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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Revise, Don't Reject, the Honor Code

Over the past few years, many students and faculty have expressed their frustration over the efficacy – or lack thereof – of Middlebury College’s flagship moral doctrine, the Honor Code. Cheating has thrived while students’ willingness to report one another for such offenses seems rarer and rarer. The Honor Code needs fixing, and many in the College community know and want it to happen.

On Sunday, the SGA passed a bill to move ahead on amending the Honor Code’s Constitution (which requires a quota of 2/3 of the student body to vote, and 2/3 to vote in favor, in order to send the changes for ratification to the faculty) to include a biennial referendum on the system. The Campus commends the SGA for taking initiative to create a more serious dialogue of change. We believe however, that these referenda might do more to harm than to help the Middlebury Honor Code.


According to Bill S2015-SB2, starting in 2016 the student body would participate in a referendum every other spring that would include three options to determine the Honor Code’s fate: maintain, revise or eliminate it. Nothing would change under the first option. The second, however, would yield a two-week revising period in which all students could participate; at the end of this period, a new Honor Code would be voted on by the Senate and Faculty Council. The third option would eliminate the Code completely, so that it would no longer apply to any student in or outside of any classroom on this campus.


This last option has many of us at the Campus concerned. Though it is highly unlikely to occur, the possibility that students would be able to eliminate the Honor Code is enough to make us take a second look at the referendum and examine the value of including this option.


Not only would the choice to remove the Honor Code immediately destroy the trust between students and professors – the same trust that awards students the privilege of take-home or self-scheduled exams, might we add – but terminating the Honor Code even once might also prevent us from ever earning back that trust. Without a grounded understanding of the Honor Code’s benefits, future students might not see the same value in it that those who have experienced it do, making its revival unlikely.


That being said, even students currently under the Honor Code do not unanimously support it; there are therefore changes to be made.  Indeed, disregard for the Honor Code has grown so egregious that last spring, the Economics department suspended it on exams in the major’s core courses so that professors could proctor them and provide a more aggressive line of defense against cheating.


The student body is aware of these holes in the Code’s application.  In a survey conducted by the SGA in January, some 33 percent of students supported the Code in principle but believed its practice needs reform, while nearly 60 percent supported it as is. Given that many students support the Code, at least in principle, opening up the possibility of destructive reform to the entire student body on a biennial basis might be dangerous to the integrity of the Code. 


There are some, however, who believe that it is not the Honor Code that has failed us, but it is we who have failed the Honor Code. Perhaps if the student body were to vote to dissolve it, we would be forced to confront the idea that we are not honorable enough to merit this code. We trumpet the Honor Code as both a triumph of moral intelligence and, thereby, a reflection of our own, yet too many of us shirk the responsibilities that it necessitates. It is a privilege to be treated as men and women of integrity, but it is our duty to behave as such. If we abandon the latter, the former goes with it.


Many of the top colleges in the United States boast honor codes. Currently, we are among them, but this bill could change that. While the bill gives students the right to affect what is perhaps the most important policy at our school on a regular basis, an empowerment that the Campus supports, the bill also poses a risk – losing the Honor Code – that does not exceed the reward of gaining the referendum. While we appreciate the opportunity the referendum presents, we fear the consequences of being able to choose the last option. We would like to encourage students to focus on a combination of the first and second options instead. It would be naive to suggest continuing with the Code as is after acknowledging the aforementioned problems in its application, but it is realistic and effective for Middlebury to amend the Code. Let’s revise, not reject, our school’s most important academic life policy to make sure that its practice achieves the goal of academic integrity. 


Artwork by SARAH LAKE


 

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