President Joel Gardner’s Letter to the BOV
Letter from Senior Faculty Member
A Note from The Jefferson Council President Joel Gardner
November 18, 2024Dear Members of the Board of Visitors,
I am in receipt of a letter written by a senior tenured faculty member expressing concerns about various circumstances prevalent on Grounds. This professor wishes to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation by the administration. One of the matters he/she discusses is the deterioration of our Honor System, focusing on the "secession" by the faculty from the System. But before delving into this professor's observations, I think it is of the utmost importance to understand why a tenured professor at Mr. Jefferson's University would be in fear of expressing his/her views that are critical of existing practices.
Significantly, this is not the first time a tenured faculty member has requested that I transmit his/her views to the powers that be at the University for fear of punishment by the administration. Three years ago, such a faculty member asked that I deliver to the administration an anonymous letter detailing concerns about the suppression of free speech and the lack of thought diversity at UVA. And just recently another senior professor explained to me why many faculty are reluctant to express their views openly, stating that the administration is "staggeringly punitive" against anyone who publicly opposes it.
If anyone might consider that these may be the ramblings of a few malcontents, then the recent well publicized letter signed by 128 University physicians and health care professionals that professes that this administration fosters a "culture of fear and retaliation" should resolve this consideration. Further, if one thinks this atmosphere of retribution is limited to faculty and not students, they should study the cases of Morgan Bettinger, Kieran Bhattacharya, and Matan Goldstein.
Now, back to the Honor System. For generations of Wahoos our Honor System was the core of their experience at UVA. Tens of thousands of UVA alums left Charlottesville with the visceral understanding that honor, character and integrity were more important than power or wealth. For over 150 years the Honor System was our "Holy of Holies" respected and renowned throughout the country. As one of our most famous and loyal alums, Mortimer Caplin, said: "We are talking about a way of life which is practiced here, which is ingrained in our daily existence, and which becomes a permanent part of us...never forgotten, wherever we go, whatever we do." Well, today our Honor System is tottering on its last legs, a mere shadow of its former self. And who is to blame? According to our anonymous professor, one group that is integrally involved in the System's demise is the faculty:
"The UVA Faculty seceded from the Honor system long ago. Surveys confirm that the number of Faculty members willing to bring an honor charge is small and diminishing. New Faculty members are warned against the system by their colleagues, and professors discourage their Teaching Assistants from bringing honor charges and will not do so themselves. Instructors who ignore such warnings bring a single honor case—and then swear never to do so again. Honor thought that this was a matter of revulsion at the single sanction, because they were so told.
But now that the single sanction is gone, little has changed, and the real reasons are revealed. The disciplinary systems the Faculty all knew as undergraduates and graduate students required of the instructor only the plagiarized paper and the source from which it was taken, or two exams with identical answers. The instructor was not expected to prepare a brief or required (or allowed) to appear at a hearing. And if the case of plagiarism or cheating was well-founded (it almost always is), the conviction-rate was near 100%. It is quite otherwise at UVA. Preparation of an honor case is onerous for the faculty member who is obliged to operate as a sort of prosecuting attorney. Then he must come to a hearing where he is transformed into a witness and roundly abused by an undergraduate acting as a defense attorney and often by members of the jury panel as well. And even after all that work and unpleasantness, the chance of conviction is low (often because the jury panel does not consider that academic crimes meet the criterion of “seriousness”) and even without the Single Sanction remain lower than the Faculty think right and proper, which is, again, nearly 100%.
Most European universities have no central disciplinary system: each professor simply deals with cheating himself by failing the student in his class. That is now essentially what happens at UVA (the Law School, notoriously, now has its own system that replaces Honor). And the UVA Faculty is prepared to live with that."
So what to do about the evisceration of what was traditionally considered to be the University's "greatest treasure" and its "most cherished tradition."
There is no simple answer; and there is no doubt that Honor is a student run system. The question is, when and why did the student body essentially turn its back on honor? As a UVA historian and someone who has been granularly involved with UVA since 1966, I can say the major fault lies with successive administrations since 2010 which have replaced honor as the defining ethic of the University with a political/social agenda. This was most clearly demonstrated with President Ryan's "Great and Good" manifesto. By our count, the word "honor" appears four times, while the word "diversity" appears over twenty times.
Historically, few students came to UVA already imbued with the University's concepts of honor. It was the administration and faculty that were the forces that were responsible for establishing honor as a paramount principle and virtue to define the students' four years on Grounds. But ultimately the proverbial buck stops with you — the Board of Visitors. Exhibit A is The Manual of The Board of Visitors of The University of Virginia. Under the section of "Powers and Duties," the very first one mentioned is as follows:
"1. the preservation of the ideals and traditions of the University and particularly encouragement of the maintenance of the Honor System by the student body;"
As regards this "duty", the clearly observable facts demonstrate that the BOV as a whole has been negligent at best. It will take a concerted "encouragement" effort for an extended period to reinvigorate a culture of honor among the student body — but if the administration is instructed to put twenty percent of the time, effort and money into honor that it does for DEI, perhaps a beginning can be made. Regarding the faculty, it should be easier. Since maintenance of the Honor System is a duty of the BOV, it is the responsibility of the BOV to strongly encourage the faculty to support the system.
In closing, I would strongly recommend that at the next BOV meeting, instead of viewing the obligatory self-congratulatory videos created by the administration's multimillion dollar public relations department, the BOV seriously consider how to remedy the pervasive atmosphere of fear and retribution on Grounds and the demise of our most treasured tradition.
Respectfully,
Joel B. Gardner
College 1970; Law 1974
President
The Jefferson Council for the University of Virginia
Website: jeffersoncouncil.org