I’ve got a letter in the latest Cav Daily about the drunkards in this town that are commonly known as UVa students. Now that Amber is a student, I’ve been paying attention to the place. They have this system called the Honor Code(tm), which essentially says that if you do bad things, you’re expelled, based on a trial before fellow students. After reading their whole little pamphlet on the Honor Code, I’m still not clear on what the rules are. There were occasional references to lying, cheating, or stealing, but it never said that in what looked like an important manner.
UVa is famous as a drinking school, as you may know. So I’m curious how these drunkard remain in school, since they’ve got this whole honor thing. If a student is under age, then they lied to buy the alcohol. If they got somebody else to buy it, then they cheated. And if they ripped it off from a restaurant or the back of a convenience store, then they stole Why isn’t the vast majority of the UVa population getting expelled each year?
I don’t get it. When I applied to UVa, I wrote an essay on why the honor code is a sham. (The topic was a classic stupid college admissions topic: What is your least convential belief?) To be honest, I can’t actually remember if that was the essay that I sent or not, but I meant it. Their joke of an internal legal system has long bothered me.
Anyhow, there are some new proposals regarding how the system should be changed. I haven’t had the time to read ’em yet, but I’ve got a feeling they’ll do very little. I hope I’m wrong.