The Academic Honor Principle is one of the central tenets of any legitimate university in this country, and Dartmouth is no exception. By and large, students know that if they get caught cheating, plagiarizing or lying in their work, suspension or even expulsion will not be far away.
So why, when "the requirements of honesty and integrity" are "fundamental" according to the Honor Principle, does this standard only apply to college students, and not to those individuals running for the highest office in the land?
Senators Barack Obama and John McCain have repeatedly flaunted basic standards of academic honesty in their quests to be president of the United States. While cheating is an overly ambiguous term in our "anything-goes" political world, both campaigns have been mired in plagiarism scandals during the past year, have sourced accomplishments to themselves that flout reality, and have sponsored the open-handed deceit that now runs rampant through the political process.
Misrepresentations, exaggerations, distortions, outright falsehoods -- call them what you will. The sheer number of whoppers hidden under the guise of advertisements and policy points would astonish even the most skeptical members of the College's Committee on Standards. The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania fact-checks the campaigns and has compiled a list of the biggest fabrications: from McCain's assertions that Obama voted to raise taxes on people making as little as $32,000, to Obama's comebacks that McCain wants to cut Social Security benefits in half, to Republican Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin's infamous "thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere to both candidates' insinuations that the other "doesn't support our troops." The list goes on and on.
We can easily blame the two candidates, their surrogates and multitude of campaign staff for willfully spreading lies. For men with uplifting slogans such as "Country First" and "Change We Can Believe In," their betrayal is hypocritical and repulsive. The pundit-powered media also shares in the guilt. Sure, they eventually report on the accuracy of various attacks. But the 24-hour cable news networks first spend hours replaying the messages to "analyze" their impact.
The truth -- an elusive item this season -- is that we, the American voters, have abandoned our duty by not holding our elected officials to any kind of standards. Here at Dartmouth, college students are held to a higher standard than any of our elected officials. If we submit a two-page paper that doesn't attribute a source, we risk a failing grade and suspension. But the candidates? There is no penalty for saying a man doesn't love his country or distorting the record to say that he supports teaching sex education to kindergartners or giving tax breaks to pedophiles.
Considering the experience we've had with a President withholding the full truth from the American people, you'd think we would have learned by now. Instead, these smear campaigns have become the norm rather than the exception. While the College holds 18- to 22-year-olds to steep and rigid standards, we have let politicians off the hook completely. We not only refuse to penalize the liars, we accept their deception as part of the process.
Socrates once wrote, "I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live." But that stereotype is too simplistic. If we, as voters, held our candidates to the same standards that college students are held to, perhaps we might actually get a little bit of real "straight talk."
