Last Spring my roommate and I traveled down to Lexington, Virginia, to spend the weekend at Washington and Lee University with some friends from home. The students down there were celebrating "Fancy Dress," a southern and slightly more elaborate version of our own Green Key weekend.
As a demonstration of my southern hospitality, I brought down a bottle of good bourbon for our W+L hosts and promptly cracked it open for a toast when we arrived. After a few drinks, I placed the bottle on a table in the middle of the fraternity, fully expecting that the frat-guy prepsters and pretty southern belles mingling in the area would soon polish it off. To my amazement, no one touched it. I saw one guy approach it, but after failing to find out to whom it belonged, he replaced it on the table and looked elsewhere.
This kind of behavior might seem surprising. After all, when was the last time anyone asked before pouring themselves a drink at a Dartmouth fraternity? Imagine! However, such behavior is the norm at W+L. Each student is expected to uphold a strict honor code that extends not only to the classroom, but to outside activities as well. Students have even been expelled for presenting fake ID's to bartenders in nearby towns (not kidding). This honor code works because students, faculty, and administrators refuse to tolerate any form of lying, cheating, or stealing, and the ubiquitous aura of General Robert E. Lee, entombed in the center of campus, sanctions this culture of propriety.
Which brings me, of course, to our beloved CS4 cheating scandal. To me, Dartmouth's decision to exonerate every implicated student in the introductory computer science class seems less important for what it says about "right" or "wrong" than for what it says about the college's commitment to principles of honor. Indeed, I have to wonder if the college has any real commitment to this question at all. Just take a look at Dean Larimore's and Berger's open letter to the community.
After announcing the termination of the cheating investigation, Dean Larimore remarks that while "it was clear to the COS that there were some students whose actions violated Dartmouth's Academic Honor Principle," it was "impossible to determine who those students may be." O.K., let me get this straight: some homework assignments were obvious fabrications, but they can't figure out who those assignments belonged todid the students forget to put their names on their papers? Doubtful. What seems more likely is that the college and the COS, cognizant of the fact that they couldn't punish all the cheaters, decided not to punish any of them. Imagine if our legal system worked that way.
According to the Dean's letter, the purported reason for terminating the investigation was the "complexity of the situation." Indeed, the situation WAS complex. But don't they know that almost every cheating case is "complex?" Aren't they aware that there are always extenuating circumstances complicating matters of human fallibility? "Complexity" shouldn't deter investigation; it should invite it.
Honor codes do not work unless they are enforced. But they also fail when the larger institution fails to create a culture that champions honor. This too, was absent in the open letter. Although Deans Larimore and Berger acknowledge the fact that cheating occurred, nowhere in the letter do they explicitly condemn it; nowhere do they express regret to the honest students in CS4 whose reputations are now unfairly suspect; nowhere do they suggest that the actions of a few students tarnished the name of our entire school, which is in fact what has happened. Rather, they call this debacle an "opportunity" to reflect upon the values responsible for our "ongoing excellence." What happened last term was not an opportunity; it was an embarrassment.
Finally, no open letter to the Dartmouth community would be complete without the recommendation of a "dialogue." I'm sure that somewhere in the Dean of the College handbook, in the chapter entitled "Crisis," there's a paragraph that says something like this: "When faced with political difficulty, recommend a "campus dialogue" about whatever ails you, then run for the hills." True to form, our Deans announced a bold plan to "begin a renewed campus dialogue about academic integrity at Dartmouth." Yeah! That's the ticket! Dialogues! Of course, no one knows what that means, nor does it really matter. Honor isn't a topic of discussion; it's a mode of conduct.What is particularly unfortunate about the handling of this situation is that it comes at a time when questions about academic integrity are unusually important. In an age when information is available on the internet almost as soon as it's created, colleges like Dartmouth need to be particularly vigilant about inculcating the values of academic honor. Intellectual property will be increasingly difficult to protect and promote if the nation's best schools stand aside when seemingly "complex" questions of honesty rear their ugly heads. And if last term is any indication, those questions will become increasingly ugly in the future.
In discussing ways to improve Dartmouth's honor code, our college might take a cue from Washington and Lee. There, principles of honor are taken seriously and violations are punished severely. In the meantime, perhaps we could disinter a Confederate General and bury him on the Green to keep an eye on all of us. I hear Stonewall Jackson's availableanyone interested?
