Opinion — Honoring Honor

            I’ve been back at Princeton as Episcopal chaplain since 1986, but only in the last couple of years have I found myself with disconcerting frequency beginning sentences, “In my day…”

            Although I still think of myself as young, at age forty-nine I am older than most of the faculty; and as one of the few people on campus whose experience with Princeton goes back more than thirty years, I now find myself one of the guardians of institutional memory. This is a peculiar and not altogether welcome role for one who has largely delighted in the disappearance of the old elite, white-male Princeton — not because it was politically incorrect, but because at least some of it was just plain wrong. Yet the old Princeton had a few things right, or at least nearly right, and I am continually surprised by how few people on campus today are aware of them.

            All this came crashing home last November, when I found myself involved in a debate about the Honor Code. Students were clamoring for self-scheduled exams (in a subsequent referendum, 85 percent voted in favor of them). In response, the administration expressed concern about potential cheating, noting that Princeton’s honor system is a “limited” one that was never intended to cover anything as open to abuse as self-scheduled exams. 

            The observation is at least partially correct: our honor code is, indeed, limited. The issue is how and why it is limited, and whether it has always been so limited. 

            The registrar’s examination guidelines for faculty make fairly stringent recommendations (in some cases requirements) to minimize opportunities for cheating. These include placing students in alternate seats, requiring them to take exams in the rooms to which they are assigned, and requiring professors to prepare new questions for make-ups taken more than twenty-four hours after a scheduled exam.

            Few people on campus today realize that the Honor Code hasn’t always been so restrictive — that not long ago, for example, students were permitted at a professor’s discretion to take exams wherever they wanted. I took few of my exams in a lecture hall and remember vividly taking my senior comps in my room, with my feet propped up on a pile of notebooks that contained all I needed to know about the first question — which I blew badly.

            It’s interesting to look back on that incident: my bungling of that single question may have cost me departmental honors. But over the years; the knowledge that I was able to resist the temptation to cheat when absolutely no one would have known has meant a great deal more to me than departmental honors. 

            Why didn’t I cheat? Not, certainly, because I’m so much more honest than the next person. If I were, the temptation wouldn’t even have occurred to me. I didn’t cheat, because, as a student at Princeton, I lived in a community in which honesty was assumed. To be sure, I had my own principles; but, equally to the point, the community supported my principles, not by making it next to impossible for me to violate them but, paradoxically, by permitting a situation that tested them.

            That chance is exactly what seems to have disappeared from what the university persists in calling an honor code but which remains so in name only. Quite simply, the faculty and administration no longer trust the students. There is no other reason for opposing self-scheduled exams in principle, and some professors and administrators are frank to admit as much. 

            The wedge of mistrust may have been driven early in this century, when, in violation of the spirit of the Honor Code, the faculty decided that it would cover exams but not papers. (Today, few students are aware it is the Discipline Committee, not the Honor Committee, that handles plagiarism cases.) Apparently, the faculty at the time believed that students would be unable to deal with the academic niceties of plagiarism in different disciplines, and retained that responsibility for itself. It rejected (or perhaps never considered) the use of faculty members as consultants when necessary, rather than as judge and jury. The unfortunate result is that, because papers have replaced exams in perhaps a majority of courses, the academic lives of many students are largely untouched by the Honor Code. 

            But I believe we’re dealing here with matters beyond the mechanics of Princeton’s Honor Code. The deterioration of trust in the university community is surely a reflection of what has happened in the society at large.

            I was fourteen years old the first time Americans knew their president had lied to them. (It was not, of course, the first time a president had lied, just the first time we were aware that he had.) In 1960, the Soviets shot down a U-2 spy plane over the U.S.S.R., and after repeated denials, Dwight Eisenhower finally admitted that we’d been making such flights for some time. We liked Ike and so forgave him; but the idea that we could trust our leaders was at least bruised, if not yet fractured. Things got worse. After John Kennedy was assassinated, we were sure the Warren Commission wasn’t telling us everything. Then came the Vietnam War and Lyndon Johnson’s credibility gap. The late sixties and early seventies witnessed the “generation gap” and a crisis in young people’s trust in their parents. Watergate and the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 shattered what little trust remained in our institutions.

            That was a crucial fourteen years, and it transformed American culture with respect not just to whom we trust but even to whether we can trust at all. That most Princeton faculty members grew up during that period may help explain why trust does not come easily to them. That our students grew up even later makes it difficult for them to imagine the moment when the Honor Code was established, when people as a community said their word was their bond and meant it.

            Yet the Princeton of 1893, the year the Honor Code was established, was not a place where people simply acted honorably by habit and trusted one another implicitly. To the contrary, cheating was virtually epidemic, a game between students and the faculty which the faculty was losing badly. Students decided to take matters into their own hands, and — miracle of miracles — the faculty trusted them to do so.

            Ironically, by all accounts there is little academic cheating of any sort at Princeton today — far less than is reported at many other institutions. Although the Honor Code is in practice little more than a shell, its ethos apparently remains influential. But the fact remains that today’s professors are less willing to trust students than were their predecessors of 1893. Today’s faculty may feel it has more to lose precisely because all hell isn’t breaking loose; but what students are losing is an education that tests not only their minds but their integrity. 

            The first step is remedying this state of affairs is the students’, and they have taken it. This fall witnessed two referenda on the Honor Code, the first proposing self-scheduled exams and the second that students vote on the code itself every four years. Under the latter proposal, two consecutive negative votes would lead to the student government’s re-evaluation and reform of the Honor Code. Although 68 percent of the voters favored this amendment, it failed the 75 percent necessary for passage. Arguably, those on both sides of the referendum voted in favor of the system. Presumably, the year voters wanted to increase students’ “ownership” of the Honor Code, which through regular debate and reform would become a living document, while the nay voters wanted to protect it from destruction by amendment.      

            The large turnout —50 percent — demonstrated the depth of student feeling on these matters. With encouragement rather than skepticism from the faculty and administration, students can use that passion to build a community of trust. To be sure, the compact won’t look like the one struck in 1893. The word “honor” itself is somewhat archaic, smacking of duels between southern aristocrats, and may unnecessarily confuse the issue. Moreover, the far greater diversity of today’s constituency complicates communication. Princeotn committed itself long ago to diversity; and now we need to deal fully with its implications.

            What we’re talking about is as basic as human nature gets: a community that assumes people will deal honestly with one another, thus drawing the best from each other; in which people care enough about this assumption so that, when it fails, as it surely will from time to time, they will acknowledge that failure and deal with it; in which there is room to cheat, because that’s the only way honor is tested; in which trust is held sacred, not because it is a Princeton tradition but because it is the essence of a true community.

            If the prevailing atmosphere of mistrust spurs students to vow as a community to take the Honor Code seriously — and to demand that the faculty and administration do the same — then we’ll be well on the way. That will require of us all a leap of faith and a willingness to risk being fools, not something Princetonians do easily. But better a fool in support of the highest human aspirations than a cynic in the service of their destruction. That’s what Princeton got right in 1893 — and that’s what it’s time to reclaim in 1995. 

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Frank Strasburger has served since 1896 as Episcopal chaplain at Princeton. 

This was originally published in the March 8, 1995 issue of PAW.