Scratch the Single Sanction

The University of Virginia is an institution built on tradition. From its pretentious, but beloved vocabulary (grounds, not campus!) to its Southern charm (guys in ties/ girls in pearls), from living on the Lawn to streaking the Lawn-- the UVa community is quick to embrace its history and hesitant to question it. And what's perhaps one of the oldest, and most outdated institutions at UVa? The student run Honor System and its Draconian single sanction. Each student that applies to UVa signs the honor code (never to "lie, cheat, or steal") on their application and then re-takes the oath during convocation. Many schools have honor systems similar to UVa's student run Honor Committee, but what makes UVa's Honor System truly unique is the single sanction- that if a student is found guilty of breaking the honor code there is only one available punishment: expulsion.

From the 2012 Student Survey on Honor

Recently two students were expelled for cheating on a biology test. Rumor has it that a handful of engineers were also expelled this week for a similar cheating scandal. In the meantime, those guilty of rape and sexual assault face little or no punishment. The rational behind the single sanction is that UVa wants to create a "community of trust" through the threat of a punishment so severe that no "rational" person would consider breaking the honor code. Despite the harsh, punitive the 2012 Student Survey on Honor reveals that 60% of UVa students have not reported observed honor violations. Moreover, 83% of students admit that “uneasiness about the student being dismissed” would deter them from reporting an honor violation. Evidence shows that the single sanction does the opposite of its intended purpose.

Last October I participated in the Ethics Debate, an annual debate between the Washington and Jefferson Societies literary and debating societies at UVa. This year we changed the format and held the debate as an exhibition in front of the Honor Committee and Dean of Students. The topic? Resolved: The single sanction is unethical. Much of the content of this post is taken from my constructive speech, which I wrote with the help of my partner, Ben, and Sam, a Wash member who I debated with in debate tryouts. Nevertheless, I've decided to publish it because I sincerely believe that the single sanction ought to be abandoned in favor of a multiple sanction system. In our presentation we used three standards of justice to gauge whether the single sanction is ethical as a punishment or not: that punishment ought to be 1) proportional, 2) preventative, and 3) rehabilitative. The single sanction meets none of these standards, which is why it is unethical.

Proportional justice maintains that criminal punishments ought be tailored to the crime. This is something we all intuitively understand: stealing ten dollars from the cash register is not equivalent to stealing someone’s car. Hence it makes sense that our legal system treats these crimes differently and gives a much more severe punishment for grand theft auto. Crimes against the honor code can be very different too: Is lying about the severity of an illness to miss a test the same as turning in an essay downloaded from the internet? Is taking an additional piece of fruit from Runk the same as embezzling money from your CIO? With such variation in crimes, uniform punishment can’t possibly be adequate, yet we have here a system that by its very name is defined as just that: a option for sanctions. However, more choices of punishment mean that you can properly match a crime to its retribution.See, honor offensives don’t exist within a binary system; rather, they exist on a continuum in which different offensives merit different responses. The Honor Council at William & Mary, for example, provides a more ethical template of a swathe of punishments including a recommendation for a failing grade in the course, community service, and academic probation. It may be ethical to allow for the expulsion of a student in extreme circumstances, but having additional options better enables us to acknowledge this spectrum.

UVa Honor Logo

Secondly, the single sanction does not uphold preventative justice.The idea behind preventative justice is that punishments ought to be designed as to discourage people from committing crimes. As I already mentioned, the single sanction is so Draconian and unrealistic that it actively prevents students from reporting honor violations because very few students want to see their peers expelled. Results from a 2006 Faculty Survey on Honor also reveal that a majority of faculty members are hesitant to report honor offensives because of doubts about the single sanction. If an incident isn’t reported to them, the honor system has no power to prevent further issues whatsoever. Additionally, Honor cannot punish trivial cases with the Single Sanction, and thus there is no disincentive from committing trivial honor violations! As a result, most students who commit even “mid-level” honor offenses that are not deemed sufficiently egregious so as to merit expulsion are merely let off the hook with no punishment.

Furthermore, the single sanction goes beyond failing to prevent honor violations and instead encourages students to lie during their trail. When accused students enter their honor trial, they are incentivized to lie through their teeth to avoid being expelled because if they lie and get caught, it doesn’t matter because they were going to be expelled anyway. When there are gradual punishments, however, a student is encouraged to tell the truth to gain the trust of the jury in order to be given a lesser punishment.

Lastly, the single sanction disregards the possibility of rehabilitative justice. The premise of rehabilitative- or restorative, justice is that institutions ought to react to crime in a way that seeks to rehabilitate the accused in the hopes of restoring the community. Obviously, the Single Sanction does not do this -- it gives convicted students no second chance, no opportunity for further education, no chance to learn from their mistakes and make amends for their crimes against our community. In fact, by encouraging lying during trials (as I previously mentioned) the single sanction makes students repeat offenders instead of rehabilitating them!

Furthermore, the single sanction violates many of the UVa community’s values such as learning, tolerance, understanding, forgiveness, & Jeffersonian humanism. We don’t expect students to know everything immediately upon entering the university; education is the primary purpose universities after all, yet students are bound by the honor code immediately upon their arrival and subject to the Single Sanction. How can a punishment system that expels you for a single infraction be ethical if, according to the 2012 Student Survey on Honor, about 50% of UVA students have not heard about the Honor Code prior to arriving on grounds? People don’t magically and instantaneously assimilate into our system, and the single sanction means that people only get a single chance.

This totally denies the opportunity for rehabilitative justice and fails to accomplish the mission of a great University such as ours. We have seen that the single sanction is inconsistent with all three of the major perspectives on punishment: proportionality, prevention, and rehabilitation. As one faculty member reported in a 2006 Assessment on Honor:

The System itself does not exemplify the morals we would nurture in our students: it is not responsive to the particulars of a person's situation; it is neither nimble nor wise; and it is not merciful or humane. Instead, it is rule-bound, cumbersome, and essentially punitive.

While the single sanction certainly has a storied tradition at this school, that does not make it ethical. I decided to publish our speech (even though my partner Ben marginally supports the single sanction) to continue the discourse on this defining element of our university. Every few years the Honor Committee brings the single sanction to referendum, and hopefully one of these years it will be defeated in favor of a more just system.