When our faculty get together to talk about integrating ethics into the curriculum, they often end by talking about adopting "the honor system." Such talk has made me uncomfortable. The reason I generally gave for discomfort is that we are trying to integrate professional ethics into the curriculum; the honor system is irrelevant to that, indeed, a diversion.

That was the reason I gave, but I had another, one I am revealing for the first time here: I did not understand the honor system's appeal. The faculty who talked about the honor system had all experienced it as undergraduates (at schools as different as West Point, Williams, and the School of Engineering at the University of Michigan). I could tell it meant more to them than they said, but I could not tell what.

Since many of my colleagues seemed to feel as I did, I decided to do an issue of Perspectives on the subject: What is the honor system? What can be said for and against it? What relevance has it to professional ethics? While hoping to help IIT decide, I thought most readers would find an issue on the honor system interesting for another reason: the honor system has something important to teach about professional ethics.

I began preparing this issue with a literature search. I was surprised by how little literature there was. I was also surprised by what I found. The honor system is not a system; it consists of at least four elements that combine in many ways. It is at least possible that no two IIT faculty had experienced quite the same system. More surprising, I had experienced an honor system.

One day in the late 1950's, the principal of my high school announced that an "honor court" of seven students would be set up to hear complaints of student violation of non-academic rules. A student found in the halls during class without a hall pass would no longer be sent to the principal's office; instead, he or she would be summoned to the honor court. Since my high school already had student monitors ("hall guards"), it would henceforth have two elements of an honors system. Students, not teachers, would have primary responsibility for reporting violations of rules over which the court had jurisdiction; and students, not teachers, would have primary responsibility for disciplining violators.

Missing at my high school were, however, two other elements: a promise of honesty (for example, "I will not lie, cheat, or steal"); and a self-enforcement rule ("or tolerate those who do"). Ordinary students were not "on their honor" either to obey the rules themselves or to help get others to. While my colleagues seemed to think of the honor system as concerned exclusively with academic honesty, the literature seemed to allow the substance of an "honor code" to be academic (as at Princeton), nonacademic (as at my high school), or both (as at West Point).

Having discovered myself a veteran of an honor system, I began to wonder why I had not noticed. I thought history would be of help. It was.

History of Honor System
West Point may have had the first "honor system." Early in the 1820's, Superintendent Thayer began to take cadets at their word when they denied doing wrong or knowing of it. Putting them on their honor to answer truthfully saved scarce time he would otherwise have had to use to investigate minor charges. Anyone later discovered to have lied would be expelled.

Cadets seem to have done their best with this system. For example, drinking alcohol was against the rules. When cadets met at a local bar, each turned from the table before downing his drink so that his fellows could, if questioned, honestly report that they had seen no other cadet drinking.

About this time, both Amherst and the University of Virginia experimented unsuccessfully with a student court hearing minor charges. But not until 1842 did the University of Virginia adopt (what is now counted) the original honor system. Each student had to sign a pledge on each examination stating that he had received no assistance.

A half century later, Virginia's system (or something like it) had only spread to seventeen Southern schools. Then, suddenly, it spread quickly northward. By 1915, at least seventy-six colleges had adopted an honor system.

The honor system grew up at about the same time as the major professions. Yet there is an important difference between them. The honor system has generally found a home at small, homogeneous institutions like Beloit, Haverford, Wesleyan, Princeton, or Hobart, not at large or urban institutions like Harvard, NYU, Yale, Chicago, or Wisconsin. Honor is an atavistic virtue, the virtue of knights, duelists, Southern gentry, and cowboys. Professions are creatures of the modem world; their home, the big cities.

My high school belonged to the modem world. Large, with more than three thousand students, it served a bigcity suburb only a polluted lake away from Canada. So, when I heard our principal announce the "honor court," I misunderstood, of course. I thought the "honor" derived from serving on the court, not from upholding a system of honor. "Honor" (in that sense) was not in my vocabulary. I doubt it was in the principal's either. He explained the court as a contribution to "democratic education."

What's in this Issue?
I have come a long way since then. I now look upon the honor system with more understanding-and more respect. I have therefore put the opposition first. Ellen Ellis' piece is now more than twenty-five years old. I have reprinted it for two reasons. First, it remains the best general attack on the honor system I know of. (I especially like Ellis' suggestion that any discussion of the honor system begin by dropping the word "honor.") Second, little Ellis says sounds out of date, though the students she had in mind could be the (older) faculty who today recall the honor system so fondly. The age of the Ellis piece gives it an ironic twist.

Ellis was already an emeritus professor (of political science) when her piece appeared. Yet her argument does not depend upon the moral degeneracy of the generation she denounced. Students will always need proctors to watch over them when they take exams because, she argues, students are-like the rest of us-morally too weak for what the honor system demands. A college needs proctors for the same reason a city needs police.

Ellis might, then, be surprised to read Rachana Kamtekar's description of her years under Stanford's honor system (even though it confirms many of Ellis' worries). Stanford had a self-enforcement requirement. Students who knew of the wrongdoing of others were supposed to report it. Kamtekar, then a student, twice chose not to do that. Her explanation helps us understand both the moral complexity of such decisions and what makes so many veterans of the honor system want to re-create it.

Joseph Beatty's piece is, in effect, a meditation on the predicament into which Stanford put Kamtekar (and Thayer put his cadets). Beatty argues for doing away with the self-enforcement requirement (what he calls "the informer rule"). His reason is that it works against the goal of moral education supposedly justifying the honor system. Loyalty and friendship are moral virtues; they are also virtues necessary for the primary relations through which we become moral. The self-enforcement requirement, if treated as preempting these other moral considerations, threatens the very social bonds necessary for moral education. Only a fanatic treats one moral consideration, even honor, as overriding every other.

These first three pieces combine argument and anecdote. The last reports empirical research. Donald McCabe's extensive study of honor systems has led him to at least two important conclusions. The first is that honor systems can reduce academic dishonesty substantially. Ellis is too gloomy about the moral improvement human beings are capable of McCabe's other conclusion is, however, that the honor system as such does not seem to be the key to such improvement. Some schools with an honor system showed no improvement; some without an honor system did. The key to improvement seems to be explicit and continuing discussion of academic honesty, an environment making academic honesty seem important to everyone.

While I no longer think an honor system is irrelevant to teaching professional ethics, I still oppose its adoption. The good an honor system can achieve can be achieved without it, simply by explicit and continuing discussion with students of moral, scholarly, and professional standards. What is bad about the honor system-its reliance on "honor" rather than honesty, decency, and other workhorses of every-day morality-is avoided. Students can learn to cooperate in creating a morally exemplary environment without a vocabulary foreign to them (and us).

Of course, the switch from talk of honor to talk of morality, academic honesty, and professional ethics will not do away with Beatty's worry. (Most professional codes require that wrong doing be reported.) But the switch may at least make it easier for students-and faculty-to think clearly about the responsibility of each for the conduct of everyone else. Honor is a preemptory virtue; morality, academic honesty, and professional ethics leave more room for discussion, revision, and even principled compromise.

That is the conclusion I drew after doing this issue. You may draw another.