Amidst clamor in opposition, support for Code reform

Last weekend's referendum on Honor Code reform was a travesty. Officers of the University Student Government and Honor Committee blatantly sought to pervert the vote and depress voter participation, deliberately obscuring the substance of the issues at stake. In the process, they have cast a pall over campus democracy that calls the very legitimacy of the USG into question.

The referendum included four proposals: tape recording proceedings of the honor committee, permitting accused students to bring witnesses to their initial confrontation by the committee, making intent a factor in the penalty phase of honor committee proceedings and seating two faculty members on the committee. As of this writing, the outcome of the referenda is unknown. The first three proposals certainly deserved passage and good arguments recommend the last.

On Saturday evening, I received a mass email message from a high ranking class officer reminding me that the proposed amendments "have not been approved by the Honor Committee, the faculty, the USG, the President's Office, the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students, the University's legal council or any other body that deals with the honor code on a regular basis." The message went on to note the "lack of institutional support" for the reforms and invited students to seek guidance on their votes. Finally, the message suggested that students could "simply refrain from voting on this part of your online ballot." Class officers are too rarely leaders who speak out on campus issues. Sadly, this last part of the message crossed the line from legitimate leadership to undermining the democratic process. Similar emails followed from various other leaders of the USG.

It is a sad day when our class officers implore us to stay away from the ballot box.

Why has the USG so resolutely opposed honor reform? It cannot be because the honor system is perfect. Defense of the honor code in its current form verges on the Orwellian. Under Princeton's system, investigator, judge, jury and executioner all sit on the same virtually unaccountable panel. Before them, the accused has no right of confidential counsel; no guarantee that full records of proceedings will be kept; no consideration of a student's intentions in sentencing and no right of substantive appeal. An assortment of class president — more often elected for slogans and socials than jurisprudence — and students who found the position attractive make up the committee.

Faced with a quasi-judicial system only marginally better than the Star Chamber, one might hope that our representatives would seek to reform the code. This has not been the case. Instead they have shown themselves to prefer to preserve a verifiably bad system and to be grounded in full-blown status-quoism. A generous observer would ascribe the USG's stance to muddled reasoning and mistaken priorities. A cynic might suggest that USG officers — who advance effortlessly onto the committee — are determined to maintain a source of prestige, influence and power.

If our representatives were truly interested in protecting students from an unaccountable system they would embrace measures to consider intent in sentencing. A reasonable person knows that there is a great moral distinction between stupidly bringing a calculator to a math exam and dishonestly doing so. The difference between a year's suspension and probation with a failing grade on the exam adequately reflects this difference, as Mr. Chavkin's amendment proposed. That the Honor Committee finds intent "virtually impossible" to prove is beside the point. Real courts routinely make determinations of intent, and an honor system in which heavy punishments are hard to inflict is certainly better than one in which they are too easily imposed. The presumption of innocence is a basic part of the American legal tradition. It deserves to be part of Princeton's Honor Code.

The opponents of honor reform offer their most absurd arguments against the remaining amendments. The first requires that "every session in which the accused student is questioned by investigators or by any other member of the Honor Committee must be tape recorded." The second guarantees "the right of the accused student to have a witness present at the first 'confrontation' or questioning by the investigators during the investigation process." Detractors say that the Honor Committee "already tape records every session" but that including this in the Constitution would be an "unnecessary detail." If that's so, then why do they resist codifying it? In a system where the accuser's identity is a secret every other protection for the accused becomes doubly important.

Addressing the final amendment, the committee describes a supporter brought by the accused as an "added distraction" who is, "unnecessary because these meetings are tape recorded to guarantee fairness and objectivity." That the tape recording can be both an "unnecessary detail" and a crucial procedural safeguard is simply incoherent.

In truth, the Honor Code will touch very few of our lives. Yet, the current system — unaccountable, unrelenting and all too unknown — reflects poorly on Princetonians' attitudes about justice and giving people a fair shake. The recent conduct of many USG members is equally alarming. Exhorting us to leave things to the experts and trying to depress participation in a referendum amount to bad faith by our representatives. In the small world of Princeton's student government, both the legislature and the judiciary require urgent reform.

Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky is a Wilson School major from Queens, N.Y.