Collegiate
Honor Codes
It is
said of some colleges, such as Princeton and the military academy at West
Point, that they have an "honor code" for their students, as if
others schools did not. Every college
has rules governing academic dishonesty, and somehow tries to enforce
them. Cheating on examinations and
plagiarism on papers are against the rules everywhere, whether at Princeton or
Lower State. Some sort of court is
assembled to judge guilt or innocence when the time comes, and from a judgment
of guilt will follow some punishment.
Why then the phrase "honor code," and what is the difference
giving rise to it? The best way to
answer is to describe how the rules are written in some typical cases.
Princeton University has an Honor System for written
examinations and what might be regarded as a junior honor system for other
kinds of assignments. Professors who
give examinations in a classroom or auditorium are required to leave the room once
the examination has begun, and can return only to pick up the papers. Each student writes and signs the statement,
"I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this
examination," before handing it in, and it is explicit in the code that
failure to report another's cheating is one such violation. The "Honor Committee" that tries
alleged violations is made up entirely of students, and proceeds according to a
Constitution first adopted in 1893 and most recently amended in 1980, a
constitution that includes mention of a normal penalty of a year's suspension
for a first offense and permanent expulsion from the University for a
second. In first offenses aggravated by
perjury the suspension may be for two or three years, while in cases "with
extenuating circumstances" there may be no suspension, but rather
"probation with supervision until graduation."
For assignments that are not formal examinations
there is at Princeton a different system and a different court. Plagiarism and other forms of
non-examination academic misrepresentation are called "academic
violations," and the court that judges such things is called the
Faculty-Student Committee on Discipline, which also has jurisdiction in other
kinds of student discipline. According
to the Princeton regulations, "At the end of an essay, laboratory report,
or any other requirement, the student is to write the following sentence and
sign his or her name: 'This paper
represents my own work in accordance with University regulations.[1]
"
The penalties for academic violations are not as
elaborately detailed as they are in the student-written Constitution for the
Honor System, but are "normally" a year's suspension for fraud, with
longer suspensions or expulsion for aggravated or repeated offenses. There is a provision for unwitting
plagiarism or ignorant use of source material; this is still called a
'violation' but not necessarily fraud, and may merit lesser penalties. But the student handbook at Princeton does a
good job, with detailed examples, in explaining the nature of plagiarism, so
that a defense of witlessness must be rare there; and a defense of ignorance of
the law is said to be no excuse.
Now except for the use of the word "honor"
in the pledge written for use by the special "Honor System" court at
Princeton, it is hard to see any difference between the Honor System used for
examinations and the honor system used for term papers. Both kinds of assignment require the
student to disclaim having cheated, albeit without, in the latter case,
pledging his "honor." Reading
the two constitutions reveals only this one implied difference: A student observing a fellow-student
cheating during an examination must report it, or be guilty himself for failure
to have done so, while a student in a dormitory who knows his neighbor has
committed a defined fraud is under no such obligation. Thus is maintained the distinction between
those who live by honor --- during examinations --- and those who live by the
ordinary statute law the rest of the time.
But shouldn't we all? Most colleges do not publish an "honor code" any more
than do municipalities and States. Most
universities, like most governments, publish rules of behavior and then punish
those who transgress. The guilty are
punished because they broke the law, not because they have broken their word
about not transgressing. Why make two
crimes out of one? New Jersey doesn't
do this; any legislature that tried to require its citizens to sign a pledge
not to steal or commit assault would be hooted out of office. We all know it is dishonorable to commit a
crime in daily life, and we all scorn the proved criminal. Isn't that an honor code already, one known
to all, without the ceremony of signatures and oaths? Why does Princeton make it so complicated?
I believe it is because Princeton is an old
university (by American standards) and still carries a gentlemanly tradition
from the last century, before purely secular justifications for the law were
considered sufficient. An English
gentleman doesn't cheat at cards (It isn't done, you see), not because
cheating is theft as theft is understood at Old Bailey, but because it
violates a gentlemanly code, a code common folk need not be expected to understand. A gentleman's mere theft might even be
excused under some circumstances, at least among gentlemen, but not cheating
at cards, though this is an offense the Criminal Code does not even list.
So at Princeton academic fraud is nefas
under a code in which the criminal law of the State of New Jersey takes no
interest. The transgressor is either
expelled (cf. cast out of polite society, sent to Malaysia to live on
remittances) or suspended (cf. "sent to Coventry") for a limited
period. The very word "honor"
breathes of medieval fealties; it has no counterpart in a rational criminal
code that lists offenses and penalties in graded ranks, with no other purpose
than to minimize the depredations of the criminal though with due regard to the
cost of the effort.
The difference
is at bottom one of religion, and religion was a more natural background for a
Princeton regulation in 1893 than it is now.
We have some remnant of this in the oaths we give our elected officers,
from Mayors to Presidents, even today.
It is plain that a judge or President who does not do his job should be
and can be fired, that is, not re-elected, and that if his failure includes
crime he should be jailed. It is also
plain that this is what we do, and that the threat of non-reelection (or jail)
really represents all the power the public can apply; but the religious
tradition makes many of us feel more comfortable if he first promises,
with God as his witness, to do what he was hired for.
We watch his performance just
the same.
So it is at Princeton, a ceremonial remnant, where
most forms of academic fraud do not even fall under the Honor System, but where
those that do are monitored not by the professor but by the collectivity of the
honorable. With a bit of cynicism one
could attribute the survival of the formal Honor System exactly to this, to the
time saved by professors during examinations.
When it comes to term papers and the like, no such time-saving would be
effected by insertion of the notion of honor, and so a simple statute suffices,
though for uniformity (I surmise) a disclaimer is still exacted.
The other remnant of aristocratic tradition in the
Princeton Honor Code is of course the range of penalties, all of which are in
one form or another exclusion from the company of the honorable, or the threat
thereof. There is no mention of fines,
or of court costs, which are considerable in any such adjudication. The statute doesn't mention failure in the
course in which the cheating took place, though this is sometimes a natural
consequence of the demonstrated failure to perform. (The professor does have this option if a guilty student is not
in fact sent down but remains at school under supervised probation, but at
Princeton it is more common for him to give a zero on just the assignment in
which the cheating took place, a zero that might or might not entail failure in
the course. If it does, the failure is
understood to be an academic judgment and not a punishment. Niggling punishments are not for gentlemen;
only exclusion or its threat are permitted.)
There are other punishments a university can
apply. Students may enjoy certain
privileges which the university can withdraw:
living in a certain fraternity house or other special residence, or
participation in some cherished extracurricular activity sponsored by the University. There are many of these, from intercollegiate
athletics to the campus newspaper or radio station, and any number of campus
clubs. If the university were truly in
loco parentis it could "ground" the errant student in a hundred
different ways, temporarily of course, the way parents do, without casting him
out from polite society (cf. "cutting him off without a nickel.")
Suggestions concerning appropriate punishments for
academic dishonesty are detailed elsewhere in this essay, and are referred to
here only in order to contrast the attitude presupposed by an Honor System with
the attitude implied by the principles of a statute law that seeks merely to
minimize crime. Statute law says
"Thou shalt not steal" to all citizens alike, but it distinguishes
degrees of stealing. Where Jehovah
would have had all thieves stoned to death (an old form of expulsion from the
community), and the Honor Code would have the cheat removed from the company of
gentlemen, modern law has found a variety of alternate, graded,
punishments. These may not entirely
satisfy idealists who want to purify their surroundings in accordance with a
religious or aristocratic code, but they do serve the more recently legislated
standards of those whose interests are more secular and pragmatic.
It
does not follow that the secular and pragmatic colleges have all therefore
eschewed the "honor code" in favor of more ordinary statutes. Consider the College of Engineering of the
University of Michigan (in Ann Arbor).
It publishes an Honor Code, and it cannot be said that there is any
religious or aristocratic (or military) tradition in the Michigan 'engine school'
to account for this. But a reading of
the history of their code and its announced rationale shows that it fits into
the same pattern, at least by emulation, of aristocratic values exhibited by
Princeton.
In particular, the Michigan document entitled Honor
Code (Revised 1984) begins with a Forward by the Dean and Executive Committee
of the faculty: "The Honor Code is
part of our lives at The College of Engineering. The standards for personal integrity implied by the Code are a
reflection of the standards of conduct expected of engineers...." (Engineers, mind you, not human
beings, or civilized men.)
The handbook includes, towards the end, part of a statement (Faith of
an Engineer) said to have been adopted by several engineering
societies: "As an Engineer, I will
participate in none but honest enterprises..." Also included is a fragment from the Canons of Ethics for
Engineers, another document of national stature in the profession: "... if he has proof that another
Engineer has been unethical, illegal, or unfair in his practice, he should so
advise the proper authority." By
means of these quotations the Michigan honor code is assimilated into the
ethics of the engineering profession as a whole, somewhat as the Oath of
Hippocrates serves the medical profession.
The code of professional ethics serves as a unifying cement, something
to distinguish Them from Us even if We are not a hereditary or moneyed
aristocracy.
To say that an Honor Code at
Princeton is the legacy of an aristocratic tradition is therefore to speak too
narrowly. Groups of human beings with a
distinguishable purpose or origin tend to adopt codes, titles, honors and oaths
to accentuate their distinction, even if the distinction is one of recent
origin, or simply invented for the occasion, as with the secret handshake of a
new fraternal lodge. The egalitarian
spirit of the 19th Century tried, when it saw what evil lurked within, to put
an end to these discriminations. Burns
wrote "A man's a man for a' that," and Tennyson pledged allegiance to
"the Brotherhood of Man, Confederation of the World."
It was no help; even at the bottom of the scale there
arose Brotherhoods of various sorts of proletarians --- of Railway Brakemen, for example. The “Wobblies”[2],
a militant labor union of the last century,
borrowed hymn tunes to sing of the "Commonwealth of Toil."
Toil! Even the antithesis of
aristocracy now was made into a unifying experience, distinguishing and
ennobling the initiate, not to be shared by the bourgeois outsider. Anyone can do it, and most everyone seems to
want to. Therefore, schools of
medicine, engineering, journalism and other professions who, much more than
upstart Knights of Labor, enjoy a ready-made distinction analogous
to the gentlemanly distinction that characterized the origins of Princeton,
find it natural to establish Honor Codes to match their other rites.
As the Wobblies imitated the established religions,
as a junior high school composes an Alma Mater as long and tedious as
Harvard's, pledging undying devotion to its colors and ideals, so may some
other colleges, even without a seventeenth century pedigree or a profession to
represent, wish to imitate them in one or another honorific detail including
perhaps an Honor Code. But you know what?
The ritual really doesn't make a difference in the law. The College of Literature, Science and the
Arts at the University of Michigan, rigidly secular, middle-class and
non-professional, whose students attend many of the same courses as the
Engineering students do, does not have an Honor Code, yet cheating is just as
illegal there as on the other side of the quadrangle.