A few years ago our faculty faced a disturbing fact: many of our students seemed not to be taking our honor code seriously. The problem was not that cheating was rampant but that students rarely reported cheating they witnessed. Like many traditional honor codes, ours then included an "Informer Rule": any student witnessing or knowing of an offense must report it if the violator does not. Failure to report was an offense as serious as the original offense. The usual penalty for any honors offense was expulsion or suspension for a set period.

What's right here?
What troubled our faculty most about student failure to report others was that they understood it as failure to abide by rules safeguarding the search for truth to which students had voluntarily pledged themselves. Feeling betrayed and angry, many believed the failure to inform was moral cowardice in the face of likely peer disapproval. Other faculty traced it to a generational egoism, cynicism, and callowness, a disposition to irresponsibility.

Many students agreed with these faculty. But some did not. Among those who did not, I found something that made me prick up my ears. Students, they said, did not experience the pledge as voluntary; they were already on campus when they realized the full implications of the pledge. The penalty for honor violations, even minor ones, was, they said, so harsh that not informing seemed morally better. The morally appropriate response often seemed to be, they said, to confront offenders when they witnessed cheating, express disapproval, ask for explanations, and so on-rather than to inform on them and open them to suspension or expulsion. Yet, in doing what they believed to be "the right thing," these students often felt morally compromised, for they also believed that they had violated a rule they were pledged to uphold.

What startled me about these comments was that student unwillingness to inform was understood as a moral response which placed them in conflict with the moral demands of the code. The students were committed to the high ideals of the code-the search for truth and its safeguards, community good, self-government, justice. The problem was that this commitment came into conflict with their concern for their fellow students, those who, if "turned in," would suffer extreme sanctions. The paradox of their position was evident: for them, a code whose intention was to protect and nurture values, ideals, and virtues of high importance, a code designed to be an instrument of moral education in an educational community, was of less moral weight than protecting a dishonest student from the full consequences of his or her dishonesty.

Teaching What?
What seemed clear in my conversation with these students was that, in the name of high ideals, our honor code obligated them to make fellow students-including friends with whom they had close ties-vulnerable to severe penalty. Doing as they were obliged to do, they experienced a wrenching of their natural sympathies; and when they failed to inform, they experienced the self-loathing that usually accompanies moral hypocrisy.

I also listened to advocates of the honor code. They claimed that the informer rule was an instrument of moral education, that it helped foster an atmosphere of trust, a sense of community. As I listened, I formulated three questions: First, did the fact that the code occasioned such divided allegiance signal an incoherence in the honor system? Second, were the students morally wrong to disobey the informer rule? Third, would students have a stronger obligation to inform in a system which punished infractions less severely? I will briefly sketch my answers to these questions.

With respect to the first question, it seems to me that there are incoherencies in the system itself. The practice of informing as a function of one's allegiance to the honor code is supposed to cultivate honorable and responsible dispositions; it is a kind of moral education. But, since friendship and solidarity are the sorts of relations in which one reliably acquires the moral and social sympathies so important to moral dispositions, it seems self-defeating to require students to inform against friends and fellows in the name of moral education. Since the informer rule undermines both the constitutive values and concerns of the person and the very sympathies and identifications by means of which the person becomes himself, it is an assault on the person or at least on personal integrity. Whatever one is, whatever one morally prizes, the code overrides it in moral significance. An enterprise which tries to promote a sense of trust and community by mutual surveillance thus courts the charge of incoherence.

Because I answered my first question in this way, my answer to the second must be that students are not wrong to resist the informer rule. Their intuition, that the systems claim to preempt all other moral considerations is too abstract and absolute, too lacking in attention to persons and moral particularities, is morally admirable. The obligations of friendship are, I think, at least as morally compelling as any obligation to inform founded on mere allegiance to general principles of justice, truth-telling, or promise-keeping. If these competing moral obligations are in fact morally equal, then forcing individuals to choose between them naturally occasions self-alienation, de-legitimizes morality and moral sensibility, and invites moral hypocrisy.

I therefore answer my third question: In a system in which sanctions were less severe (and in which sanctions helped to educate and cultivate moral sensibility) students probably would be more willing to inform. But, even then, informer rule systems would be neither coherent nor person-respecting enough to overcome the robust considerations offered here against informing as a requirement.

How (it might be objected) could respect for persons or their integrity justify students shielding from punishment those who have used instructors and students as unwilling instruments for their dishonest purposes? To be sure, cheating is wrong and we are right to resent it as we resent other injustices. But it does not usually involve great harm or injury to persons. In situations-academic or not-in which offenses against honor threaten considerable or great harm to persons or to systems, we often believe (rightly) that informing is a strong moral obligation and we (rightly) resent the unwillingness to inform.

But a practice of routinely informing on associates and friends, in its wrenching and devaluing of natural sympathies and identifications, is destructive of personhood. In such systems, all of one's relations to other community members are mediated by one's quasi-official role: watchdog or guardian of the code. Whatever concern one has for a friend's or associate's good, whatever precise understanding one has of the other's problem, whatever compassion one feels for the other, one's duty under the code must prevail. This allegiance to an abstract and absolute principle oversimplifies moral life and, in so doing, assaults and reduces persons. So, I believe, it is ordinarily far more morally objectionable for an educational institution to require individuals to inform than for it to fail to punish dishonest students. Of course, such institutions should cultivate in various ways, commitment to truthful inquiry. And, to will that end is to will some means-but, of course, the precise means chosen must be consistent with the end.

A Final Provocation
I realize that I can't hope to do justice here to the complex issues I have been discussing; I can at best provoke. So, in the spirit of provocation, let me close with a point that seems obvious to me: If educational institutions abolished the practice of grading, academic honor codes (with or without an informer rule) would likely disappear. Grading and certification, rather than higher moral values, are in practice more important to honor codes, perhaps even a necessary condition of their existence. Institutions trying to restore the integrity (and innocence) of inquiry should therefore consider ways to cut or loosen the tie between grading and learning.