We Have an Honor Code!

First let me say that I am opposed to neither integrity nor honor. Strongly in favor of both! In fact I am glad that these words are re-entering our vocabulary. I just haven’t heard the evidence that the device that is being proposed here gets at the problems we have, or that we even understand what those problems are. We should be talking about the incentives and rewards we present to our students, and to which they respond, sometimes badly. Some introspection on faculty culture would be healthy too, because students take their cues from us. But all that will have to be for another day; I want to speak to the motion as it is before us.

 Let me go straight to the core of my worries. We have a long and, if I may, honorable tradition in this institution of not asking members of the community to make oaths, pledges, or quasi-sacred affirmations. Now I recognize that this makes us different from other places. In fact, Samuel Eliot Morison, in one of his Harvard histories, observed that it was a distinctive characteristic of the place, that the founders did not expect students to take any oaths. Morison concluded that by avoiding oaths, the founders were putting the emphasis instead on personal autonomy and responsibility. As he put it, “Our founders knew from their English experience that oaths are powerless to bind conscience. … Accordingly this academic vessel was provided with the barest possible code of statutes, and her master and crew, unhampered by oaths and religious tests, were left to exercise their best judgment, as God gave it to them.”

Do we know better now? Equipped with psychological research, perhaps we have discovered that oaths really do have the “power to bind conscience.” So it would seem, since two proposals for solemn pledges have surfaced in the past year, first for a kindness pledge and now for an integrity affirmation. Who knows what may be next.

 It all seems so retrograde. We are moving from treating our students as adults, as autonomous souls endowed with free will, to treating our students as children. We should not do so, however willing students may be to take these oaths.

In today’s world, pledges and oaths are for scout troops and fraternities and military schools, places where the high values are obedience and regimentation. Actually I once received a delegation from one of the service academies when they were trying to figure out what to do about a cheating scandal of their own. Pledges don’t belong in academic communities like this one, which at its best is a place of mature, free-thinking, skeptical, nonconforming men and women. Please excuse me for characterizing this exercise as juvenile, but we know that it is. No one would propose that members of this faculty make such an affirmation. Many of us would refuse to take it. We value academic integrity even more for ourselves than we do for our students. But for all the talk about shared student and faculty buy-in, voting this would be to go on the record as believing that a ritual affirmation of integrity is good for students, even though we would not be willing to take it ourselves.

Let me close by asking a couple of direct questions, in a sharper form than I have put them before, in the hope of getting clearer answers. 1(b) of the motion states, “Commitment to the honor code will be demonstrated through an ‘Affirmation of Integrity.’” The verb form seems not to be an imperative, as it is in the previous Docket Item, which uses a third person “shall.” Is the affirmation voluntary or mandatory? I am of course not asking whether integrity is required of students. Of course it is. I am asking about the act of affirmation itself. Is making that affirmation voluntary or a mandatory? If it is mandatory, what is the sanction on students for failing to affirm their own integrity? Will that act of defiance or neglect be treated as a breach of academic integrity? And finally, will individual faculty members be required to require students to make these affirmations?