After half a semester of backyard noise, late night weekend parties and one living room rock concert, an anonymous neighbor complained about a radio station event at my house to the University as well as the police in the early hours of Sunday, Oct. 12. Two days later, my housemates and I trudged into the Office of Off Campus Student Life to meet with Chuck VanSant about the incident, and were summarily punished for our honesty.
We gave an account of the night as accurately as possible: the party lasted about an hour, until the arrival of the Metropolitan Police Department around 12:40. They politely (as usual) gave us a verbal warning about the noise and asked us to turn down the music and send everyone home. We did both. The party was one of the smallest and shortest we’d hosted all year, and since the police had made no report and the neighbor never showed up, no one could confirm the specific details but us.
We left the meeting expecting a written reprimand. Later that afternoon, we each got an e-mail from VanSant informing us that we were also banned from having any more parties for the remainder of 2006. His rationale: “The students admitted to hosting a party of approximately 50 to 60 people. The party included music and a keg. Guests were on the back porch… Mr. VanSant finds that it more likely than not that the party caused a disruption in the neighborhood.”
The Student Code of Conduct contains no sanctions on parties based on the number of guests, whether they are allowed on back porches or the bare fact that music and keg beer may be present. In short, the party restriction was based solely on apparently harmless information that we ourselves had willingly provided to the Office, for which there could be no proof but our word. Never mind that we live in a privately-owned off campus townhouse, outside the jurisdiction of University housing and their attendant rules.
Meanwhile, I spoke to someone who has been called before VanSant several times this semester for similar neighborly complaint and received no sanctions beyond one written reprimand. The difference? He and his roommates lied through their teeth each time. They slimmed down the numbers of guests, made false claims of who was and wasn’t present based on age and even went so far as to claim they didn’t know there would be a keg at their house. As a result, they dodged the sanction bullet—on their word alone.
My house had a week to appeal the decision. We couldn’t: according to Student Conduct’s web site, the only grounds for appeal are “substantial procedural error,” “new evidence of a substantive nature” or a “substantial disproportionate sanction.” The whole substance of our argument could only have been that we told the truth, and ended up worse off than if we had not.
This problem is endemic to Georgetown’s culture. In a class last week, I spoke up when a professor mistakenly indicated that I’d turned in all of my reading responses, when I was still missing one. As a result, she told me I didn’t have to do it. I was stunned, less by the generosity of the professor than by the realization that it was the first time at Georgetown I’ve ever actually been rewarded for being honest.
The preamble to the Student Code of Conduct states, “The education offered by Georgetown University is an education in values. Especially appropriate in a university community are virtues of truthfulness, honesty and personal honor.” Meanwhile, a 2005 report by the Center for Academic Integrity showed that 70 percent of students on most campuses admit to some cheating. As a school with an honor code, Georgetown theoretically has less. But how effective can any honor code be if the institution administrating it doesn’t honor honesty and, if regardless of any higher values embraced, it rationally makes more sense under the system to lie?
