Praising Caesar as a Colossus who "doth bestride the narrow world," Shakespeare's Cassius tells Brutus that "we petty men ... peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves." Of course, it is not the graves that are dishonorable but the men who end up in those graves, after leading lives tainted by skulduggery. Nevertheless, there can be honor even among thieves, and dishonor even among scholars, men and women who have been intimate with Shakespeare, Spinoza, and the Scriptures.
Dishonor in higher education is possible only because honor is so fundamental to the idea of a university. Honor is the engine that drives us to make and share discoveries. We volunteer to cover an ailing colleague's classes or give a book to an indigent student because it is the honorable thing to do. And we shudder at revelations that Marc Hauser, a professor of psychology at Harvard, may have fudged data in his studies of primate behavior; that several books by James Twitchell, a professor of English at the University of Florida, appropriated others' words verbatim without attribution; and that Alexander Kemos, the third-ranking administrator at Texas A&M University, lied about his doctorate.
While we are appalled but not shocked to find fraudulent bankers and deceitful politicians, disgraceful behavior within a university is especially distressing. It is a betrayal of the trust that is essential to a community of scholars. "Say it ain't so!" we want to shout at the eminent historian who concocted sources, the college president who faked his credentials, the coach who channeled illicit payments to student-athletes. A discovery that one experiment has been misrepresented or one manuscript forged can begin to erode the entire body of collective knowledge.
"The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not also a man of honor," notes Sir Colenso Ridgeon in George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma. There is, of course, no necessary correlation between intelligence and virtue, and to find examples of brilliant scoundrels, it is not necessary to look to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Just look around the nearest university.
"What is honor?" asks Falstaff, who concludes that it is a vacuous abstraction, merely "a word." Yet, even though John Dryden dismissed it as "but an empty bubble," the word has spread. Particularly on college campuses, honor echoes like a carillon—in honors courses, honors colleges, honor societies, honor rolls. Graduation ceremonies dispense honorary degrees as well as diplomas inscribed cum laude—with honor. It is true that, in Book 9 of The Republic, Plato has Socrates divide humanity into three classes: "lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain." And if the categories are mutually exclusive, then the university, while a magnet for lovers of wisdom, would not be a natural home for lovers of honor (or, especially in these lean times, lovers of gain). Nevertheless, the principle that there is honor even among scholars, that the love of wisdom is itself worthy of honor, is proclaimed by the mottoes of the University of Kiev—"Utilitas honor et gloria" (Utility, honor, and glory)—and the U.S. Military Academy ("Duty, Honor, Country"). The college fraternity Kappa Delta Rho pledges "Honor Super Omnia" (Honor Above All Things), and students at Texas A&M University recite by heart the "Aggie Code of Honor": "Aggies do not lie, cheat, or steal nor tolerate those who do." In Boulder, Colo., students submit completed exams along with an affirmation: "On my honor as a University of Colorado student, I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance." But what is the honor of a University of Colorado student? Members of academic communities are forever avowing their honor, despite and because of contrary evidence.
In his new book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (Norton, 2010), Kwame Anthony Appiah answers Falstaff's question by defining honor as "an entitlement to respect." An entitlement, to be sure, is not the same as respect itself. One can conclude from Appiah's definition that to be honorable is not to subordinate everything to reputation but rather to act so as to be worthy of respect, regardless of whether anyone actually grants it. Appiah distinguishes between two kinds of honor—"positive recognition respect" and "esteem." Positive recognition respect is what we accord individuals simply because they belong to certain peer groups—vintners, dental hygienists, firefighters, knights of the Round Table—regardless of whether they have in fact individually done anything extraordinary to earn our respect. Esteem, by contrast, is a matter of merit, and it is inherently hierarchical. While we might accord all baseball players positive recognition respect, a batter who hit below .250 would not earn enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. We can respect all violinists but acknowledge that there was only one Heifetz.
To the extent that higher education aspires to be a meritocracy, in which the best students receive the highest grades and the best professors the most illustrious titles, universities are excellent laboratories for the study of honor. Appiah, who has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors, is himself among the most esteemed of contemporary academics. But, though he holds a prestigious chair in philosophy at Princeton University, in his book he does not address questions about honor in higher education. Instead he devotes a chapter to each of three "moral revolutions" whose success he ascribes to the reversal of honor codes. Dueling among English gentlemen, foot-binding in China, and slavery along the Atlantic were each, Appiah notes, initially supported by appeals to honor. In 1829 the Duke of Wellington challenged the Earl of Winchilsea to pistols at 12 paces because it was considered the honorable response to calumny. Until the demise of the Manchu dynasty, just after the turn of the 20th century, Chinese women signaled their refinement by contorting their feet into a lovely but painful lotus shape. And until the trade was banned by Britain, in 1807, white slaveholders purchased African laborers in part to advertise their own elevated rank. Appiah devotes a fourth chapter to an incomplete revolution, the campaign to end honor killing—the murder of a woman whose alleged sexual activity brings opprobrium on her family—in contemporary Pakistan.
Honor and morality, as he notes, are independent variables. Even as slaveholding was considered a badge of honor by the colonial elite, cogent arguments were made against it as morally repugnant. However, Appiah argues, it was not until honor was recruited to assist morality that the peculiar institution was dismantled on the plantations of the Western Hemisphere. Slavery was—and is—wrong, but what caused the moral revolution against it was the novel conviction that owning human beings was also dishonorable. William Wilberforce's abolitionist movement became a struggle to restore England's national honor. Similarly, opponents of both dueling and foot-binding spelled out their iniquities. Yet those claims, while necessary, were insufficient without a belief that the practices also violated standards of honor.
When that belief took hold, the conversion was rapid and complete, like a chemical reaction in which the introduction of a trace element instantaneously transforms the entire contents of a test tube. Within decades, dueling was being ridiculed for bringing dishonor to an effete aristocracy, and gentlemen who previously would not have married brides with unbound feet now considered women with bound feet unworthy mates. In the case of honor killing, Appiah contends that moral suasion in itself will not end the loathsome practice unless that suasion serves to alter the culture's honor code: "Honor killing will only perish when it is seen as dishonorable." If and when that time comes, as it has for dueling, slavery, and foot-binding, earlier attitudes will seem bizarre. People will ask, says Appiah, "What were we thinking? How did we do that for all those years?"
Let's apply to academe Appiah's analysis of how honor and morality can be wed, and of the mayhem that can result when the two are severed.
A sense of personal honor motivates individuals to do what is worthy of respect and avoid doing what induces shame. However, we can talk about national honor—for Americans, it was affirmed when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and it was besmirched by the officially sanctioned torture at Guantánamo—because honor is conferred and denied within communities that share a code of honor. To the extent that we identify with a group, our honor is invested in the actions of our cohorts.
Yet, within the grouping called academe, just as I would not take credit for a colleague's discovery of the mechanism behind Alzheimer's, I would not accept blame for another's arrest for arson. Collective dishonor is not the same as collective guilt. When Binghamton University's basketball team became embroiled in scandal last year, specific Bearcat players who were arrested for theft and drugs and administrators who looked the other way were guilty of serious infractions, but the entire community of students, faculty members, administrators, and alumni felt the dishonor. On the other hand, William H. Gass's novels and essays bring honor to everyone at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is a professor emeritus.
Misdeeds are not necessarily more rampant on college campuses than in brokerage houses, law firms, or shopping malls. But some seem common: plagiarism; grade-fixing; doctoring sponsored research to please the sponsor; sabotage of rivals; conflict of interest; abuse of laboratory subjects; fabricating credentials. Most of these are illegal and unethical as well as dishonorable.
However, echoing the examples that Appiah discusses, a few invidious practices are still considered honorable within certain academic subcultures. Binge drinking is not only widespread; a famous national study conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health in 1997 found that almost half of the students surveyed reported downing four or five drinks in rapid succession within the previous two weeks. It also distinguishes the "well rounded" undergraduate from the "nerd" on many campuses. At colleges with high drinking rates, 34 percent of other students reported harassment from binge drinkers. Hollywood celebrates college life as a long, merry bender; a poster advertising College (2008) shows a hung-over student bent above a toilet bowl. In popular culture, the bespectacled grind supplies papers and answers to his less bookish fellows, but, though he gets the grades, it is the smooth—and bibulous—guy who gets the girl. Many consider it more shameful to be seen in the library than at a beer bust and take pride in their alma mater's designation as "party school."
Though not universal, such attitudes are pernicious. Inebriation endangers physical and psychological health and obstructs learning. Binge drinkers squander educational opportunities that others are denied. Such arguments can and must be made, but they are not likely to end binge drinking unless they are joined to a change in the culture's honor code. If students begin to believe that not only is it not awesome to be soused but that it is dishonorable to put themselves out of commission and into a stupor, then declining an additional drink will be deemed worthy of respect. Sobriety will suddenly become the new cool.
Similarly, 75 percent of American undergraduates admit to cheating during their college careers. In other countries in which I have taught, education is conceived of as communal, and it is honorable to share answers with fellow students, dishonorable to withhold assistance. In the United States, collaborative test-taking, when not just a lazy river to a passing grade, is more a matter of flouting fussy rules. But there are sound reasons to discourage cheating. It makes a mockery of individual responsibility and subverts the integrity of academic credentials. It encourages slipshod learning, producing graduates unqualified to teach a class, prepare taxes, or perform surgery. It is inherently dishonest. But the way to reduce its incidence is to make it dishonorable, to convince test-takers that relying on themselves is worthy of esteem. The "gentleman's C" is not worthy of a gentleman; true gentility earns its grades. As with dueling, foot-binding, and slaveholding, cheating will end when the honor code is altered, when respect is accorded those whose work is their own.
In cynical, selfish times, honor, like Rodney Dangerfield, gets no respect. Though it is itself founded on a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, honor comes to seem like a foppish posture. Wisely defined, however, in universities and elsewhere, it is applied ethics, a standard and strategy for living as we should.
Comments
1. jbarr - October 07, 2010 at 09:22 am
I wonder the degree to which college sports/edutainment industry has contributed to such dishonor on college campuses. Does anyone have a thought on this?
2. littleredhen - October 07, 2010 at 09:49 am
I would like the author to provide evidence that "abuse of laboratory subjects" is "common".
3. texastextbook - October 07, 2010 at 10:18 am
Academe is a promised land, a state of mind. One would properly say that he visits academe.
Rachel Maddow, an educated woman, would be 'of' academe, would have come from it. She can be seen at her job today (well, as of last night), mocking, ridiculing, a fellow citizen, one named Christine O'Donnell, who is a candidate for public office.
What responsibility to Maddow's audience have those who consider themselves to be members of the academy?
4. lizardmom1 - October 07, 2010 at 04:44 pm
I wish the author had discussed the dishonor of abusing one's authority to bully and harrass others. Once, in my naiveté, I mistakenly thought academics were too honorable for these practices.
5. barrycooper - October 07, 2010 at 06:43 pm
Someone who is honorable is someone who can be relied on to do the right thing because it is the right thing. The concept is without content if doing the right thing is easy. Thus, it implies a personal code of conduct which is maintained in the face of difficulty. It implies eschewing the easy way for the hard way, because it is the right thing to do.
As you say, to be honorable does not imply that one will in fact receive honor. But that is not the point. The point is that a personal moral code is not just a burden, but a liberation from a crippling sense of confusion. Who we are is what we choose to do and why, and to be unable to followe the dictates of your own conscience is to be owned by events, and not to be the captain of your ship.
The people scampering around in the dark: they are the cursed ones. Their burden is far the greater, even if they are honored publicly.
It is best, I think, to think of honor as something YOU do, as an internal matter, and if it eventually reflects back on you, so the better, but that is not the main reward.
6. arrive2__net - October 08, 2010 at 01:36 am
This is a good and thoughtful article. I have these comments:
I think the phenomenon Plato and Socrates observed was really driven by traits, not categories. I think most people have traits of desire for honor, money, and wisdom, but not in the same order of priority or strength.
People often have competing systems or conditions of honor.
Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net
7. frankschmidt - October 08, 2010 at 09:39 am
Actually "cum laude" means with praise not with honor - which may be the root of the problem discussed here.
8. gypsyboots - October 08, 2010 at 10:39 am
Appiah certainly raises an important topic, one worthy of prolonged reflection.
Honor is fundamentally mainitained by the right to exclude those who fall outside the code. But Western cultures have long waged a campaign against "honor" as a regulator of social conduct, ever since Dewey. Honor is a way that individuals and groups regulate each others' behavior without government sanctions. But modern liberalism insists that government should have a monopoly on all penalties, even social ones.
Hence the many campaigns against even private groups that exclude others, often including appeals to courts to override or outlaw this or that social custom because it is "hurtful" to various excluded groups. It's part of liberalisms's legal positivism, thgat regards law not as an expression of honor but as a purely pragmatic arragement of penlties to produce some desired outcome.
In America, the Constitutional right of association was originally understood differently that it is now. Origianlly, the idea wasn't that everyone should belong to every group, or be able to in theory, but that everyone be free to form their own groups. It didn't matter if you were excluded from some groups, as long as you were free to form or join your own group, which in turn could exclude others.
But now, the right of association has gone from being essentially a right to socially exclude others (as long as such exclusion didn't have material aspects such as loss of a job) to a "right" for everyone to be "included."
Of course the reason for this change was the effort to break a vicious code of "honor" in the south that sanctioned bigotry. But the effort has expanded to the point that almost any form of social exclusion is now seen to be equivalent to racism.
Where "honor" is strong, official pentlies are often lax. Non-Japanese are often surprised at the leniency of Japanese judicial penalties and prison sentences, for instance.
But that is partly because social penalties are so much stronger than in the West. If you're convicted of or even charged with murder, for example, your family of origin has a "funeral" for you, after which they never speak to or refer to you again. You are socially "dead" to them. These penalties are a pwerful deterrent, but unfortunately their positive effects seem to be inseparable from other, cruler kinds of exclusion. Until recently, for instance, the very poor and certain minorities in Japan were officially "invisible."
In the same way, caste discrimination survives and thrives in India, despite many official bans and remedies against it.
9. dennisszilak - October 08, 2010 at 07:12 pm
Much that is dishonorable may not even be shameful; and much that is shameful is not even dishonorable.
Honor and dishonor lie within the context of a tradition associated with a well-defined discipline, The notions are trivialized by associating them with shameful, illegal, immoral or debasing behaviors within the realm of loosely constructed social standards. Honor and dishonor belong to certain fields within society but not to positions of status, social standing or profession. [Profession: a collection of person united by self-certification, self-interest and self-satisfaction, who have never been bothered by a conflict-of-interest, never having seen one.]
As regards a discipline within a profession, conduct may be honorable or dishonorable but as regards "professional conduct," it can only be admirable/shameful, legal/illegal or creditable/discreditable according to the transitory, relative, fashionable or expedient tendencies of the profession at any given time. To the extent that market-place activities can be considered a discipline governed by a tradition of exchange values and contractual relationships, conduct may be honorable or dishonorable. Thus there can be honor and dishonor among thieves or even bankers. However, within the profession itself conduct such as that characterized as good or bad "business practice" is not subject to "disciplinarian" standards. Rather the standard is "whatever the market" will bear. What it won't solicits approbation.
Even if students are considered as constituting a profession, it is an exaggeration to claim they are duty-bound to some discipline. Being a student, being a parent, being a friend, employee, spouse, teammate often involve behaviors that are shameful, discreditable, illegal or "evil" but these roles do not involve a duty to the traditions of some discipline.
Craftsmen, including all workers in the construction industries, share a discipline with a well-established traditions in regard to what comprises safety, durability and quality. Artists certainly are devoted to various disciplines, whose works will be judged as having redeeming value or not but there is no tradition for works of art to which any artist owes a duty. Politics as the art of the possible, the compromise or the negotiation can hardly be said to even be a discipline, although it can lay claim to a well-established tradition either for good or ill.
A difficult case arises with the profession most associated with concepts of honor and dishonor: the profession of "arms." Suffice it to say individually members of the military may well have a well-developed sense of honorable and dishonorable conduct "under fire." but considered as a profession, the military values reputation and "closing ranks" above all else. [Consider the current case of "whistle blowers," such as Bradley Manning http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/206106/bradley-mannings-guilt-mdash-and-ours ] The athletic disciplines have long traditions for "sportsmanship" as well as changing standards for "winning is everything." The case of "performance enhancements" measures, those outside the traditional means of physical development for competition, are debatable. Only some notion of "natural law" or the body as the "temple of the Holy Ghost" would appear to exclude modern enhancements from others that aid physical development to improve athletic performance. At gladiator school neither safety, health as such, or mental well-being was much of a consideration.
In sum, student conduct may be shameful or not depending on the circle in which it is performed, but it is never dishonorable. Students who cheat on tests are usually not yet in the position of being duty-bound to some discipline. People who claim degrees or certifications they do not have will get disapproval from many quarters but no transgression of duty to a discipline or even traditions of a discipline are involved. In the teaching profession there is no dishonor in lacking collegiality or even having ill-disguised contempt for the profession. Dishonor comes with failure to do one's duty to the demands of the discipline. This is dishonor to compromise the demands of the discipline, to compromise, even under fire from administrators, colleagues and especially students who are in the habit of wanting to do what they are used to doing. University scientists who produce the results desired by Big Pharm or medical providers are the worst offenders but every discipline has its opportunities.
10. dexter_peabody - October 10, 2010 at 06:54 pm
And what about the many unnoticed rewards for the needless churning of textbooks.
11. maltheyounger - October 10, 2010 at 11:09 pm
I find the inclusion of the drinking habits of college students in this article to be silly and clearly a ploy to increase readership by referencing a "hot-button" issue. Sans the photo of drinking and the brief mention of binge-drinking at the end of the article, the article is a stale, cliche meditation on the decline of the modern academic world and the rise of a dishonorable culture that needs to be combatted. Adding drinking to the mix seems to spice things up a bit, but is both unrealistic and unrelated to the author's real point. There will always be a drinking culture at the American university, just as there always has been -- the latest sensationalist study aside, all college students today are at least somewhat familiar with the their parents' outrageous exploits. It is an overstatement to say that drinking is considered "honorable," I've never heard a college-age boozer go that far, but it is also ludicrous to say that the squares will ever triumph so fully that getting drunk in college becomes "dishonorable." The entire drinking subpoint is unrelated because it doesn't deal with an issue that relates to honor in the same way the other topics raised by the author and Appiah do. Footbinding and cheating are demonstrably unethical, the authors attempt at demonstrating that drinking is a significant harm to others and students that drink is not well defended or supported by the current literature base (see articles on the life expectancy of regular drinkers).
12. duchess_of_malfi - October 13, 2010 at 06:01 pm
This is a very weird combination of photo and column. Here is what the Chronicle is linking under "Past Coverage" for the article:
Too Many Colleges Are Still in Denial About Alcohol Abuse - April 14, 1995
Study Classifies 44 Percent of Students as Binge Drinkers - April 5, 2002
40% of College Students Are Binge Drinkers, New Report Affirms - April 26, 2002
Binge drinking is considered to be deviant by students on some college campuses and normal on others. But "normal" is not "honorable." The negative effects of binge drinking and cheating, for the individual and other people, are not similar. The analogy does not work. (And if you know anything at all about crime, the "honor among thieves" idea reflects real life about as well as Cary Grant's John Robie reflects real thieves.)
Honor is not the only thing that drives academic discovery. Curiosity, competition, money, security, and vanity do as well. Most people do the right thing because their society has defined it as the right thing: they conform because the thing is habitual and expected, and because too much would be lost if the wrong thing were done. Maybe honor is visible only when it is tested.
13. dank48 - October 14, 2010 at 09:52 am
Unless I'm mistaken, Socrates also argues that it is better, in a sense that seems at least partially to mean more honorable, to be wronged by someone than to wrong someone.
Whatever honor amounts to, it would seem to have nothing to do with the sort of shabby behavior that's rationalized because "everybody's doing it." For students, wanting or needing the good grade doesn't justify cheating, for example. For professors, the same goes, plus of course the requirements of professional conduct.
"I want" is not the moral equivalent of "I should." The rest is detail.
14. tappat - October 14, 2010 at 10:19 am
Honor and morality, we used to learn, as with everything, should be joined and separated, according to one's sense of honor and morality, in various circumstances. While I could draw on one of the many works referenced by Mr. Kellman in this nice essay of his, I would rather draw his attention to a work I read with him many years ago, The Master and Margarita, using part 2 as a kind of center point for contemplation, or even more to another, perhaps simpler work, The Scarlet Letter. What are we to say about Margarita's honor and morality or that of Hester's, as we contemplate the question from the multiple honor codes and moral worlds brought to bear by the authors in communion with their more participative, imaginative and humane readers? Surely witch and whore are among them, but so is so much more, too, including a rather high-handed contempt for the reaction that produces the simple reactions of "witch" and "whore," right? For university professors in the US, what is the honor and morality of reducing everything they do in the classroom and with the curriculum to that which our masters tell us can be represented by metrics? Perhaps I should be providing a set of multiple-guess options for each of these questions, but I'd rather put them as prompts for a highly discursive essay, one that includes, perhaps, some art and music and more poetry than modern, which is to say bureaucratic, interpretation and narration. You know, Mr. Kellman, the sort of essay or reaction you used to solicit and revel in, many years ago.
15. 49k95 - October 14, 2010 at 04:59 pm
Great article. However academia today is more like mafia (without the Witness Protection Program) than the microcosmos full of honor that it should be.
16. wdabc - October 17, 2010 at 07:41 am
South Korean universities/colleges consider lecture notes, power point presentations, publications, etc. the property of the university. If the professor refuses to submit any of the above documents, they will enter your office and steal the professors' intellectual property. Not only is this dishonorable, but it is criminal on serveral levels. It is theft. It is a violation of intellectual property rights and so on. In a country that prides itself on "saving face", I find this the highest level of dishonorable behavior.