Don’t Audit the EC, Bifurcate It
Don’t Audit the EC, Bifurcate It
An independent review would undermine the foundation of Washington and Lee’s Honor System
(Busts of university namesakes George Washington and Robert E. Lee sit infront of the university crest. Source: The Spectator)
The events of May 17, 2023 were vindication I did not want. One day prior, The Spectator had published my opinion outlining the dangers of EC overreach in Title IX cases. As it turned out, the Executive Committee of the Student Body had removed one of its own members, Vice President Jackson Doane, under suspicious circumstances that same day.
The situation rapidly devolved into finger pointing. The EC framed Doane’s removal as a response to alleged breaches of confidentiality during an Honor Investigation. Doane denied the charge and claimed that Student Body President Martha Ernest had made classist comments in EC meetings and had spearheaded his removal due to a personal grudge. He further argued that his removal violated the White Book since he was neither informed of nor participated in the meeting in which the committee voted on his removal.
I could expand at length on the procedural dimensions of the case, but it suffices to say that the relevant sections of the White Book are sufficiently vague as to allow for competing interpretations. (For those interested, Article VI, §1, Article VI, §4.A and Article IX, §2.B relate most directly to the case.)
Looking past the procedural debate, Doane’s removal is only the latest example of a recurring problem with W&L’s student government: the self-interested conflation of judicial and administrative authority by the Executive Committee.
The EC currently has two mandates: one judicial and the other administrative. Their judicial responsibilities comprise the execution of the Honor System and are prescribed in detail in the White Book. Their administrative duties include managing budget allocations for student organizations, representing the student body when liaising with the University administration, and, in a less-defined way, representing the student body in general.
This dual mandate is fairly novel, as executing the Honor System was the EC’s only primary responsibility for most of the 20th century. According to Student Body Constitutions obtained from W&L’s Special Collections, the administration of student organizations were managed by committees and subcommittees of students loosely overseen by the EC for much of the University’s history. As recently as the early 1990’s, these functions and others were managed/overseen by a “Student Activities Board” (SAB).
As Special Collections only has copies of a few Student Body Constitutions from the last century, I haven’t been able to ascertain precisely when the EC took on its expanded administrative role. SAB’s last appearance in the Calyx was 2002, suggesting that the transition may have occurred in the early 2000’s.
It is essential to highlight the difference between the EC’s two mandates. The adjudication of the Honor System is time-intensive, out of the public eye, and rigorously structured in the White Book. The EC’s administrative duties are lower stakes, less intensive, have lower guard rails on conduct, and are largely community-facing.
This differentiation is essential because the Executive Committee has, going back at least to my time at W&L and likely further, tended to collapse the line between their two mandates. They most often do so by attempting to use the confidentiality necessary to the Honor System as a smokescreen to obscure Student Body visibility into the committee’s administrative functions.
The Doane-Ernest fiasco is a textbook example. After his removal, Doane read a statement outlining his grievances during the open portion of the EC’s next weekly business meeting only to have portions of his statement redacted in the minutes made available to the Student Body on the sole grounds that redacted portions were “deemed confidential by the full executive committee.” This redaction reflects a conscious effort to prevent the Student Body from evaluating the situation on its own merits.
(Section of the May 16 Business Minutes, featuring the redacted portions of Doane’s publicly-shared speech)
In fact, the EC has no claim to confidentiality in this case. Confidentiality only applies to Honor Matters, which are exclusively covered in the White Book. The Student Body Constitution (the sole document delineating the EC’s administrative responsibilities) does not contain one reference to confidentiality. As they do not regard Honor Matters, budget allocations and associated EC meetings are not protected under the White Book’s confidentiality clauses.
The EC does have one potential loophole if administrative matters and Honor Matters are covered in the same meeting. However — as a now-graduated member of a recent EC administration told me — it is common practice to compartmentalize meetings regarding Honor Matters from meetings regarding budget allocations or administrative liaisons, thus rendering defensible claims of cross-confidentiality improbable.
Additionally, the redaction of Doane’s statement could constitute a violation of Article II, §C.iii.4 of the SBC, which requires the Secretary of the EC to “Keep an accurate record of the proceedings of the meetings of the Student Body and Executive Committee” and “Publicly post these minutes upon two-thirds approval from the Executive Committee.”
While the two thirds clause provides a potential loophole, the redaction clearly contradicts the spirit of the section by seeking to obscure a constituent’s critique of the EC. The reality is that redacting Doane’s statement was self-interested; Doane had a right to express his grievances to the Student Body, but the EC censored him without any procedural basis.
Unfortunately, such obfuscations are more rule than the exception when the EC faces student body scrutiny. In the summer of 2020, the EC held a meeting in which they voted to issue a statement supporting changing Washington and Lee’s name without informing the Student Body they were considering such a statement or providing the Student Body an opportunity to comment in open session. In doing so, they violated Article II, §I.i of the SBC.
Facing strong condemnation from a plurality of the Student Body in the aftermath, the Committee refused to release a list of how each member voted, arguing that the need to maintain unity as a committee required them to keep votes confidential, although individual members would be allowed to speak regarding their own votes.
After releasing their statement, the EC held a Student Body Town Hall. While represented as an opportunity for students to voice their thoughts and concerns, the Town Hall was little more than an opportunity for activist EC members to justify their statement with partisan virtue signaling, while downplaying the concerns of and in several cases shaming constituents who spoke out against the decision.
On the flipside, whichever members had voted against changing the name (it was confirmed that the vote had not been unanimous) chose to remain silent. Based on official statements made in the town hall and conversations I had shortly thereafter with one of these more moderate representatives, they kept quiet to maintain a veneer of “unity” and “confidentiality” regarding the outcome.
It is no surprise that any system of conduct regulation will be considered suspect when its executors repeatedly deflect criticism from constituents for their missteps. Since Doane’s removal and name-change-gate occurred far enough apart that there was no direct overlap in EC membership between the events, it can be further inferred that the problem is more systematic than the result of a few specific bad apples.
How The Student Body Can Regain Control Over Student Self-Government
Structurally, there are several ways to address the problem. First, the SBC could be amended in its next review cycle to add additional checks on EC power while retaining the current division of responsibilities.
While this is the simplest alternative, it would be almost totally ineffective and — given recent precedent — likely fail to receive a quorum of students. In both name-change-gate and Doane’s removal, the EC showed a patent disregard for the checks the SBC already has, and there’s no reason to think that would change without a full division of judicial and administrative responsibilities.
A second option, as proposed by Andrew Thompson in response to Doane’s suspicious removal, would be for the EC to authorize an independent investigation into their conduct, perhaps with the aid of a “neutral university administrator” delegating authority to “outside investigators’ or “community members.”
Auditing the EC is an untenable solution. Faculty can’t be trusted to participate in such a scenario since they have historically pushed for more faculty control over student conduct and would likely co-opt any role in an external audit to achieve that end.
The University Administration has some incentive to keep their hands off the Honor System since a strong System can be — and has historically been — a strong recruiting tool. That said, if approached by elected student leadership with the message that the student body can’t self-govern, the bureaucracy would likely also take the opportunity to expand and consolidate control over student conduct regulation.
Even aside from these practical considerations, an external EC audit is unacceptable in principle because it undermines the very premise of the Honor System’s existence: that the Student Body of Washington and Lee can be and is self-governing.
The Honor System is built on the principle that students of Washington and Lee are expected to, and are therefore capable of, behaving honorably with reference to their peers, without external governance. If the Student Body considers themselves children that must call in grownups to settle their squabbles, then the Honor System is a lie.
Fortunately, there is a third alternative: amending the SBC to bifurcate the EC into two committees. One would execute the Honor System, and the other would handle student organization budgeting and administrative liaison.
A petition to amend the SBC must, according to the SBC’s Article VIII, §A, be publicized by the EC and presented for a vote by the Student Body if signed by at least 200 students. If two-thirds of a quorum of half the University’s student body vote in favor of the amendment, it is adopted. Numerically speaking, that would be about 765 of the roughly 2300 undergraduate and law school students at W&L.
Such an arrangement would resemble the committee structure of the past, where various student committees executed a broad array of administrative functions with fairly loose EC oversight. Reverting to a bifurcated model with an analogue to the old SAB serving as a subordinate counterpart to the EC would be not a radical departure, but a return to a norm that has worked historically.
Bifurcation is not wholly novel even in contemporary debates over the Honor System. It has recurred situationally at least since I first arrived at W&L and has gained enough traction to be brought up in an EC Business Meeting last December, and to be addressed in multiple Ring-tum Phi articles.
Accomplishing bifurcation would require motivation and organization, both of which have lacked in recent years. The bond of trust that defined the W&L Student Body for decades has deteriorated, in no small part due to breaches of trust by the Executive Committee, but also due to the subjective nature of the White Book’s operative definition of Honor.
The Student Body has largely disengaged from W&L’s student self-government due to disillusionment and apathy. This is most notably reflected in small pools of candidates for EC positions and low turnout for EC elections and White Book/Constitutional Review votes.
For Student self-government to survive at Washington and Lee, this trend must be reversed, and I believe bifurcation may provide a welcome catalyst for student re-engagement. It would not be a one-stop solution but would unquestionably be a step in the right direction.