A Presidential Defense of the Honor System
[The following highlight features email communication between Professor of Law Gwen T. Handelman and President John D. Wilson about the alleged “intolerance” of the Honor System after a law student was dismissed from the university for an Honor Violation in 1995.
According to the Executive Committee President of the time, university officials failed to remove the student from campus in a timely manner, which resulted in a series of unsubstantiated allegations about the EC’s handling of the case and an open forum at Law School. The following letters were accessed in Washington and Lee University Special Collections and Archives.]
To President Wilson,
The Faculty Handbook states that all faculty members have an obligation "to support and uphold the Honor System in all its various aspects" and recites the student Executive Committee’s definition of that obligation. It is unclear the extent to which the Executive Committee’s statement of "recommended practices" reflects University policy.
The "Honor System" has troubled me for some time. Especially after last night’s forum at the Law School with members of the Executive Committee, I recognize that I should have spoken out before. I deeply regret my complicity, by my silence, in the wrongs that have been committed in the name of right, such as the recent expulsion of a young man who enriched the law school immeasurably as the driving force in establishing the Public Interest Law Students Association.
The Executive Committee's procedures are morally disturbing. They obstruct truth-finding and are fundamentally unfair. Further, the "single sanction" in fact imposes disparate sanctions on law students and undergraduates, because a law student's opportunity to pursue legal education elsewhere is constrained by practices that do not apply to an undergraduate's admission to another school. Finally, the harsh "single sanction," particularly as applied to law students, produces disproportionate, unjustly severe results in many cases, which I believe is largely responsible for selective prosecution and application of the sanction, with pernicious effect.
I share a widely-held perception that the system is used, wittingly or unwittingly, as an instrument of intolerance. However, I do not have access to reliable data to verify that similar cases have been treated dissimilarly or to correlate the results with the racial, ethnic, gender, affiliational and other differentiating characteristics of the students involved. It is my hope that such a study will be undertaken. Until then, at least, I hope that you will clarify that faculty are not obligated to facilitate or assist prosecutions contrary to the dictates of conscience.
Dear Professor Handelman:
Your memorandum of 4 April is deeply disturbing. It makes representations that I have never heard before. I am especially appalled that you would cite, as true, the perception that the system is used, wittingly or unwittingly, as "an instrument of intolerance." To follow that statement with an acknowledgment that you have no evidence to support it only underscores the tone of irresponsibility that pervades your memorandum.
I think, also, that it is disingenuous of you to ask me to clarify that faculty are not obligated to facilitate or assist prosecutions "contrary to the dictates of conscience." No citizen of this country should feel compelled to violate his or her deepest convictions and beliefs. Conscientious objection is a valued privilege in this society and should be exercised when necessary and with full understanding of the responsibilities that accompany it.
But your memorandum does not address an individual claim upon conscience. It indicts the Honor System per se and implicitly calls into question the delegation of responsibility for its operation from the Board of Trustees directly to the Executive Committee of the Student Body, a delegation that has been in effect for well over a century.
Of course you can and should offer constructive criticism when you have solid reasons for doing so. But if your quarrel is, as I take it to be, a quarrel with the Board’s very act of delegation and with the concept of a community of trust as defined by the Executive Committee, then I believe your recourse is only to the Board. You are not, in good faith, free to take it upon yourself to cancel the decision of the Board by subverting the work of the Executive Committee.
If I may add a demographic footnote to your unsubstantiated "widely-held perception," let me report to you that in the past five years 23 students have left the University as a consequence of honor charges placed against them. These include 17 men and 6 women, 1 law student, 16 members of Greek organizations and 2 black students. I do not myself discover in these numbers a basis for the presumption that we are here dealing with "an instrument of intolerance."
There is much in your memo that deserves more careful thinking than you have, in my opinion, provided. Your inaccurate speculation about the disparate impact of the single sanction is a case in point. There are good arguments that can be urged … and over the years have been urged … against the single sanction. But what you posit (again without evidence) as categorical differences between the responses of law and undergraduate schools to applicants who have violated honor codes does not strike me as one of them.
But I will not go on. If you care to discuss the matter further I will see you of course.
Most sincerely,
John D. Wilson