Presumed Innocent: Middlebury’s Honor Code
Sunder Ramaswamy
September 9, 2006
Good afternoon. I am very pleased to speak with all of you today as you prepare to sign the College’s Honor Code. I would like to thank Dean Gentry for the opportunity to try and explain what it means to me as a faculty member, and also how all of us – students and faculty alike – benefit from this.
The Honor Code is a signature feature of the Middlebury College experience. It weaves together strands of ‘honesty’, ‘respect’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘dignity’. I am sure that it comes as no surprise to you that a faculty member would affirm the virtues of academic honesty. You’ve probably been told by teachers, parents, and other adults for most of your life that cheating is wrong, immoral, and dishonest. And those same adults probably created circumstances that protected you from whatever impulses you might have had to cheat. As a small child, your parents might have gently admonished you when you denied responsibility for your own misbehavior. Your teachers in school might have tried hard to discourage cheating by suggesting you’d be caught if you tried. Now, however, as a student at Middlebury, signing the Honor Code means that you are committed to behaving with integrity and honor, not because your parents or your teachers tell you that you should, and not because someone will necessarily catch you if you don’t, but because you choose to. This freedom of choice comes with enormous responsibility but also a sense of empowerment.
Why make that choice? What do you gain from behaving with such presumed integrity in your academic pursuits? There are many good answers to that question, but I believe that one singular benefit of your commitment to academic honesty is the very nature of the relationship between students and faculty at Middlebury.
In an effort to explain what that relationship is, let me offer a counter example. I attended graduate school at a large research university in the mid-west, a school that had no honor code, even though most students behaved quite honorably During my years there, I served as a graduate instructor for a few undergraduate courses. In fact my first eye-popping experience was to walk into the Elliott Hall of Music, the largest auditorium of any university, to lecture on the ‘principles of microeconomics’ to 1000 students – nearly twice the size of the entering class here. If teaching such a large army of students was tough enough, conducting exams was another elaborate exercise. My retinue of 15 TAs had to make up, proctor, and grade exams. My fellow teaching assistants and I undertook those tasks with the presumption that many students, and possibly any student, might be prepared to cheat if not subjected to vigilant surveillance. We randomly assigned students to seats in the large auditorium so they couldn’t sit with friends who might provide answers to test questions. We created multiple copies of the same exam, same except for questions being randomly assigned across different color coded versions; We walked up and down the aisles while students completed a test, looking carefully for evidence of any suspicious behavior.
Now, you can imagine that when every student seems to be a potential cheater who may care more about getting a good grade than about learning or being fairly evaluated, the relationship between professors and their students is often tinged by the specter of mistrust. In that atmosphere, there is a distance between students and faculty; we often become potential adversaries, seeming to work at cross purposes.
When I left graduate school and came to Middlebury, I found a very different set of expectations. I was surprised when I was told at the orientation for new faculty members, that faculty do not proctor exams. The Honor Code, it was explained to me, means that there is a contract of trust between students and faculty: Students pledge that their work is their own and faculty respect the seriousness of that pledge by allowing students to complete exams without surveillance. I was somewhat unnerved (and truth be told, a bit skeptical, fresh off my graduate school experience) by this at first, but I quickly came to realize that we all benefit immeasurably from such a “social contract”. I can work with students with the assumption that they want to learn and are willing to take intellectual risks. I can assume that when a student writes “I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on this exam” that it is true. I can trust that the tactics that I used in graduate school to catch cheating students are no longer necessary, and are in fact antithetical to the nature of the faculty/student relationship at Middlebury.
We all benefit because we are partners in the educational enterprise. Like any good criminal justice system, the presumption here at the College is “innocent until proven guilty”, rather than my graduate school experience, where the starting presumption was one of ‘guilt’, and we as TAs worked hard to make sure that students stayed ‘innocent’.
I wish to make it clear, that despite this sense of idealism, I am not naïve. Although I assume that a student who writes the Honor Pledge is being truthful, I know that there are students who may choose to cheat on an exam or plagiarize a paper. I know because I have experienced it occasionally in my own classes. I will tell you, however, that the experience is rare, and when it does happen, it feels like a painful breach of faith, faith that is built on my experience with hundreds of students who have upheld the Honor Code and valued the reciprocal trust it engenders.
I urge you then, as you sign this pledge today, to consider carefully the commitment you are making, and to respect the sense of community that depends on it. It is a community that we are all honored to be a part of and into which we are happy to welcome you.
In closing, as we ask you to ‘think before you act”, I am reminded of the well known passage of a 19th century poem by Edward Fitzgerald, in his translation of the famous ‘Rubaiyyat’ by Omar Khayyam, which goes as follows --
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Thank you.
Note: This talk has been adapted from a similar speech given by Dean Susan Campbell, in 2005, with permission.