Students share integrity responsibility

Andrew Collins" column on the 'albatross' of a Community Standard saddens me. The Duke Community Standard is a statement of values by which we hope to live as a community. Would Collins prefer that we not have any honor code at Duke? Shall we be silent on the subject?

The students, faculty and administrators who proposed the Community Standard, and the faculty and student councils that approved it, were not so na*ve as to assume that all students act honorably. Nothing in the code forbids proctoring. But I have heard a Board of Trustees member volunteer that when he was an undergraduate at Duke, in a multi-hundred person chemistry course, no one cheated because they respected the professor. Those exams were not proctored. Have our current students lost all respect for their professors? For their peers? For themselves?

Faculty employ many strategies for dissuading cheating, such as discussing their expectations for academic integrity, teaching the techniques for avoiding plagiarism and assigning successive drafts of papers. However, it is not only the faculty"s responsibility to ensure that the climate for academic integrity is robust; the students have a role to play, including confronting peers known to cheat, which the obligation to report encourages. For what it"s worth, the Honor Council and the AIC both are reviewing the obligation to report, which was part of the previous honor code as well (1993-2003). Whatever the result, students along with faculty and administrators have to make any honor code real.

Duke does not have the venerable tradition of honor of UVa and Washington and Lee because we are much younger, not because we don"t have the 'timeless qualities of Jefferson and Lee.' We do not eschew tradition for dynamism, nor is dynamism incompatible with honesty--to the contrary, integrity is an expectation for all our undertakings at Duke. On this point I, for one, am not ready to 'fold "em.'