Public Portion Minutes 4/7

By admin Published April 15, 2013 Public Minutes

Honor Council Minutes from 4/7/13

Members Present: Tamar Hoffman, William Bannard, Janela Harris, Brian Guggenheimer, Jon Laks, Ryan Baxter-King, Emily Brown, Erin Berlew, Austin Boyle, Ann Wolski, Allie Kandel, Damon Motz-Storey, Max Findley, Joost Ziff, Andrew Szczurek

Members Absent: Jon Sweitzer-Lamme, Henrik Born

Public Portion Guests: Suzanna, Cora, Rachel, Allison, Jeremy

Jeremy: I have heard in conversations that people don’t feel comfortable coming to public portion.
Tamar: That surprises me because I am always willing to talk about the Code
Rachel: I’m only a freshman but I didn’t know abotu council until this semester
Ann: That’s legit. I didn’t know until I was a junior.
Tamar: What can we do about that?
Ryan: I think it works well but it needs to be more publicized and more user friendly.
Emily: I think Jeremy was bringing up more of Honor Council being defensive about the Honor Code, not a lack of publicity. I think that might be valid, but I don’t know how to change that.
Damon: Maybe we can talk to HCOs and making sure that part of customs week is making sure that people know about public portion and what’s it about.
Jon: Tamar were you thinking that there could be a separate time for public portion.
Tamar: I think the defensiveness comes from being in this room and feeling that I am representing honor council. When we do public portion here I do not feel comfortable sharing my skepticism.
Ryan: Are you thinking about something as simple as going to the Bryn Mawr room.
Jon: I think that’s a really interesting idea. Another pressure in this room is that HC knows that there are things that need to be dealt with. These issues might be something that doesn’t necessarily require all 16 members of HC. Maybe there could be 4 groups of 4 or something. We could just have 4 people responsible for holding a public portion space.
Jeremy: Part of the problem is that this isn’t my perspective. The people who hold it are not going to come to public portion.
William: I see a parallel between recent abstracts. Are HC members community members first or HC members first. I feel that we’re all community members first. I’m generally not very concerned about speaking from my position vs. speaking from my opinion. Still there’s a perception of authority for HC members that I think is completely unfounded. These are not about authority than anybody else, they are about being elected.
Andrew: I agree with that. I also feel that where that stems from is that it’s easier for anyone to criticize an existing body by applying assumptions than it is to do what is right or wrong. People are on HC and have confidential things that they can’t talk about. They are part of a body that have Honor in their name. It seems as though they have more “honor” or whatever. That’s bullshit. I think we should tell people more clearly that the HC doesn’t belong to Council. It doesn’t belong to a Council to have authority on, etcetera. It belongs to the community to ratify, modify, live by. I think people don’t think about it. My speech isn’t very clear right now, but that is an idea of the feelings that I have been having.
Jeremy: I think part of the problem is that you are going have to ask us to leave. It is the simple fact that HC has to operate in secret. That lends an aura of mystique.
William: We are just going to talk about the cape I am going to wear.
Tamar: I understand where you are coming from. I think that confidentiality is really important and there is no way to circumvent that. There has been a push to open it up though. Telling the number of cases we had.
Jon: That happened my freshman year as well.
Tamar: I think we really tried to be transparent. We couldn’t say exactly what had happened. I am trying to see where the loopholes are in a way that doesn’t jeopardize students’ right to have privacy protected.
Allison: Why doesn’t HC always publish the number of cases?
Janela: In the past where there are fewer cases, it hurts confidentiality more.
Max: It’s also a very interpretive document. Every semester we get Council who has a different idea of it. Sometimes it feels like it would be too much exposure while others feel like it’s not enough. I think more community input would be nice. I think it’s too easy to get wrapped up in our own ideas.
Tamar: These are big changes. At the beginning of your term it seems like a long time at this point it feels like there wasn’t much.
Allison: Why would saying we have 2 cases compromise the confidentiality.
Damon: If I were the person involved in that case it would feel revealing. It would feel like I am the problem here and I am the one who caused it.
Allison: It wouldn’t breach your confidentiality though.
Ryan: Let’s say that there was only one case and there was separation. That would compromise the confidentiality of it.
Andrew: But if that person was separated then it wouldn’t matter.
Jon: The timeline is not that specific for releasing abstracts but abstracts are not supposed to be dated. Releasing certain information about statistics would make it possible for people to figure out when dates are.
Andrew: I still feel that it is more important to tell the community than allow people to connect the dots.
Janela: I think that there is another reason why we don’t publicize this information. I think a system like the HC works if everybody believes that everybody else is following it. It won’t work if people think that everybody is breaking it. Telling the community that a lot of people are breaking the code and are not fully restored lowers the responsibility that each individual feels. It also lowers the pressure to not break the code. I see publicizing that information as harmful.
William: Not publicizing that information means not publishing that information without a full abstract. When you have none of them coming when there should be more.
Ann: What do you think is gained by revealing the number of cases?
William: I’m going to add to that. What does that number tell you? What else would you want to know? Social vs. Academic? Separation or not?
Allison: I more was asking because it shows that HC is attempting to communicate with the community. I don’t think the community needs to know how many cases there are, but I think it is important to keep the perception that the people you elected will be communicating with you.
Jon: The college releases statistics every year even if there is no direct connection between those numbers and something else. SC publishes all its budgeting information. I have an expectation that administrative bodies should do that.
Austin: I think things like retention rates have meanings. I think the question is what more does the number of cases mean.
Ann: You also have something to compare retention rates to. I feel like the number of cases is so unique to Haverford and so unique to itself that we can’t compare it to.
Joost: One comment from a person who didn’t ratify was that there is a point that the number gets so high that it doesn’t matter what the reasons are. One example, sexual assault statistics are important even if we don’t know whether or not they mean reports or assaults.
Tamar: I think the context for that number was really important. I think there was a very different perception among different parts of campus about what was happening with the Honor Code.
Max: The first thing people want to know is what kinds of cases we have. Cheating/plagiarism/setting roommates stuff on fire. I want to know if there is a high prevalence of things.
Tamar: I think it was hard to distill what those patterns really were. I wonder how specific we can get without revealing too much. Besides cheating/plagiarism what else is useful?
Andrew: I would want to see Academic vs. Social. I find it very concerning that people don’t see the Social Code working on campus.
Rachel: I think it would be good to know how many cases were accidental and how many were intentional.
Janela: Do you think that information is more useful in an email or do you think that abstracts would be more useful?
Rachel: I think ideally reading abstracts is the best way, but expecting the student body to read the abstracts would be helpful. I think it is important enough to know even if students aren’t going to read all of the abstracts.
Allie: I think the email is real-time while abstracts are often held back a couple of years or have to do with previous semesters but I think both things are still useful.
William: My problem with giving a real-time thing is that it puts me in an uncomfortable position that I am judging whether something is accidental. There would be a 50/50 chance that I am sitting on a case. I know everything that is going on. I know who is involved and how juries feel. I don’t think it is fair for me to make that judgment.
Damon: Things aren’t always so clean cut.
William: Some people on campus don’t think that there is such a thing as “accidental” plagiarism.
Allison: That is why statistics and abstracts are useful together.
William: I am always wary to create statistics as a math major because I think you can get them to say anything you want them to say. I think there is value in just sort of a sense you get and not having a number that backs that up or contradicts it. At the same time you need a base of information and that doesn’t exist right now.
Ryan: I think the best course of action is that the backlogged abstracts get out. I think the best thing that can happen is abstracts getting out.
Emily: I kind of like the idea of doing a proportion thing, like Academic vs. Social. I agree with Will that there are way too many ambiguities in academic cases because they are not always clear cut. A vs. S is always clear cut.
Austin: I think it would be an interesting idea to put out a survey. We often sit here and talk about the sorts of things the community would like to see and asking what the community would like to see and then talk about what the community would like.
Janela: I think that is dangerous if people want something and we don’t give it to them.
William: Right now it comes down to how do the co-chairs read the code and the constitution. There is a lot of stuff about confidentiality. What can we do about that? I think that if people felt strongly about this, then a plenary resolution would be a good way to go. I don’t think HC deciding “the community needs this” is helpful. I think the community deciding “we need this” is better. At the end of the day I think it is up to the community.
Ryan: Is there anything else somebody wanted to bring up?
Tamar: We actually need to wrap up soon. We can bring up something else in brief.
Jeremy: Something that I’ve been thinking about is how we talk about how Haverford is a self-selecting community. People decide to come to Hford because we have the Honor Code. I am curious how athletics might affect the community as a whole.
Max: As a student who was recruited for athletics, I only applied to Haverford. Being recruited doesn’t get you out of the HC essay. That was the hardest essay I did. By having to do that essay it makes the process be self-selecting. I don’t think being recruited makes a difference, since at some level every person is recruited through advertisement.
Austin: A school as poorly known as Haverford… The people who find out about it are the people who care about this sort of thing.
Tamar: I think there are other factors that come into play. Needs-blind, no-loan school means a lot. I find it hard to believe that people who don’t self-select for the HC don’t follow it or care about it.
William: I think a lot of people select the school based on the perks of the HC not the HC itself. A lot of people select Haverford because it’s not a party school but you don’t get in trouble for partying. I have had friends who come visit me and it’s a Friday afternoon and you have a pong table on the hall. A dean walks by… Raisa walked by and saw the pong table. I am still waiting for Creighton to play pong with us. There are other reasons people walk by.
Ryan: Also, door-locking, and take-home exams, and everything.
Allie: plus without the Code, there’s no customs: without a safe space, PAF and AMA discussions go out the window, then HCOs are gone, and the whole program falls apart
Brian: I disagree strongly. I think that the customs program is bigger than the Code.
Andrew: i thought the code was bull-shit, and i chose haverford for academics
Jon: other schools have codes, too, but we pretend that they don’t
Tamar: we need to end this discussion, i’m sorry.
Mo si.
Tamar: one more thing: elections are coming up for chair and secretary, so think about that, and maybe talk to one of us about it.

These minutes reflect the interpretations of Janela Harris and Brian Guggenheimer, Co-Secretaries. They are neither reviewed nor approved by the rest of Honor Council. Questions/comments? Email hccosecs@hc!

Tags: Community Outreach Confidentiality