Since most of this stuff seems to be disappearing from their original places on the internet, I thought it might be good to link them in one place. Also, it looks like as of last month, “President Reveley has approved the first substantial revisions to the Honor Code since 1997,” so it’s a good time to revisit it.
William and Mary’s honor code is the oldest in the country, instituted in 1779 at the behest of Governor Thomas Jefferson. It forbids lying, cheating, or stealing in private life as well as academics. For major assignments and tests, sometimes we would be asked to write an oath to that effect.
Anyway, the juridical apparatus for the honor system is considerably younger, and not especially good at upholding the ideals of the code. It is a perpetual source of fear and consternation among the sort of students that are paranoid, or civic-minded enough to be fearful and consterned about these things, as I’m told by students older than myself whom I’ve got no reason to doubt – and I would hope today’s students maintain a healthy skepticism even of the revised code, which does not restrict the Council’s authority to academic affairs only, as some of us would have liked.
That opposition had always been a part of the Virginia Informer, the independently-funded college newspaper started in 2005, where my first article, a book review, was published. Most notoriously, articles in the Informer led to the forced exit of Gene Nichol, the college’s president prior to Reveley, who resigned in February 2008 prior to the expiration of his three-year contract that wasn’t renewed.
The person who hired me was Steven Nelson, now of U.S. News, and he wrote an article the month before I began writing about the Honor Council, reporting on the Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs being charged with an honor violation.
The biggest criticism of the Honor Council itself is its opaque elections – candidates weren’t allowed to campaign and could only provide background information on themselves. Obviously this exacerbated the selection bias toward smarmy, ambitious authoritarians.
Rumors float around constantly about the poor administration of Honor Council cases, some of it undoubtedly the rationalizing inventions of those who’ve known someone or had themselves been found guilty. But some of it is real. I found documentation on three cases, for an investigation cowritten (she did the second case) with Kiersten Hoffman, our features editor, that was published on April 14, 2010. It’s there at the link if you’d like to read it, so I won’t explain any more here. There was a staff editorial along with it but that’s disappeared into the ether, along with all of the issues after 2009 that ought to be in William and Mary’s internal archive…
Having hundreds of copies of an article you know is going to shake up one of your college’s most treasured institutions is a thrilling thing, not least, this time, because the only thing above the fold, in addition the letterhead, was the headline, “The Case Against the Honor Council.”
After it was published I received a phone call from two female students who had been charged with an honor violation, with a hearing in several days. It turned out that the alleged act of cheating had been on an open-note, open-book, open-internet Medical Sociology test, and the person who had witnessed it, and pressured the professor to make the actual accusation, was the chair of the Honor Council, John Pothen, who became a Fulbrighter.
The news article has also disappeared, but the accompanying staff editorial which we actually called “J'Accuse,” mostly written by Mike Watson, is one of my favorites. The whole thing’s at the link, but here’s the end:
Thus we must conclude that the Honor Council and Dean Gilbert have committed serious errors in judgment and ethics in this case. It is unacceptable that despite a clear material conflict of interest Honor Council members were allowed to sit and chose to sit on the hearing panel. It is unacceptable that Dean Gilbert permitted the panel so constituted to hear the case. Two students nearly received the academic death penalty at the hands of a panel that even Chairman Pothen found possibly non-objective. Mercifully, justice was done in spite of this and the students were acquitted. However, they have been placed under extreme stress and next time victimized students may not be so lucky. Justice demands that fundamental reform is necessary. We now demand it. We also warn that failure to reform fundamentally and continued failure to exercise proper judicial ethics will be noted by this newspaper.
The next week the Student Assembly defunded them. (Nelson was a sponsoring senator, in recent years this sort of intersection arguably became problematic, when a former editor was elected student body president and at least one became an Honor Council member himself.) Eventually President Reveley convened a committee to look into reform, whose findings culminated in the changes released this August. At first glance the new code seems not to have adopted some of the more radical proposals, but I’ve only skimmed it.
The official student paper, The Flat Hat, was predictably aghast at what we were doing. “Simply lambasting the Honor Council will not provide any incentives for the Honor Council to reform from within; if anything, it will just elicit anger from its members, and nothing constructive will occur,” one read. And the next week they gave Pothen a platform to call me an immature liar. By that point, though, all were acknowledging some consideration of reform needed to take place.
I’m not sure if the August reforms were much of a step in the right direction. In any case, if they’re not, it doesn’t seem like there’s the same sense of agitation there anymore. At the same time in 2010 Scott Foster, my housemate at the time in one of these seven-person hovels we called ‘lodges’ – they’re turning into eco-somethings now, courtesy an earmarked donation – was running for City Council on a wave of student opposition to occupancy ordinances, excessive enforcement of noise ordinances, and the generally brutish behavior of law enforcement that had clearly taken the wrong side on the question of whether Williamsburg was a college town or a colonial landmark-qua-retirement community. He was elected in what the Daily Press called a “landslide.”
Foster is up for re-election next year, so we’ll see if I’m wrong about the student body’s complacence, though at this point Foster is well liked enough among residents that it doesn’t depend on them (he’s accomplished quite a lot too). I hope I am. The polling place has moved to a church right across one of the arms of the angle that frames the campus at the end of Duke of Gloucester street, and if every person in the dorms along that road voted, students could put one more of their own on the Council.
But I digress. If you’re reading this and you’re a student, I hope it’s given you a sense of possibility. If you’re not, I hope you’ve found it an interesting story. That way I won’t feel like I’m just nyah-nyahing for being on the winning team for once. Sometimes it’s nice to revisit old stories, especially when you’ve just read their (somewhat) happy endings.
