The Honor Code: A Faculty Perspective
by Thomas Deans

This is unfair,” complained the parent of one of my wife’s college students. “With so many students doing it, why single out my son for punishment?”

Hearing this, my wife was dumbfounded. The student in question was no naive freshman who had overlooked a footnote. He was a senior, freshly accepted to medical school, who had stitched together three Internet sources and claimed the work as his own. When a quick Web search exposed the deception, my wife expected the student to accept the consequences gracefully. Instead, his family moved into damage-control mode.

At the time, my wife and I were both teaching at a large Midwestern university that had a system to handle academic dishonesty, and it lurched into motion. The facts were clear; the administrators of the system were fair and efficient. Everything pointed to a speedy resolution: an “F” on the student’s transcript paired with a special notation signaling academic dishonesty, plus the mandate to attend a special course dealing with ethics.

Yet the student dodged and weaved, and in the process revealed the university’s system as ultimately rooted in the protocols of a judicial process rather in a code of honor. The student couldn’t avoid the “F,” but by filing an appeal he could delay the academic dishonesty designation.

The end of the spring semester was days away, and appeals couldn’t be heard until the following fall when students returned - time enough to keep a transcript from alarming medical-school officials. The student probably thought that he could explain away an “F” in an English course and then take a summer course to graduate.

My wife and I moved a few weeks later. While we don’t know how the story played out, we fear that the student is currently in medical school.

Since then, I’ve been teaching at Haverford College, where an honor code is part of the institution’s core identity. The code is both old—embedded in the college’s Quaker roots—and new—refashioned and ratified each year by the students.

Yet Haverford is not immune from academic dishonesty, as I learned a few weeks into my first semester when I found in my faculty mailbox an Honor Council abstract on a case of serious plagiarism. For every honor code violation, the student-run Honor Council writes an abstract, distributed to every mailbox on campus, that recounts the testimony presented, the council’s deliberations and the final resolutions. Each abstract ends with a series of questions intended to spark wider reflection and dialogue.

When I read that first abstract, I recall being impressed by the care that the students devoted to seeking the truth as well as the hard-nosed penalty for wrongdoing (“separated from the college for two semesters” leaped off the page). I also felt voyeuristic. Broadcasting violations, even with all the names changed, seemed a bit puritanical, like putting offenders in the stocks for display in the public square.

Yet I’ve come to appreciate that dealing with misconduct in a discrete judicial system or behind closed doors in the Dean’s Office is far more precarious because in a community built on mutual trust, there is no such thing as an isolated violation. Every breach of integrity reverberates in the delicate ecology of reciprocity on which community living and the cooperative pursuit of knowledge depend. Personal ethics aren’t just personal. They’re the community’s business.

And this too was evident in the Honor Council abstract. Only two of the council’s seven final resolutions were punitive; the rest were restorative. The student was required to engage in a mediated dialogue with the professor, to write an essay as part of repairing that relationship, to write a letter to the community, and, upon return to Haverford, to re-sign the honor pledge and meet regularly with a dean.

That abstract confirmed for me what I had been gradually learning as a new professor at Haverford: that the honor code is less about scrutinizing individual behavior than it is about shaping a culture. It is less about discipline as we popularly define the word and more about disciplina, its Latin root, which means teaching.

By asserting a culture of such deliberate honesty, responsibility and understanding, Haverford is in many ways swimming against the tide. In the latest National Survey of Student Engagement, for example, 87 percent of college students reported that their peers had copied and pasted material from the Internet into their academic papers without proper attribution. I suspect such a troubling statistic has less to do with premeditated deceit or technological ease than with the state of student culture. When—out of laziness or confusion or desperation—students find themselves sitting in front of a glowing screen at 2 a.m., tempted to cut and paste text from a Web site, what is to stop them? Personal integrity, certainly. But just as important is a sense that one is a vital part of a dense network of people and principles, relationships and rituals, all keyed to a culture of reciprocal trust.

At Haverford, the honor code is not an administrative overlay that occasionally kicks into action. It is part of our blood and bone.

Thomas Deans is assistant professor of rhetoric and composition and director of the College's writing program.

Submissions for Moved to Speak can be sent to Editor, Haverford Alumni Magazine, 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA 19041 or via e-mail to Steve Heacock at sheacock@haverford.edu