Honor and Dishonor
Bits and Pieces 2013-10-13
Summary:
I am in favor of honor. I am not in favor of an honor code.
Talks have resumed at Harvard about adopting a so-called “honor code,” sometimes referred to as a "modified honor code." If I am not mistaken, the "modification" would be that students will not be required to turn each other in. I can see that the code would be more palatable without the snitching requirement, but I wonder how effective it would be with no moral onus for peer enforcement.
But effectiveness is not my main concern. The deeper question is whether "honor" will mean anything at Harvard beyond its use as a modifier for things having to do with undergraduate cheating. I suspect we will just establish the honor code and some kind of court (which, it seems, may not be dubbed an “honor court”). Honor, quite likely, will be reduced to a vestigial form as a declaration you won't cheat on your tests and papers when no one is watching.
It may be that the mere act of writing words to that effect will have a positive effect on academic integrity, without any larger context of personal or institutional honor. Much as I would like to see less cheating, it doesn't feel quite right to me to reduce the moral issue to an exercise in applied psychology. If someone in William James Hall had demonstrated that the color pink makes people cheat less (in the way that football teams who dress in Iowa's pink visitor's locker room are supposedly less aggressive), would we make all students take their exams in pink clothing, or in pink rooms?
The problem with speaking about honor more generally in the Harvard community is that Harvard has been so reluctant to respond to bad behavior by anyone but students, or even to acknowledge that there is anything wrong with a variety of faculty behaviors that everyone knows are wrong. For example, a bare minimum of honor calls for understanding and owning up to one's malfeasances. Without calling it “honor,” the Ad Board has long considered holding students to that standard part of its educational role. There simply are no such expectations for faculty.
Let's start with the infamous Gov 1310 "Cheating Scandal" itself, which Harvard publicly labeled “unprecedented in anyone’s living memory.” This case has entered the hall of Harvard horrors alongside the bust of University Hall in 1969--two tragic events in which the balance of responsibilities, between students and the institution, is highly debatable, and student bitterness about Harvard’s actions has evolved into a lifetime of alumni resentment and mistrust. Already it is common knowledge, even among the Harvard faculty, that the cheating scandal began when the professor made a joke out of his course. This fall, one science professor, when confronted with an unexpectedly overflowing lecture hall on the first day of classes, cautioned the class, “This is no Gov 1310, you know.” That is, I am not going to announce that you don't have to go to class and won't have to work hard to get an A, the way the Gov 1310 professor did.
According to multiple accounts, Gov 1310 was a miserably constructed course with a miserably constructed exam. Since the professor said that no one had to go to class, it was common practice for students to take notes for each other. The exam was "completely open book, open note, open Internet, etc." Harvard, rather than proclaiming to the world that it had on its hands the biggest cheating scandal it had ever seen, should have acknowledged that it had on its hands an awful case of faculty negligence. It should have told the professor that he had made such a mess of his course that there was no way the College disciplinary process could treat all students fairly, so it would not deal with any cases at all---exactly as Dartmouth College did in the year 2000 when a large number of students were accused of cheating in one Computer Science course. Instead Harvard chose to scar dozens of students, and put through a year of hell many who were ultimately allowed to continue. Harvard then let the professor quietly slip away.
I don't actually blame the professor, since I don't kn