The difficulty with creating an honor code out of thin air is that there is really no guarantee that anyone will follow it. If the student body isn’t used to adhering to an honor code, the argument goes, then introducing a sheet of paper affirming a vague commitment to integrity isn’t going to change much.
However, this argument is not convincing. Just because a measure may not fix a problem is not a very good reason not to try it. It’s like saying that we shouldn’t institute background checks for gun buyers or limit the amount of semiautomatic weapons on the market, because gun violence may also be due to insufficient mental health services. (In fact, this was exactly the argument that NRA President David Keene made at an IOP Forum last year.) To me, this type of reasoning sounds like a half-hearted attempt to avoid any attempt at solution whatsoever.
Furthermore, institutions such as the honor code could have the power to change attitudes and behavior. As Taonga Leslie pointed out in an article last spring, a formal affirmation of honesty has been shown to lower the incidence of cheating in some instances. And chances are that even if students are annoyed by having to sign such an affirmation repeatedly, the honor code will nonetheless make them more aware of issues regarding honesty and integrity—which, after all, is the whole point. The question, therefore, is how to structure the honor code so that it is as robust as possible.
The key to the new honor system is the proposed Honor Board: a group of students, faculty, and administrators who “shall be responsible for reviewing any apparent violations of the Honor Code,” according to the draft released by the Academic Integrity Committee. The crucial aspect of this board is really the presence of students on it—that way, prospective violators of the honor code would have to answer to their peers instead of to a distant and seemingly antagonistic administrative board.
My own high school had a similar “Honor Council”, which adjudicated cases of lying, cheating, and stealing, and the results were generally positive. The only problem with the case in my high school—and this is the danger that I see in the as-of-now vague description of the Honor Board at Harvard—was that the Honor Council always deferred to higher administration, with the implication that anyone who went before it was really going through a formality before other administrators would make a decision. If we want to make a community of honor and honesty, then we have to give ourselves the responsibility for our actions and for the actions of our peers, because otherwise it’s not really a community at all.