What is the Responsibility Code? Perspectives 4

AVEDIS REID ‘26 (HE/HIM)

I, f or one, have no idea. But I have only been at Davidson for six months, so who knows, maybe I live under an administrative rock. So I asked around, and from sophomores, juniors, and seniors, I, again and again, heard resounding no’s. I looked it up. I was alarmed.

I know what the Honor Code is—in my first week at Davidson, its merits and consequences were preached to me by my OTM leader, then by a representative of the Honor Council, then by President Hicks, who drove his point home with Bentham and Rousseau. It is, I was told, the central governing document from which all Davidson’s ideology and expectations flow, our commandments from Mount Sinai. It is so important that the paper I signed, affirming that I had read and understood it, is hanging on the wall of the most central building on campus and will be until I graduate. So monumental a treaty that angels of knowledge (or whatever those things on the roof of Chambers are) watch over it day and fluorescently illuminated night. I assumed, as I believe much of this campus does, that included in the Honor Code are both grand sweeping ideological decrees (stuff of thou-shalt-not-lie-cheat-orsteal tier heft) and rules which govern dayto-day campus life. It actually only consists of three short paragraphs, two of which flow from the principally substantive first: Each Davidson student is honor bound to refrain from stealing, lying about College business, and cheating on academic work.

Stealing is the intentional taking of any property without right or permission. Lying is intentional misrepresentation of any form. Cheating is any practice, method, or assistance, whether explicitly forbidden or unmentioned, that involves any degree of dishonesty, fraud, or deceit. Cheating includes plagiarism, which is representing another’s ideas or words as one’s own.

Besides begging for some pre-law student to turn it into a rollercoaster of loopholes, the Honor Code is wholly separate from the prosaic rules which govern each student at Davidson’s everyday life. Those rules are mostly contained in the Responsibility Code, which I heard of for the first time last week. The Responsibility Code is a governing contract, which we, as students, are held to with the same ardent fervor with which we are held to the Honor Code—just sans lectures, ceremony, signing, or really any notification of any sort. My alarm is not because of anything radical in the Responsibility Code I had not heard before; most of it is just common sense: “Possession and consumption of alcoholic beverages by anyone under twenty-one years of age is forbidden by the State of North Carolina.” “...[S]tudents will not engage in any form of activity which intentionally or recklessly results in physical injury…” “ Every student residing in college housing has the right to exclude at any time anyone other than their roommate(s) from their room.” I am alarmed because, like any social contract, I was bound to it the moment

I stepped onto campus as an enrolled student and was for six months totally unaware of its existence. I may be the anomaly here, and after this article I might receive a flood of emails about how I exist on my own plane of imbecility and ignorance for not knowing. But as far as I know, I am not. It passes under the name of North Carolina law and common sense, which is perfectly reasonable, but a binding code is binding and those bound by it should be at least nominally aware of its existence. I believe Davidson has a responsibility to make its students aware of the rules that govern its students, a responsibility which, as far as the Honor Code goes, they satisfy with flying colors. The Responsibility Code, albeit less flowery and driven by ideology, deserves the same attention—we deserve that attention, if not for the sake of our adherence to it, then for the sake of the idea of a social contract in general. President Hicks made the same point in his address at the signing ceremony—a social contract (Rousseau’s, in Hicks’ example) can only be adhered to with the knowledge and consent of its social populace. Otherwise, it is illegitimate, or tyrannical, or both. The Responsibility Code poses no grand tyranny, but we are the victims of an ideological glut, caught in the chasm between theory and practice. Signing the Honor Code is not an empty act because it actualizes this principle, so often ignored in the actual political realms in which Rousseau hoped to be honored. If not at a liberal arts college, where else are the -