The Ad Hoc Committee on Academic Integrity published its draft report proposing changes to the College’s Honor system in March and presented its proposals at the April 9 faculty meeting. The committee proposed renaming the Honor and Discipline Committee as the Committee on Academic Integrity (CAI).
Dean of the College Gretchen Long convened the committee, which is composed of faculty, staff, and students, in spring 2023 to evaluate how academic integrity is upheld at the College.
The changes that affect the Faculty Handbook will be voted on at the May 7 Faculty meeting and the rest will be implemented directly by various College offices, including the Dean’s Office and the Committee on Educational Affairs.
Under the current version of the Honor Code, changes to the Honor Code must be approved by a student referendum, which is only binding if two-thirds of the student body participates. Turnout in recent student elections hovers around one third, with 29.1 percent of students participating in the most recent WSU elections. In order to implement its recommendations, the draft report suggests bypassing the procedure for amending the Honor Code.
The changes come in the wake of what the report describes as “increasing discontent” with the current honor system from both faculty and students.
Professor of Philosophy Justin Shaddock, faculty chair of the Honor and Discipline Committee, noted that concerns ranged from faculty complaints about ill-considered findings and lenient — or insufficiently restorative — sanctions to a broader lack of engagement with the honor system. Shaddock pointed to the low participation rates among students who don’t vote in H&D elections or run for H&D seats, as well as among faculty who fail to bring cases to the committee. These issues, he said, fueled on-campus dissatisfaction and ultimately led to the establishment of the Ad Hoc Committee.
Among the major changes proposed by the committee are decreasing the size of the renamed CAI to 13 members from the current 16. The new committee would be composed of six faculty members, one staff member, and six students — two from each class except first-years. The report concluded that including first-years on the committee has delayed its operations during the fall semesters, noting that first-years have less experience at the College. The report also proposed that students be selected for the committee by its members and members of the dean’s office, rather than through an election.
These changes, per the report, would align the College’s honor system with those at peer institutions whose processes the ad hoc committee studied while drafting the report.
The committee also proposed allowing for some cases to bypass the hearing process with a students’ consent, allowing faculty to instead pursue a “restorative conference” or decide on appropriate sanctions for students who have admitted to honor code violations in consultation with the CAI.
These changes are partially intended to decrease what multiple committee members described as an overwhelming workload for student chairs of the committee. “I think it’s just a really unsustainable system at the present,” Professor of Geosciences and Honor and Discipline Committee member Alice Bradley said. Restorative conferences would increase faculty agency in the honor system, according to Professor of Music Zachary Wadsworth, the chair of the ad hoc committee.
The ad hoc committee’s report also recommends that the College lift the current ban on faculty-student communication during the disciplinary process. Professor of Physics Charlie Doret ’02, who has served on the Honor and Discipline Committee in the past, said he supports this change, as long as there is adequate communication in place. “I think that process could be efficient and fair and just, but it does require a level of trust in the conversation between faculty and student,” he said.
Despite being happy with the proposed changes overall, Bradley said that she is concerned about controlling sanctions on students as a faculty member. “I don’t want it to be my decision that a student is going to fail the class because of [a potential infraction],” she explained. “So being able to take that out of the faculty’s hands both makes it easier for faculty and makes it more fair for students.”
The draft also allows faculty members on the committee to vote on hearing outcomes — a change that Honor and Discipline Committee student co-chair Sam Sidders ’25 believes is necessary under the proposed reforms. “If we’re reframing the honor code as this agreement between students and faculty, then students and faculty should be holding students accountable,” she said.
Under the current honor code, once a case has been brought to the Honor and Discipline Committee, faculty do not have a vote in determining whether a student has violated the honor code. “We might ask questions at the hearings, and then we might engage in the [committee’s] discussion after the students left,” Chair of Environmental Studies and Professor of Economics Sarah Jacobson, who has previously served on the committee as a faculty member and faculty chair, said in an interview with the Record. “We wouldn’t be voting in the end.”
“For most hearings, we would try and get three of the students and three of the faculty to come,” Sidders said of the proposed new system. “So we would always try to maintain that even split, and then votes would pass with a simple majority.”
Under the current committee bylaws, there is little incentive for faculty to attend every hearing, she noted. “Their perspectives are really valuable,” Sidders said. “Having [faculty] more involved in the system by voting is a great way to increase their attendance.”
Under the proposed changes, Doret noted that the ratio of faculty to students among the voting group has the potential to influence the severity of sanctions the committee decides on, and spoke at the Faculty meeting to advocate for this ratio to remain consistent over the course of a semester. “I want to make sure that whatever the process is, it’s consistent from week to week,” he said. “So that students can expect that if they are found to have violated the Honor Code, they will face the same sanction as a student who might have done it the week before or the week after.”
Jacobson noted that increased faculty involvement could help streamline the committee’s work and may not change the severity of sanctions. “I don’t have a strong reason to think that faculty will vote more or less punitively than students,” she said. “What I do know is that, as chair, securing a quorum of students was sometimes very difficult, so I think administratively, this will improve things.”
The new proposal also involves eliminating the use of bylaws for the committee altogether in favor of written procedures, which would be adopted each year. No other standing committees at the College follow the bylaw model. “These bylaws have continued to exert force over the committee’s operations from year to year, meaning that a previous year’s committee has been able to control the operations and procedures of the following year’s committee,” the report states.
The ad hoc committee is currently asking community members to read the report and provide feedback, according to a Daily Message published Monday. The form to provide feedback will close on April 23, before the committee puts together a final report before next month’s faculty meeting.
