On February 11 of 2019, the Honor Committee published its Bicentennial Report. It is the most comprehensive analysis Honor has ever conducted, complete with smooth web design and creative artwork. It begins with a message from Ory Streeter, the Chair of the Honor Committee at the time of the Report’s release. He notes that, “At times, our Bicentennial Report is celebratory, and at others, somber. But it is always honest. We are proud of our approach and look forward to engaging the community’s response.” Its harrowing tales of Honor trials and systemic issues is a testimony to the need for Honor’s abolition. Though the committee suggests nothing near as much.

The report’s most important section, labeled “Experiences,” describes cases of individual students who were either expelled, took an IR, or were found not guilty. Their stories illuminate the harms the Honor System reaps in the community. The first story concerns expulsion, entitled “Succisa Virescit,” Latin for, “That which gets cut down grows back stronger.” The Honor offense in question involved a 12-page capstone paper, where the professor:

noticing a formatting error in one of my citations, believed that my paper was too similar to a source I cited 10 times. She emailed to let me know she was turning my paper in to the Honor Committee. "I have to think this was intentional" she wrote, based solely on the fact that I was a third year student, had completed the required research courses for Psychology majors, and some phrases were "reshuffled."

The author (who submitted this piece anonymously) faced a traumatic experience. After being reported, she recalls:

Because of the timing of the semester, my case was on hold until the fall. The summer of 2008 was the hardest time in my life. I lost my hair. I couldn't eat or sleep. I developed kidney infections and panic attacks. I could not focus on my classes or friends or extracurricular activities. I seriously considered taking my own life. Quite frankly, I felt like I had no one to turn to at the University, and I began believing my professor’s words: I was an enormous disappointment.

Her trial did not make things better.

Two jurors fell asleep during my trial, and only one was removed. The Trial Chair rolled her eyes during my testimony. I was constantly interrupted while testifying. I was barred from presenting key evidence, including an email from the author I was accused of plagiarizing (for the record, he believed my errors were unintentional and he was given appropriate credit)... After nearly 3 hours of deliberations, the jury returned a guilty verdict.

Behold the efficacy of student self-governance. The Honor process humiliated this student, then inflicted cruel and unusual punishment. Summers between semesters allow students to take a break from stressful academic expectations and provide a window for professional experiences. Yet this student was beset by kidney infections, hair loss, panic attacks, and suicidal thoughts. How the Single Sanction advanced any interests of the community in excessively punishing this student remains to be seen. The University is aided when students are productive, correct their faults, and strive to never repeat them. The Single Sanction afforded this individual none of those opportunities.

She was eventually able to forge a path ahead for herself, transferring her credits to another school, graduating, and earning a master’s in higher education administration. She currently serves as a director overseeing reports of student conduct, where she is tasked with supervising the expulsion of students. “This past October marked 10 years since my Honor trial,” she wrote. “On that day, I got a tattoo: ‘Succisa Virescit’. While the scar will forever remain, I have emerged stronger. Others may not be as lucky.” If anything, this story shows that this student was redeemable and could clearly have been rehabilitated during her undergraduate career and allowed to reenter the community. Tales like these show how Honor’s retributive policies hinder the community, since they can expel students who commit forgivable faults.

The “Not Guilty” story in the report is somewhat more encouraging. It recounts the experience of Johnathan S. Perkins, an alum of the Law School. In 2011, Perkins was the victim of police harassment. He published the incident in the Law School’s newspaper to share his experience as a black student in a racist society, where he learned most students “were blithely unaware of the black experience and that many of them even harbored overt animus toward black people.” He notes that, “On more than one occasion, students and other members of the Charlottesville community openly and with impunity called my friend and me n-----s and other racial slurs.” After his story was published, Perkins was confronted by an FBI agent, who, with two University Police lieutenants, pressured him into recanting his statement. He relented. The University subsequently announced his recantation, and a wave of Honor reports were filed against him. Reflecting on Honor’s racially disproportionate reporting, he notes:

Unless one genuinely maintains the racist belief that minority and international students lie, cheat, and steal with 3-5 times more frequency than white or American students, then one is left with two explanations for the disparity. Minority students are monitored more closely and reported more frequently (known within Honor as “spotlighting”) and the violations by white American students are being overlooked, the reporting standards applied to them elevated (known within Honor as “dimming”).

This phenomenon Perkins identifies invites questions of accountability. Spotlighting and dimming are further examples of systemic racism within Honor. This includes Perkins’s panelists, who asked questions like, “Why didn’t you just tell the police to leave you alone?” and “Why would the police have stopped you, if you weren’t doing anything wrong?” The ensuing trial included testimony of UVa professor of law Kim Forde-Mazrui, an expert on racial justice. Perkins was subsequently acquitted. But he would not have been exonerated “without making certain that all those involved in the proceedings confronted their own racial biases as well as the historic racial tensions that persist in America’s institutional adjudicative processes.” Stories like these echo across the American legal system, where the burden is often placed on victims to reveal their judges’ own shortcomings. And Honor is no exception.

In the third story, an anonymous student recounts their experience taking an Informed Retraction. The only thing more painful than this story’s prose is the ceaseless privilege exhibited by its author. “Life is filled with shortcuts,” they begin, “[like the] urge to splurge on mouth-watering gruyère popovers rather than pushing through the 27th day of your 30-day cleanse” and “the temptation to rely on Google rather than our memory.” The shortcut in question occurred during “a typical UVA afternoon in the fall of 2017,” where, in room 120 of Monroe Hall, they sat “brain stumped, pencil in my clammy palm, under the surveillance of not only my professor, but also, the great founding fathers of the University of Virginia.” The author subsequently committed the student’s original sin: “like Eve sitting in front of the mouth-watering apple, I bit. I cheated off of my neighbors’ papers.”

Eventually, the author received a phone call, informing them that they were under investigation for an Honor offense and faced a decision: “Fight my case and risk expulsion, or make an Informed Retraction.” Seized with fear, the author took the latter. “Though absolutely frozen and barely able to think, my decision was easy. Informed Retraction it would be.” It is great the author found it so easy to leave the University for a year, when for others taking an IR means forfeiting important opportunities, foregoing a lease, and possibly returning to an unsafe home environment, among other obstacles.

The author enjoyed many financial privileges, inaccessible to many students, during their leave of absence. They:

Connected with Dr. Russell Grieger, the renown [sic] behavioral cognitive therapist and clinical psychologist who studied under Albert Ellis and served as an adjunct professor at UVa. Dr. Grieger became a savior from my demise and, more importantly, a mentor. With his help, I gained mental stability, improved my personal strength, and discovered a new passion for cognitive processing and mental health.

It is fortunate that this student received professional help from an expert, but such resources are out of reach for many. Low-income and middle-class students disproportionately suffer from the sanctions of Honor, which disrupt financial aid, loans, work schedules, job opportunities, and living accommodations. Besides gaining professional support, the author harnessed their network of connections, becoming a tutor, program coordinator, and leader for a program called Horizons Upward Bound. Whether they disclosed that they were on academic leave for cheating while preparing low-income students for future success in secondary education is unclear.

Near the end of their story, the author shares the epiphany that, “Each event in life is a dot. Good or bad, once the event occurs, it is over and the dot becomes one of many that have already occurred.” The statement is bizarre, but its purpose soon comes into focus as the author asserts, “The Informed Retraction allows students to transform a mistake into one of life’s many past dots rather than the final punctuation on an experience.” The author concludes with a solemn reflection of the system they found “so cool. So special” by stating “thanks to the Honor System at UVA, I possess an extreme readiness to return to the University.” Rebounding from a year off of school is difficult for most students to do, particularly those who come from middle and working class families. This experience, then, resonates only with those who enjoy the same privileges this author does.

Unless the author omitted something, the Honor System had nothing to do with their “extreme readiness” to return to the University. The growth this student experienced during their Honor leave of absence was the product of their privilege. But this story discloses far more about Honor’s publishers than the author, since they championed this experience as a defense of the IR. Those who take an IR must make amends with all “affected parties,” but this is about the only step towards rehabilitation that the IR takes. The IR is touted as a rehabilitative process, but this story shows how little effort Honor actually puts into it, suggesting that the system is still disposed to punish rather than to restore. That Honor’s officers are so out of touch, however, should not be surprising. On February 12, 2019, Honor Committee members Julia Batts and Lillie Lyon, who was recently selected as the Honor Committee’s chair for the 2019-2020 term, published an article in the Cavalier Daily entitled: “It’s Time to Celebrate Forgiveness By Listening to the Six Chapel Bells Ring.” In a vapid attempt at community outreach, the article’s subhead reads: “Considering the Informed Retraction is one of the most monumental aspects of the Honor System, celebrate its institution Thursday by listening to the Chapel bells ring.” Perhaps the author of the IR story was in attendance. Others who did not experience as smooth a time with an IR were likely not.

Honor’s sanctions are not only ineffectual; they are racially biased. According to the “Data” section of the Bicentennial Report, “On average, international students were 18 percentage points more likely to face some sort of sanction outcome than domestic students.” Since this can jeopardize the visas of international students, the stakes are exponentially high. The race of those reported to Honor is unknown for 29% of cases, but for statistics that are known:

White students make up 29.7 percent of students reported to Honor, but were 58 percent of all enrolled UVA students in 2017. Asian students are significantly over-represented among students reported to Honor relative to their representation at the University. Asian students constitute at least 27.1 percent of reported students but are 12 percent of the UVA domestic student population (for whom race is identified by the IPEDS standards), a difference of 15.1 percentage points. Black students are over-represented by 2.7 percentage points, at 8.7 percent of reported students and 6 percent of UVA students. Hispanic students are underrepresented, making up 6 percent of UVA students but 3.6 percent of reported students.

Thus, white and Hispanic students are underrepresented in reports to Honor, whereas Black and Asian students are overrepresented. Moreover, “Students who were reported by other students, as compared to students who were reported by faculty members, were on average 41 percentage points less likely to face a sanction outcome,” and “Fourth year students, as compared to first year students, were 27 percentage points more likely to face a sanction... Graduate students, as compared to first year students, were 37 percentage points more likely to face a sanction.” For a system that preaches peer accountability, the data suggests endemic racial bias and dissimilar standards for students of differing years.

The report includes other revealing information, such as a letter from a secret society, the Society of the Purple Shadows. Its peculiar, self-serious prose features no capitalized letters, except when referring to itself (“THE SOCIETY”). It notes that “THE SOCIETY has continually supported the Single Sanction as it has proven to instill the virtues of honor as a way of life, embodied commitment to the common good, [sic] rather than as a disciplinary measure.” The notion that the Single Sanction produces and supports a larger moral system is cited by the Purple Shadows, though they do not offer evidence as to how. For Honor to include the letter’s reasoning contradicts HAC’s recommendations, as it says:

In order to reframe the discussion around the Community of Trust, it should no longer be used as the primary justification for the Single Sanction. It also no longer makes sense to rely on this justification given the advent of the Informed Retraction – Honor now facilitates a process by which those who have violated the Code can return to the community.

The most revealing part of this letter’s inclusion is that a relatively unaccountable student institution incorporated statements from an even less accountable student organization—an elite secret society—to justify its own existence. This letter also reveals exactly how power operates at UVa. Student networks of power operate in plain sight, because they are friend groups. This is true for groups that are known and those that are not. Surely, this letter’s inclusion by Honor was influenced by a member of the Purple Shadows. At the very least, it proves that the Purple Shadows can influence Honor to the extent that it would include a message that contradicts HAC’s recommendations. Events like this embody inextricable elements of student self-governance. This is why it is imperative to form a new system bereft of student oversight.