Honor, Freedom, and Honors

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences last Tuesday discussed the proposal to adopt an honor code. The item was formally moved, so it could be voted at the next meeting. Several comments were offered to the effect that there would be something wrong with asking students to write the formulaic honor statement repeatedly. No decision has been taken as to how frequently the affirmation would have to be made, and that seems to me a problem with the legislation. As the Crimson accurately quotes me as saying, there is a big difference between affirming one's commitment to academic integrity once at matriculation, or once a year, and reciting the commitment like a ritual prayer on each item of submitted academic work. (CS 20 students have to answer "check in questions" on the reading the night before every class. There are just three or four questions and they are multiple choice, click-click-click and you are done. Would they be expected to type out the honor pledge in addition?) I observed that it seemed to me unlikely that a defiant soul like Emerson would have ritually and uncomplainingly written out the honor pledge for four years. Wouldn't he and some of Harvard's other eminent nonconformists at some point have refused? What sanction would Harvard want to have visited on such young cranks, destined for greatness, for the perfectly logical sin of refusing to affirm their own honesty? I am trying to imagine Harvard's great logicians, Quine and Putnam and Sacks et al., explaining to their logic classes that yes, "I am being honest" is a self-refential, semantically challenged proposition, but it didn't matter, they had to keep saying something like that anyway, because the Faculty had voted to require it of them. Part of the rationale for the code is that we have a cheating problem, and schools with honor codes have less cheating. A literature review was offered in support of the latter thesis, but upon reading it, I am not convinced that it actually supports any such conclusion. (Alas, the literature review, like the draft honor code and implementing legislation, is confidential by the protocol of Faculty meetings, not to be shared with those who are not members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.) Even if it were true that reciting the pledge made people less likely to cheat, I wouldn't favor it. "Why not, if it works?" Because there are values more important than effectiveness. It might also work to lower the room temperature or to paint the walls pink, but academic integrity is not a matter of behavioral manipulation by tried and true methods of psychological trickery. If it were, we'd just hire an ad agency. And getting people to be honest at Harvard is not the objective anyway; we want to graduate honest people. When Harvard students become corporate executives or political leaders or professionals, there will be no one there to make them recite the pledge that reminded them to be honest while they were students. Integrity has to come from some deeper place in their beings. A requirement that students affirm the honor pledge, repeatedly, feels to me like an infringement of students' right to free speech, which includes not only the right to say what they wish but also not to say what they don't wish.  Rather than training students to recite formulas, we should be educating them toward exactly the opposite frame of mind, to resist and challenge attempts to require them to say things. At the end of the day, I think the honor pledge is an attempt to find the solution to a problem under the lamppost that is easiest illuminated. Students cheat for a variety of reasons. But one important reason students cheat, especially in catastrophic cases like Harvard's Gov 1310 or the Dartmouth CS course a few years ago, is that they feel they are being cheated. Students tend to work hard when they think the course is making an effort to teach well and to make fair demands on students; they cut corners when they think the demands on them are unfair, or they reason that lazy professors should expect little work in return. This is a version of Harvard sociologist Chris Winship's Low-Low Contract between faculty and students: "Faculty pretend to teach, students pretend to study, and as long as parents and others paying the bills are oblivious, everyone is happy." A major cheating scandal disrupts the oblivious compromise, but making students recite the honor pledge without changing faculty behavior isn't a solution to the real problem. Here is what I think is really going on, aside from those egregious examples of catastrophic failure. The Faculty, as a corporate body, honors students for basically only one thing: Grade Point Average. For honors a student requires a departme