More than just a pledge: Honor Code for Princeton and life

The tables turned on me last year. I attended graduate school at the University of Arizona, and there, after 16 years as a student, my financial-aid deal thrust me to the other side of the classroom. The opportunity to shepherd more than 200 students through a freshman world geography course made me nearly giddy, and I approached the role of teaching assistant with the desire to pass on the best of what I had learned in college — a sample of a Princeton education, in an environment far removed from the basement of McCosh.

As a teacher, I tried to provide a knowledgeable yet friendly face to students far too accustomed to a surfeit of stale, inadequate pedagogy in a very large school. And I think I succeeded, for the most part. One student pledged his eternal affinity to me when I once used the f-word in class. Another thanked me for telling her that she was too smart for Arizona and should apply to Duke. And still others succeeded in staying awake.

But because of the number and diversity of students who overflowed my 18-seat seminar table in each of my four sections, I doubt that all my students received anything close to a Princeton education. But one student named James did.

James' Princeton-like education did not come by way of discussions on post-structuralism or astrophysics or econometrics — I would not have been qualified to teach any of those. I did not attempt to correct his essays with a John McPhee-esque pen, and he did not take in lessons on global development or American literature — which I was qualified to teach, sort of. Rather, I gave him something that I hope all of us are capable of teaching: an education in Princeton values.

About halfway through the spring semester, James turned in a paper that read more like a confession than a research report. It included sentence fragments, misinterpretation of data and a flimsy structure common to freshmen at Arizona and Princeton alike. But it also included incorrect and irrelevant data, stray references to Warsaw — when the topic was the nation of Jordan — and disjointed paragraphs that bespoke of furious cutting and pasting and pasting again.

The name casually affixed to this tract belonged to James, but it was not really his paper. I sifted through all my other papers to find that about 90 percent of it had been lifted verbatim from the work of another student who wrote on Poland. In one ignominious gesture, James conveyed to me not only everything he knew about the topic (less than nothing) and everything he felt about education (total disregard).

I had never seen plagiarism before, and it was not pretty. Like most Princeton students, I had never had any direct contact with our honor code beyond my own compliance with it. I had always followed the code with paranoid diligence — in all my papers I quoted incessantly, stuck religiously to the footnote format in my shredded MLA handbook and avoided paraphrasing altogether. So when I read James' paper, something kicked in that I can describe only as instinct.

In his paper, I recognized not a struggling freshman but rather an unscrupulous violator of the honor code. And I recognized not necessarily a violation of Arizona's honor code (assuming there was such a thing), but of Princeton's honor code — my honor code. James' offense would qualify him for expulsion from Princeton, and I would have lobbied for such a punishment. But in my resolve to throw the book at him, I found that in Arizona "the book" is only so big. A thin, workman-like document, Arizona's Code of Academic Integrity cuts a narrower swath than our honor code. It defines how teachers may judge an offending piece of work, but it does not regard the student who writes it. It seeks justice, but not education.

Certainly we hope that Princeton offers a better education than Arizona — or at least an education more appropriate to its student body — but I cannot bring myself to conceive of any curriculum or student who would not benefit from Princeton's emphasis on honor. A student who successfully adheres to Princeton's admission criteria should not be considered inherently more honorable than one who slides in with 20,000 other kids, nor should his work be more valuable.

But Arizona clearly disagrees. Of a selection of penalties I could impose at my own discretion — including no penalty at all — the most severe was a failing grade in the course. At Princeton, a dishonorable student gets kicked out of school. At Arizona, for the very same offense, a plagiarized paper receives an "F." And though at Arizona much worse offenses usually receive far kinder penalties, I chose to fail James because honor is one rule that ought to apply to Tigers and Wildcats alike.

When I confronted James to bid him farewell, he appeared dumbfounded as he took leave of my classroom for the last time. I could tell that he thought you are not supposed to be able to fail in college — that nobody really punishes kids who cheat and there is no such thing as academic integrity. But now he knows that you can, and people do, and there most certainly is.

I have been taught differently. Josh Stephens is a former 'Prince' Associate Editorial Page Editor from Los Angeles, Calif. He can be reached at jrs@alumni.princeton.edu.