The President W&L Needs
The Washington and Lee Executive Committee recently approved two desperately needed amendments to the White Book: partial codification and modification of the requirements for a guilty verdict.
(The White Book | SOURCE: Washington and Lee University & Claude)
The Honor System at Washington and Lee University was deeply shaken last academic year. For the first time in several years, the university held a student body Open Hearing for an Honor Violation.
The outcome deeply divided the W&L community, and a Spectator poll of hundreds of students revealed significant concerns about the Honor System, the bedrock of our university. The Spectator devoted our last print edition entirely to the matter, and the hard work of many community members defending the Honor System is slowly paying off.
The reconstituted Executive Committee (EC) recently conducted a first-round vote to approve two amendments to the White Book. The Spectator unequivocally supports the EC’s decision to approve both of these amendments, while urging the Committee to go further in its efforts.
These two amendments provide both clarity and support for the Honor System by adding detailed language on what constitutes an Honor Violation and clarifying the requirements for a guilty verdict in both closed and open hearings.
The EC’s first vote amended the White Book’s definition of what constitutes an Honor Violation. The previous definition was “[a]n Honor Violation or ‘HV’ is any conduct that violates the trust of the current Washington and Lee community.”
This language was problematic because it allowed too much variability in student conduct. There were no specific grounds to determine whether an action was an HV or not. Ultimately more disappointing was that for most of the University’s history, some sort of codification was present, until its slow phase-out that culminated in 2015, when these actions were not explicitly present in the White Book.
If taken to its logical extremes, what the average person would classify as HVs, such as lying, cheating or stealing, could be rejected as HVs if it was decided the action did not violate the community’s trust.
The amendment’s language, as per the EC’s vote, now reads “An Honor Violation (‘HV’) is any act, such as lying, cheating, and stealing, that violates the trust of the current Washington and Lee community.” (emphasis added)
This is one of the changes The Spectator called for in our editorial last year on three necessary fixes to the Honor System.
There, we noted that “the unnecessary uncertainty about what constitutes an Honor System harms the system itself and the community’s health. Students, alumni, along with faculty and staff, all noted varying levels of worry about the uncertainty and vagueness of the modern Honor System.”
This addition, which we will refer to as partial codification, is a desperately needed change. It significantly reduces vagueness and confusion about potential HVs by naming lying, cheating and stealing as examples.
This change makes it clear that these actions will be treated as HVs, meaning a student can be expelled for any of them, ultimately deterring actions that jeopardize the university’s integrity.
This amendment is especially needed in the age of AI. Students will be deterred from unauthorized uses of AI, such as cheating or plagiarism, because, under the new definition of an HV, doing so would incontrovertibly constitute an offense.
The second amendment the EC voted to approve relates to the requirements for a guilty verdict in an open or closed EC hearing.
The previous requirements read as follows:
“A guilty verdict in either an Executive Committee Hearing or a Student Body Hearing requires a determination beyond a reasonable doubt (1) that the accused student committed each act as alleged, on the basis of all evidence and testimony; and (2) if the alleged act(s) occurred, that the accused student violated the community’s trust.”
The amended language reads:
“A guilty verdict in either an Executive Committee Hearing or a Student Body Hearing requires a determination beyond a reasonable doubt (1) that the accused student committed each act as alleged, on the basis of all evidence and testimony; and (2) if the alleged act occurred, that the act constitutes an Honor Violation.”
This language difference may seem inconsequential or needless, but it is extremely significant.
By changing the language from violating the community’s trust to constituting an HV, the EC directly says a guilty verdict requires an HV. Paired with the new definition of an HV, the EC eliminates a major vulnerability in the previous process: shifting definitions of what constitutes a violation of the community’s trust.
As alluded to earlier, under the previous rules, lying, cheating or stealing could be dismissed from being HVs if they did not violate the community’s trust. Now, the EC has made it clear that lying, cheating and stealing are explicitly HVs.
Connecting to the latter amendment, this creates a closer tie between an HV and a guilty verdict. This means lying, cheating, and stealing are direct grounds for a guilty verdict in EC or student body hearings, ultimately boosting clarity around and support for the Honor System.
The Spectator unequivocally supports these two changes to the White Book.
Recent controversy surrounding the Honor System highlighted a drastic need for reform and a return to objective standards about what is an HV. Too much vagueness and interpretive leeway allowed what should be obvious HVs to be treated as such.
Even these changes are not enough to fully shore up the Honor System. As we argued in our editorial last year, the Executive Committee should propose an amendment that returns the requirement that chairs of Student Body Hearings must strike, with cause, prospective jurors unwilling to affirm their commitment to administer the Single Sanction.
This 2024 change could largely be blamed for the turmoil surrounding the most recent Open Hearing. Reversing this decision would restore the common-sense rule that only those who believe in the essence of the Honor System should be entrusted to adjudicate it.
Additionally, the Executive Committee has the chance to go a step further by requiring that EC members swear to support and uphold the Single Sanction. These two reforms would firmly shore up the Single Sanction, the Honor System’s defining feature.
But The Spectator does not oppose a step in the right direction merely because it does not go far enough.
These amendments change that by partially codifying the system and building a tighter connection between HVs and guilty verdicts. Hopefully, these changes strengthen the Honor System’s legitimacy on campus and continue to solidify our university’s status as an esteemed beacon of truth and honor to a world that desperately needs it.
