Wellesley's Fabulous Honor Code

I've heard this question a few times, "Are faculty bound by the Honor Code?" Apparently I'm not the only one, because it appears on the General Judiciary list of "Frequently Asked Questions about the Honor Code." Here's the answer that appears there:

The Honor Code is an agreement between faculty and students. In this agreement, Academic Council commissioned a set mode of conduct based on trust and respect to be followed by Wellesley students. The Honor Code is in fact a student-run system, but the Faculty and Administration play a significant part in the regulation of the Honor Code.

I hate to pick on the former Chief Justice who wrote it, but this is a C+ answer. It is Clintonesque in its calculated opacity. Here is my suggestion for a replacement. It's a bit longer than the original one, but I hope you will find it more satisfying:

If you mean to ask whether the actions forbidden by the Honor Code are also forbidden for faculty, the answer is yes. However, violations by faculty are not under the jurisdiction of the General Judiciary. Depending on the nature of the violation, grievances against faculty might be addressed by the Committee on Faculty Appointments, a special Grievance Committee, or, as in cases of academic dishonesty, an external group.

If you mean to ask whether faculty are obligated to police the Honor Code, the answer, as I explained in the previous article, is yes again. On this point, the language of the Honor Code is atypically clear. The Honor Code "is the responsibility of every member of the College community."

If, on the other hand, this question is meant to ask whether faculty are obligated to assume that the Honor Code is never violated, the answer is no. That may seem obvious, but some faculty and some students seem to be confused on this point.

I have talked to a number of faculty who seem to think that the Honor Code means that they have no obligation to prevent or detect cheating. The Honor Code is a frequent topic of conversation on faculty and staff conferences, and these threads provide a survey of faculty attitudes. Of course these attitudes span a range, but the one that always makes my head spin goes something like this:

Well, I've been here for [lots of] years and I've never seen a case of serious plagiarism. Of course, I'm not really looking, so I can't be sure. A few years ago I caught a student cheating on an exam, but I didn't take the case to the General Judiciary.

As they say in the business, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." This kind of naivity is too common, and it puts us in a situation where, if cheating does occur, it is unlikely to be detected or punished.

It may seem paradoxical, but I think that the environment that is most conducive to trust between faculty and students is an environment where cheaters face significant risk of being caught, and where the consequences are dire. Willful obliviousness to cheating undermines students' faith in the Honor Code and the grades that are supposed to evaluate their work.

Even if faculty turn a blind eye, students see a lot. I heard about an incident where three students were caught cheating on a take-home exam. One of the students offered the self-serving excuse that "everyone else" was cheating too. Of course she is wrong about "everyone" but it is likely that she has witnessed other violations of the Honor Code besides her own. If her role models had been caught, I suspect she would have been less likely to follow them.

More importantly, we're not doing a student any favors by letting her get away with things here. Dishonesty is a habit; conversely, honesty requires discipline and practice. The biggest favor we can do for a student is to help her develop that discipline. For some students, a trip to the General Judiciary is a transformative experience. It is a powerful thing to sit at a table and face the judgment of the community.

Of course, we have to avoid the extreme. If the pursuit of cheaters sets the faculty spinning like Lieutenant Commander Queeg's ball bearings, there is no question that the atmosphere of the school and our educational aspirations suffer. But the other extreme---the one I think we are too close too---is just as bad.

In the next article I will discuss another frequent confusion about the Honor Code, and suggest some ways to make the Honor Code more effective.