On the Rollout of the Honor Code Proposal

In an email last Tuesday from the College Council, students were notified about an upcoming vote on the proposed revision to the current Honor Code, which would shorten the text to a single paragraph. The rollout of this proposal was met with confusion and outrage from the student body, with complaints ranging from the initial voting timeline being too short to the shortened text supposedly eroding student rights. While the College Council addressed some of these issues by providing a frequently asked questions section and pushing the voting deadline, many felt as though the proposal failed to adequately represent the desires of the student body.

As a Board, we believe the recent debacle represents another addition to the administration’s long-held track record of failing to adequately communicate with the student body: the silent removal of microwaves and fridges from dorms, the cumbersome distribution of the Amherst College Textbooks system, the sudden closure of Plimpton House, and now the messy rollout of the proposed Honor Code.

The initial announcements about the proposal, for instance, did not explain why it was necessary for the Honor Code to be more concise other than valuing concision for the sake of it. Amherst’s Honor Code is somewhat lengthy in comparison to that of peer institutions — such as Bowdoin and Williams — and so the proposal could be understood as an attempt at modernizing it. However, while the aforementioned honor codes either describe which actions count as violations or outline disciplinary procedures, the College Committee’s revised Honor Code does not do any of these things. It instead reads more as an honor code statement, such as what Hamilton has. If the college intended to reframe the Honor Code as just a statement without further clarification, the reasoning behind this should have been made much more clearer not only during the initial rollout but during the two years the proposal was being developed as well.

On top of that, the initial rollout did not mention that the student rights described in the unrevised Honor Code would “live in their original policy homes.” There was also no indication that the text outlining the current revision process would “move to the College Council’s charge.” In an era where universities nationwide are capitulating to political oppression, the lack of communication is a pressing concern for the student body. It is not immediately obvious what the implications of a shortened Honor Code could mean for our rights, especially when it is unclear what actions the college is taking to protect us. The rights enshrined in the unrevised Honor Code have the capacity to protect students from outside pressure, and any attempt to alter this text can appear as an attack on our rights. We cannot blindly trust the college when even neighboring institutions are silently submitting to the Trump administration’s demands. All parties involved in this proposal, whether it be the administration, AAS, or the College Council, should have considered these issues when initially announcing the new proposal. This lack of proper communication reflects a broader failure to understand and represent the student body’s needs.

While it is imperative that members of the student body follow updates to school policies on their own time and use opportunities such as AAS and the College Council’s recent tabling at Val, it is undeniable that a large part of the backlash toward the proposed Honor Code was due to the college’s inadequate communication with the student body. This not only includes the unexpected rollout in the first place, but the college’s tendency to use AAS as a student proxy — the majority of the student body was not given the opportunity to even hear about the development of the proposed Honor Code in the first place, despite the fact that it would affect everyone. Instead, the college consulted only a select few students on the College Council and AAS, even if the opinions of these students did not faithfully represent the student body’s voices. There should have been, at the very least, meetings such as the proposed Town Hall or other options for student engagement so as to fine tune and publicize the proposal.

As we have done in prior editorials, we ask for greater transparency from the college. We deeply appreciate the effort the College Committee has put into clarifying the new proposal, especially in response to articles published in The Student last week. However, this lack of proper communication has been a problem that seems to be consistently ignored. While the backlash and frustration over the proposed Honor Code may seem overblown to some, we must remember that the failure to communicate will only exacerbate the already eroding trust between the student body and the college.

Unsigned editorials represent the views of the majority of the Editorial Board (assenting: 10; dissenting: 0; abstaining: 0)