UVA Faculty Have Seceded from the Honor System
The Jefferson Council has received a letter from a senior University of Virginia faculty member who, for fear of retaliation, asks to remain anonymous. He outlines what he calls “generic” concerns of the UVA faculty — generic in the sense that they are broadly held and not of a political or ideological nature. The issues should be of great interest to alumni and others who wish the best for UVA, so we are pleased to publish them in a series of posts on The Jefferson Council website. The first focuses on a critical dysfunction of the Honor System.
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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.
[The Honor Council] 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 percent. 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 percent.
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.