I have been following the UVA lacrosse death case in the media for the last few days. Not because it involves two photogenic people, not because I am happy for the opportunity to engage in the kind of class-warfare discourse that the media love to propagate (it sells, after all). Not because I am somehow more concerned when rich white people get hurt than when other folks get hurt. Not because I am scared by the realization that this sort of thing can happen "even" at a place like UVA. Not because I take an almost sadistic, voyeuristic pleasure in hearing endless recountings of just how gruesome the last moments of this lacrosse player's life seem to have been.
I'm interested largely because I am an alum of Mr. Jefferson's university and feel my part in the collective mourning that has come upon our community.
UVA has a long and storied tradition of student self-governance, with an honor code that could almost be the envy of a place like BYU. I still remember getting the honor video in the mail the summer before my first year and watching in awe as I saw recounted the almost mythical (albeit very true) story of the now-famous anonymous student who taped his coins to a vending machine when it gave him a free drink or something like that. And since nothing at UVA ever gets done without the approval of its patron saint, there were even quotes in the video from Mr. Jefferson himself about the propriety of taping money to vending machines (if I'm remembering that correctly).
My point is that with this honor code in place, merely glancing at someone else's ultimately inconsequential quiz during a discussion section could get you expelled from the University. While the community of trust and honor thus created may seem reminiscent of neo-medievalist chivalric codes better suited to the antebellum Southern environment in which the University was founded than to a twenty-first- century leader in higher education, I like the honor code and have no hesitation in confessing myself to be a proud defender of it.
So in a community where storied accounts of coins taped to a vending machine prevail and students are expelled for even the smallest acts of dishonesty, what on earth is a person with no less than three run-ins with the law (including a drunken, threatening, and ultimately tasered and arrested encounter with a police officer in Rockbridge County) still doing occupying seats in the "academical village"? The lacrosse player charged with the murder of his ex-girlfriend never should have been a student at UVA in the first place. He violated the honor code long ago and should have been sent on his way packing.
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2 comments:
Not to veer slightly off subject, but I have no problem with an honor code that stresses honesty towards a vending maching. Those kinds of honor codes are points of pride rather than points of institutional authority. I get confused about an honor code that looks very closely at unshaven faces, hair over the ears, and shorts. Every inclusion is an exclusion, whether stated or not, and by emphasizing the arbitrary nature of personal appearance, money taped to a coin machine gets overlooked. On the other hand, that lacrosse player would have been booted out of BYU long before this crime could have occurred.
I like honor codes, and I wish Iowa had a stricter one, but when honor codes become the end and not the beginning of the arguments, I fight the power. You made it the beginning of the argument--commendable.
Let me add one other thing--and it is positive. For every story of someone ratting out my unshaven face and girls in my dorm room, there was someone doing something astonishingly honest in the context of the classroom and academics. I find the lack of those stories in Iowa disheartening. It seems that those stories at BYU would come up to the point that you couldn't take another--they usually had something to do with a person admitting to cheating or dishonesty after the fact or returns of wallets, proper financial exchanges, and keeping one's word--so I would start to parody them. But parodying moments of impractical honesty does not suggest that I don't admire them.
Another advantage of an awesome honor code is that you don't have to sit in silent, thoughtless stupor while your students take exams. As I write this, I am watching the grass grow while my students while away their time on the finer points of cross-cultural encounters in French literature.
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