Honor: An undergraduate affair?

My editor, knowing my bias toward the dilatory, felt safe in approaching me very late in the week with the specific assignment of an essay about the Honor Code. Her initiative had a double impetus. She wanted some background for tomorrow's page, and she knew that for more than a decade I served as an informal faculty adviser to the Honor Committee. Indeed, I think I still am such an advisor, though since no Honor Committee chair has sought me out in the last four years, I cannot be sure.

The Honor System at Princeton does seem to me to be in crisis. So what else is new? On Feb. 2, 1928, Dean of the College Christian Gauss, the most distinguished dean in our history, tried to persuade a concerned alumnus of Princeton to write an article for the 'Prince' in support of the Honor Code. He thought the matter was pressing, but that it required student rather than faculty intervention. "The trouble with the system, if there is any trouble, is with the decline in the esprit de corps," he wrote.

"You realize, too, that my position is delicate. The administration has nothing whatever to do with the Honor System. It is an undergraduate affair. They are in honor bound to maintain it. All I can do is talk with some of the members of the Honor Committee." The concerned alumnus, one F. Scott Fitzgerald '17, apparently had writing commitments of greater priority. Pity. Now I have to do it.

My own investment in the Honor Code is twofold. In the first place, I do believe that intellectual honesty is a moral obligation born of intellectual freedom and that it is one of the few absolute requirements of any learning community. It is my further belief that the Honor Code embodies our only real, as opposed to illusory, mechanism of what used to be called Student Power.

I often hear that the Honor Code is "a relic of a bygone era." True enough, but so is the Constitution of the United States. A striking difference is that we have been better at dragging the Constitution along with us, using techniques of amendment and interpretation, as we have moved through the decades. The Honor Code enshrines the nearly vanished pedagogy of a century gone in which the only kinds of evaluated student work were "recitations" and, especially, in-class examinations overseen by invigilators. The deal struck by the founders of the Code got the profs out of the exam rooms by promising that students themselves would be the proctors. Today, nobody knows what a "recitation" was, and formal final exams play an ever smaller role in a rich pedagogical repertory that includes problem sets, term papers, lab reports, junior and senior independent work. In my experience, few instances of discovered or suspected student cheating relate to final exams.

Instead of bringing the Code along with these changes in a timely manner, a jurisdictional vacuum developed. That is where the student-faculty-administration Discipline Committee came from. For many years, we have had two asymmetrical jurisdictions to deal with cases differing not in their essence (intellectual honesty) but in accidental manifestation (cheating on a paper as opposed to an exam).

If "esprit de corps" was in decline in Dean Gauss' day, its fall is by now nearly complete. For many of today's students, the word "honor" itself, even without its ascription to "gentlemen," has a fusty and archaeological aroma, a redolence of some lost aristocratic tribal value, like the reckless valor of a Mucius Scaevola or that of a Kiowa brave. This is not, alas, modish postmodern cynicism. For where in our public life can they point to models of the honor envisaged by the drafters of the Code?

The Honor Code was founded in local social consensus. Surely the essence of that consensus — a catholic obligation for truthfulness and fair dealing in our most important academic transactions — is as evident today as it was in 1906? Or is "surely" simply a weasel word I use to introduce a clause of wishful thinking? In order to deal with cheating, the University is perfectly capable of operating a more capacious Discipline Committee, one that, for better or worse, mimics the tone and structures of our judicial institutions, which catches some crooks and misses some others but generally keeps a lid on things. Such a committee need have nothing more to do with "honor" than our courts do. If students want the Honor Code, it's time for them to speak up. For as Gauss said, "The administration has nothing whatever to do with the Honor System. It is an undergraduate affair." But is his next sentence also true?

"They are in honor bound to maintain it." John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.