For What Sort of Honor System is "The W&L Spectator" Advocating?

For What Sort of Honor System is "The W&L Spectator" Advocating?
Their editorial board lacks a complete understanding of the system’s limits and history.

(The White Book, which describes W&L’s Honor System)

The W&L Spectator Editorial Staff’s recent article, “The Honor System Fails Because the Administration Consumes its Power,” purports to focus on the evils of bureaucratic bloat. While W&L’s burgeoning administrative bureaucracy is a serious issue, the Editorial Staff goes a bridge too far in framing it as a primary cause of the Honor System’s decline, or in suggesting that the Executive Committee’s decision to not hear sexual misconduct cases represents an instance of “delegating that authority to the Harassment and Sexual Misconduct Board.”

Ironically, the Honor System is one of a very few student institutions left on campus that is relatively free of administrative “support” (interference). While I agree that the system is in decline, blaming that decline on an abdication of authority by the EC to the HSMB is a serious, though not unusual, conflation of moral and jurisprudential responsibility.

The Spectator’s perspective completely ignores the jurisprudential limitations associated with the confidentiality of evidence in federal Title IX cases. Regardless of how strong the objective case may be when all the evidence is accumulated, the student-run Executive Committee of Washington and Lee University does not have jurisdiction over most, all, or any of the evidence and testimony in sexual misconduct cases. As a result, EC investigations into sexual misconduct would almost certainly lead to acquittals for lack of evidence.

The Executive Committee is beholden to the same restrictions as any other judicial entity, summarized in the principle that innocence is presumed until guilt is proven on the basis of objective evidence. The EC’s longstanding decision to not hear sexual misconduct cases represents the most pragmatic solution to the restricted nature of evidence in Title IX cases: if you know you can’t judge the case then don’t hear it. It cannot represent an abdication of authority to a bureaucracy because the EC never possessed the authority to make unilateral convictions without evidence in the first place.

All this being said, I agree with the Editorial Board and students who correctly argue that an Honor System which preaches intolerance of dishonorable behavior but refuses to address one of its worst forms is morally bankrupt. The Executive Committee should hear sexual misconduct cases, but given its limited ability to investigate such cases without itself violating Title IX, the student body should not expect the Committee would likely ever be in a position to make a definite ruling. Investigation does not necessarily imply conviction.

This nuance appears lost on the Editorial Board, whose article appears to advocate for an authoritarian EC as the most effective solution to the Honor System’s Title IX dilemma: “Imagine if the EC had the same power [as the HSMB]; they could have dismissed Selby for any number of Honor Violations in 2021 and prevented the sexual battery that occurred last year.”

Is the Editorial Board really ignorant of the restricted nature of evidence in Title IX investigations? While this is the simplest explanation, the idea that the entire Editorial Staff could be ignorant of this fact seems highly improbable.

But what is the alternative? Is the Editorial Board suggesting that a state or federal conviction could serve as a proxy for guilt? Or that one accused of sexual misconduct could be defensibly dismissed because they are presumed guilty in the court of public opinion, or worse, on the sole basis of the accusation? All these alternatives present a far greater abdication of both moral and jurisprudential responsibility than delegating judicial power to the HSMB, even if that power were the Executive Committee’s to delegate in the first place.

Has the Editorial Board already forgotten that less than three years ago, the Executive Committee violated the Student Body Constitution by releasing a partisan activist statement supporting a change in the university’s name without informing or soliciting input from the student body? Have they forgotten how more radically-minded members of that year’s EC proactively belittled constituents who spoke out against this breach of trust, while other representatives stood by without comment?

That fiasco wreaked havoc on the W&L community’s already tenuous trust in the Executive Committee and, thereby, the Honor System itself. Yet, the sort of unbridled authority which the Editorial Board seems to view as incumbent on the Executive Committee goes much farther. Were such power placed in the hands of the EC three summers ago, I would not have been at all surprised to see at least a few members frame opposition to their activist agenda as an Honor Violation in and of itself, placing students who opposed that agenda in theoretical danger of expulsion for dissenting.

Not that this would have actually occurred; it is highly unlikely that the majority of any given EC would accede to such a radical idea. Even the possibility, however, would almost certainly so shatter trust in the EC and the Honor System, that the System would collapse, with the student body trading autonomous self-governance for the perceived security of a lower stakes but more onerous code overseen by the university administration.

All this said, I am confident that the concerning aspects of the Editorial Board’s recent article, as pertains to the Honor System, are honest mistakes and not manifestations of hidden authoritarian instincts. None of the current Editorial Board were students when Name-Change-Gate happened; they lack the context that informs the dangers of an unchecked Executive Committee.

Nevertheless, the profound blindness to the dangers of EC overreach that appears to have developed in less than three years is alarming. It also illustrates the unique challenge inherent to Washington and Lee’s Honor System: it is a perpetual institution purporting to represent universal truths, administered by and for an inherently transient population.

The most impactful example of this hazard is the White Book itself (the student handbook for W&L’s Honor System) whose textual deterioration through revisions at three-to-five-year intervals have accumulated to render the system almost totally subjective today (as I outline in some detail in a Spectator article published last year).

The only solution is vigilance and dialogue between current students and alumni. Therefore, I earnestly entreat my friends on the Editorial Board and the W&L community at large to commit as much energy to learning from the students who came before, and to passing on their own wisdom to the students who come after them, as they do to the unique conflicts which they face in their own time at Washington and Lee. The maintenance of the Honor System, and everything else that makes Washington & Lee great, depends on it.

The opinions expressed in this magazine are the author's own and do not reflect the official policy or position of The Spectator, or any students or other contributors associated with the magazine. It is the intention of The Spectator to promote student thought and civil discourse, and it is our hope to maintain that civility in all discussions.