bigger and bigger gate receipts and
winning for the sake of winning
should be resisted because of the
subtle effect it has in distorting the
values of a university and indirectly
imposing a strain on the whole
system, of which the honor system in
a part.
By second semester, however, the
1969-70 Honor Committee was
preoccupied in sorting the probable
requirements which a court of law might
see current standards of the Due Process
and constitutionality as imposing on the
Honor System. Codification of the
System's procedural standards has always
advanced more quickly than codification
of the scope. In recent years there has
been an accelerating evolution of the
honor trial from a rather "inquisitorial"
judicial proceeding to a more
"adversarial" proceeding, as defense
counsel have insisted that they must not
only clarify the facts of the case to the
Honor Committee, but that they must
also be at liberty to present and to argue
the case to the best advantage of the
accused. This represents a major aspect of
a general trend toward a more "legalistic"
Honor System, which has paralleled what
law student Rick Levin called in 1971 a
"clear trend" in contemporary legal
opinion concerning educational
institutions "for the courts to hold a
student's interest in pursuing his
educational opportunities to be more
than a privilege, and to recognize
educational opportunity as an emerging
right." The monolithic severity of the
single penalty has forced more
"legalistic" in their administration to the
System, to the point of allowing
professional attorneys to appear in honor
trials as non-oral advocates, and of
concerning themselves with the
presentation of psychiatric testimony and
lie-detector evidence in trials.
| The Cavalier daily Thursday, March 16, 1972 | |