No Honor, No Responsibility

THIS PAST SUMMER, Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence commissioned a study of student honor codes in institutions of higher learning throughout the country. Anticipating the ripples of anxiety such a study would send throughout the student body, the dean attached to the report that innocuous and placating adjective "fact-finding," thereby attempting to dismiss any policy implications.

But ripples there were. Within the first few weeks of the semester a chorus of groans could be heard from undergraduates who worried that they might soon have to affix their signatures to papers and exams and perhaps even report a peer who has run afoul of the rules. The criticisms ranged from the insipid--that it was nostalgia for his alma mater, honor-bound Princeton that motivated Spence to undertake the study--to the pragmatic--that if the system ain't broke don't fix it--to the serious--no one wants to bust a buddy. Surely, such a cosmopolitan and enlightened a place as Harvard has no use for an anachronism that has traditionally been the hallmark of those preppy colleges nestled in the idyllic Northeast.

Although such responses are predictable, they are also intensely ironic. Granted that, at first, the thought of implementing an honor code sounds threatening, its ultimate effect is flattering. The proposition rests on the key, and by all means correct, assumption that students possess the maturity to govern certain portions of their academic affairs without supervision. The establishment of a code would remove from the classroom babysitters we've by now outgrown. To reject an honor code out of hand because of its one uncomfortable, albeit necessary aspect--the responsibility of one student for another's actions--is to focus prematurely on the enforceability of the rules rather than their substance.

The irony of the opposition to an honor code stems from the fact that, for the most part, ours is an assertive student body. We regularly protest, for instance, that we don't need a Core Curriculum to ensure that we depart after four years as well-rounded individuals. The rapid growth of student government in the form of the the Undergraduate Council, to take another example, and the multiplication of its functions surely represents one of the most salient features of undergraduate life in recent years while student representation on University committees increases annually. Sometimes this zeal for government spills over into areas not directly related to student affairs, such as the current efforts to tell the University where to put its endowment dollars. Why, then, in light of our passion for self-government, should we reject an honor code which is nothing if not an extension of autonomy?

SNITCHING. There's the rub. The word reminds us of the rat-finks we all knew in grade school and summer camp and the very possibility that we might have to report someone who we may be friends with, someone we may have had meals with or sat next to in class makes us recoil from the notion of handling our own affairs. A typical response to the honor code proposal is: if someone cheats its his or her business; in the long run, they are the loser. But are they? The best response to this argument was provided by a fellow Crimson editor when he said: under the current system, if you cheat and don't get caught, you are vindicated. You don't lose, you win. And the notion that we should mind our own business and disregard another's actions presents a very atomistic picture of student life that cannot possibly sit well with those of us who feel that the student body is more than the sum of those who comprise it but somehow community with duties and obligations.

What's true outside the walls of academe is no less true within. Rules and regulations are, more often than not, for the benefit of the community but they are only as good as those upholding them. To reject an honor code because of the burdens enforcing it imposes on us means we like freedom but the type that is free of responsibility.