AAS Revisits Honor Code Update

The Association of Amherst Students (AAS)’s controversial Honor Code update proposal is once again up for voting by the student body next Monday, after its initial vote was postponed last spring amid widespread student criticism. 

The AAS’s College Council, which reviews and proposes changes to institutional polices such as the Honor Code, announced the vote in an all-student email sent on Tuesday morning, alongside an information session on Wednesday to hear students’ thoughts on the proposed changes. If approved by a majority of students, a faculty vote will follow. With faculty approval, the new Honor Code will take effect next fall. 

Last year’s proposal sparked immediate student backlash, calling the change an erosion of student rights due to its exclusion of specific rights — such as the right to protest and to engage in the free exchange of ideas — outlined in the current Honor Code. 

In light of this reaction, the College Council approached this year’s proposal with greater caution. On Monday, Senator and College Council member Tim Churchill ’29 emphasized their goal in combating misinformation about the new Honor Code. “We’re trying again this year, and the focus is on education,” he said.

Churchill said that the aforementioned student rights are excluded from the new Honor Code to avoid redundancy with the Student Code of Conduct, not to deprive students of them. “[They] are literally in the Student Code of Conduct, word for word, the exact same thing, so [they’re] not going anywhere,” he said.

AAS President and ex officio member of the College Council Shane Dillon, who pushed to revive the effort this semester, echoed Churchill’s sentiments. “If I believed for a second that anyone’s rights were being chipped away here, I would not be the person reviving this, full stop,” he said in an interview with The Student.

Senator Rachel Howell ’26, another member of the College Council, admitted that last year’s email about the proposed change was poorly worded. “If you have no clue what the Code of Conduct is, no clue what the Honor Code is, it would look like you’re ‘losing rights,’” she said.

To address this, Churchill said that the College Council will be releasing “very deliberate language” about the differences between the Code of Conduct and the new Honor Code. 

One key difference, according to Howell, is that the Code of Conduct is written and revised by faculty and Student Affairs, with less say from students.

Whereas, “the Honor Code is supposed to be student-driven [and] about accountability for ourselves and our peers,” she said. “If we don't update it, it's going to fall completely into irrelevancy.”

Another major point of contention following last year’s proposal was the length of the new Honor Code. The current Honor Code, which has remained unchanged since 1984, is four pages long. In contrast, the proposed Honor Code is just a few sentences. 

The actual text of the proposed Honor Code remains unchanged from last year’s proposal and reads: “As an Amherst College student, I pledge to be honest in my academic pursuits and commit to ethical scholarship. To foster a community of trust, I uphold the principles of respect, intellectual growth, curiosity, and diversity of thought. By embracing these principles, I will promote the integrity of our academic community and advance the pursuit of knowledge.”

At Monday’s AAS meeting, Churchill argued for readability. “The Honor Code is supposed to be more of an aspirational statement of what we want to live up to, of how we want to behave … and if you have a [four]-page document explaining how we want to act and behave, nobody's going to read that,” he said. 

Dillon hopes the Council’s efforts to provide more clarity surrounding the intentions of the new Honor Code will avoid a repeat of last year’s controversy. 

“The simple fact is this: No rights are going away; Nobody wants an Honor Code that’s a million miles long,” he said. “I just hope students will stop and really think about that before the vote, and whatever the vote decides will be what it is, and that will be that.”