Honor and Obey SIFTING THROUGH THE PARADOXES OF ENFORCED HONESTY by Scotch graphic by Michelle Fields Show a little love for the Honor System. Fake the loving if you don't truly feel it down deep. The Honor System needs all the loving it can get in these troubled and trying times of ours. There exist few university institutions quite so trodden-upon and scoffed-at as the U. of Va.'s regime of self-enforced Honor, and with good reason. It's well-documented that the Honor System is shall we say a somewhat selective beast: while there is the much-touted perk of being able to take the occasional exam outside the classroom, many professors still require students to stay in the exam room and sit one seat apart, and most professors and TAs threaten not to grade your exam if you haven't written out and signed the Honor Pledge. Until recently, students were not permitted to bring their backpacks into the U.Va. Bookstore, a controversy only partially put to rest last year by the Bookstore's capitulating on the backpack issue but bringing in the Rent-A-Finest to patrol the floors and level suspicious looks at everyone. And who could forget the Honor Committee's infamous Day Without Honor two years back, a colossal failure of a PR event during which students and faculty were supposed to act as if the Honor System didn't exist -- and which slipped by unnoticed, a day like any other, much to the cackling amusement of anyone even remotely cynical (which, in these troubled and trying times of ours, consists of just about everybody). Then there are the other standard-issue eyebrow-raisers of the Honor System. Watch your stuff in Clemons Library. Use bike locks. Don't walk alone at night. Feel free to indulge in a bit of underage drinking out on Rugby whilst the university looks the other way. When you get right down to the brick and khaki of it, U.Va. is just like every single other university in the world in terms of undesirables: there's crime, dishonesty, hypocrisy, general unpleasantness, poor hygiene, bad grammar, etc. The operative difference is that here we insist on putting on airs and proclaiming proudly to anyone who will listen (i.e. other U.Va. people) that we live in a Community Of Trust. It's like everyone thinks that if we say it loud enough -- Community Of Trust, say it with me people Community Of Trust -- then suddenly the Honor Fairy will flutter on down and liberally sprinkle our hallowed grounds with shimmering Honor Dust and we can return to our homes for another semester of halcyon studiousness as only gentlemen and ladies would have it. Except, in the words of Ice-T: Shit ain't like that. It's real fucked up. The administration and the faculty don't trust the students, and, let's face it, a large portion of us students aren't really worthy of that trust. We're not stupid. We didn't just get off the boat. We've been to high school, most of them public schools at that. We've been lying, cheating, and stealing ever since we first saw it on TV as impressionable toddlers. If given the chance and the circumstance, you know we'd be copying tests and term papers like medieval monks, muttering various things to ourselves about the ends and the means. But honesty is of course its own reward. The problem with that, for the university, is that if students are just going around not lying, not cheating, and not stealing, then there are no outward appearances that the Honor System and the Honor Committee are really working. And delivering on outward appearances is U.Va. in a nutshell. But short of dosing Charlottesville's water with sodium pentothal, the only way that the university can make it look like it's actively taking steps to work the Honor System is by cracking down, having Honor trials, kicking students out, and thus getting some tangible results. But which way does the university prefer it -- to have more Honor convictions, which would show that the Honor System really works in weeding the undesirables out of the Community Of Trust? Or would the university rather see fewer cases even brought to trial, to show that the U.Va. community is honest to begin with? Is the Honor System punitive or preventative? This is the modern Honor System. The one that's thought of in terms of law enforcement, the one that operates on that principle that's been in effect ever since The Law came into existence: Fear is a wonderful motivator. The Honor System doesn't really promote honesty directly; more like it "encourages" honesty, say, analogous to the way in which the Mafia "encourages" its clients to pay back on time. If we eliminate from consideration for a moment those admirable folks who walk among us who would never ever in their lives even consider lying, cheating, or stealing (i.e. people who don't need a silly Honor System to keep them in line, and we're told these people do exist), then we the remaining flawed individuals would then be more likely to obey the Honor code simply because the threat of the alternative (i.e. getting caught) is kind of a cold-sweat-breaking bummer. The Honor code works largely because of one serious reason: we students are scared to death of being expelled. In these troubled and trying times of ours, when a college degree and a sparkling-clean resumé make for the only ticket to the kind of success we now expect from the American Dream, the threat of having an Expulsion rap on the old permanent record is a genuine heart-stopper. Who wouldn't kowtow to such pressure? Other universities have cruder, blunt-trauma-type regulations for dealing with flawed students: the faculty comes right out and informs you that if you're caught cheating, your ass is grass. But here at U.Va., there's the added air of the pompous Community Of Trust sentiment that that's really just the result of keeping students in an atmosphere of quiet paranoia, not to mention wielding a kind of institutionalized conscience that tries to make Honor offenses seem less like policy violations than they are heartbreaking oh-how-could-you betrayals. But all these issues assume the optimist's view of the Honor System: that the founders of the System obviously meant well, probably visualizing a spirit of mutual trust and respect between students and faculty as well as between the students themselves in non-academic areas, rather than the dogmatic threat of expulsion that's now aimed at students. So what if the founders deliberately meant for the Honor System to be a substanceless, unenforceable, hopelessly idealistic pretense, but that dealing with that pretense, and with all the people who dogmatically swear by it, is what would teach U.Va. graduates how to really function out in the great big wide Real World, thus giving their cherished System a great deal more resilience and relevance? And if that's refashioning the ideals of history to fit the reality of modern society, well, that's U.Va. in a nutshell too. This is why the Honor System deserves your love. Because it's fake. Because more people focus on the letter rather than on the spirit, more on the supposed prestige than on the pragmatism. Because it's based on appearances and gestures, independent of intent or the sincerity of the sincerity you act out. Because that's how the world works. And it's best to get used to the dire importance of maintaining these façades, and maintaining them in spite of your better thinking. Let's not kid ourselves. Your life in these aforementioned troubled and trying times of ours will pretty much be a series of pretenses: jobs and relationships and situations that demand that you act a certain way and pretend that you truly believe in certain principles and basically keep your true thoughts to yourself. And what better way to get it ingrained in the noodle upstairs than to have your desperately-important college education founded upon a system designed to teach you how to deal with pretenses and carrying on in the face of pointless declaratives and posturings, a system that lets you deal with hypocrisy-for-your-own-good on a daily basis, a system whose very name is thus so hypocritically named "The Honor System"? For once, let's be truthful -- not honest -- with ourselves. The Honor System doesn't work, at least not the way most people think it should, but who cares whether or not it actually works. It's the constant putting up with the ridiculousness of the system and its conflicts that serves the real and relevant purpose. If you don't believe that, please convince yourself that you believe it. You'll feel much better about the Honor System that way, and we're all about feeling better here. And the next you hear someone say, "Man, the Honor System is bullshit!" just remember -- to invoke that ubiquitous U.Va.-centric phrase of affirming justification which can be applied to everything from academic excellence to oral sex -- Mr. Jefferson would have wanted it that way.

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