The Story of an Honor Council Member
The Honor Council – What Exactly Is It?
The Council is a body comprised of twelve students and twelve faculty memebrs, which serve as the Council’s “Voting Members,” whose job it is to review potential instances of academic integrity violations—or breaches of the Honor Code. Each voting member possesses a vote of equal weight, making the Council community-based and entirely egalitarian.
In addition, the Council is comprised of fourteen Student Academic Integrity Fellows (“SAIFs”), who advise students coming before the Council of the group’s procedures and what to expect. They serve as a key resource for these students, acting as the main point of contact throughout the Honor Council Process.
The Council is overseen by two Associate / Assistant Deans for Academic Integrity and Student Conduct, as well as is supported by two full-time staff members, known as Case Managers, who organize and compile all pertinent case materials.
We are distinct from the Administrative Board in that the Honor Council’s proceedings deal solely with violations of the Honor Code—meaning instances of suspected cheating, plagiarism, etc.—while the “AdBoard” deals with any other violations to the Student handbook as well as processes schedule petitions and requests of that nature.
For a quick overview of the Honor Council process, here is an easy-to-read flowchart!
My Roles and Experience:
I first joined the Honor Council as a first-year, spending my spring semester completing the Council’s extensive training, and I became a full-fledged Voting Member beginning my sophomore fall. In addition to my direct involvement as a Voter, I also serve as Co-Chair of the Training Committee, meaning that I spend each Friday onboarding and preparing our new class of members. Working alongside my Co-Chair and the Deans of the Council, I help facilitate discussions over key pedagogical readings and mock cases, in what I like to think of as a “fifth class” for the new members.I value my time on the Council because I think its cause is an important one: to make Harvard a better place. The long-term purpose of the Council, in my opinion, is to create a shift in our student body’s culture from one that sees college as a transactional experience into one where students can value the pedagogical experiences they’ve had here at Harvard. The Council is less about punishing students or weeding out the “bad eggs.” Instead, we recognize that students come to us after experiencing their lowest lows and having made regrettable mistakes. The process of going before the Honor Council is meant to be an opportunity for learning and reflection. While there are repercussions for one’s actions, we do believe everyone deserves a second chance, and that is a key principle that motivates our decision-making as a body.
Ultimately, I remain involved in the Honor Council because I wanted to make a difference here at Harvard. While our mission to transform the College’s culture is just beginning, and probably won’t be fully realized for years to come, it’s an exciting time to be a part of its work as it’s just in its infancy.
Action Research
Beyond the process, itself, we also facilitate a great deal of outreach, from talks during Opening Days, to freshmen study breaks, to tabling in dining halls, and visiting classes. Everyone in the College will have interacted with us in some form or another, and you may have stopped by to pick up our chocolate, seen our posters, or any number of ways where we try to make points of contact and foster these ideals of academic integrity which we work to promote. Ultimately, the goal of my project is to identify key ways in which we can more effectively carry out our mission: how can we better foster a culture of academic integrity here at Harvard? In order to reach a conclusion, I am hoping to first survey members of the student body to try to gauge the overall perception of us as an organization as well as academic integrity more generally, and to try and measure the effectiveness of our current outreach strategies. In addition, I hope to interview various Honor Council members and affiliates in order to try and solicit new proposals and ideas for us to potentially implement. Ultimately, we have a great deal of strategies to reach out to students, but we have little guidance on how effective each of these approaches are. Hopefully, I can walk away from this project with new ways for us to envision outreach and how we talk about academic integrity, so we can more effectively carry out our mission of making Harvard a better place.In order to reach a conclusion, I am hoping to first survey members of the student body to try to gauge the overall perception of us as an organization as well as academic integrity more generally, and to try and measure the effectiveness of our current outreach strategies. In addition, I hope to interview various Honor Council members and affiliates in order to try and solicit new proposals and ideas for us to potentially implement. Ultimately, we have a great deal of strategies to reach out to students, but we have little guidance on how effective each of these approaches are. Hopefully, I can walk away from this project with new ways for us to envision outreach and how we talk about academic integrity, so we can more effectively carry out our mission of making Harvard a better place.
