Reforming the Honor Code Office

BYU Students are hoping to reform the Honor Code Office with a social media campaign, and students have been sharing stories online of their own run-ins with the HCO. The stories have a few recurring themes:

• Gay students being targeted disproportionately, often for non-violations
• Vindictive behavior between students that the HCO enables and promotes
• Hints at breaches of confidentiality in the ecclesiastical confession process, putting repentant students’ educations on the line when they seek counsel
• Policing of doubts and testimony by other students
• Local police officers sharing information about BYU students that occurs off campus
• The emotionally and psychologically unhealthy impacts of the HCO on students: paranoia, anxiety, depression, and the fact that some reported sins/violations are associated with psychological issues
• That the HCO encourages lying and discourages repentance by inserting academic (and downstream financial) consequences to what should be personal spiritual matters
• That there is an HCO file on each student, including fishing expeditions in their social media accounts. (FYI, they are legally obligated to show you your file if you request, and I would request the heck out of that thing.)

Additionally, an online petition seeks to modify some of the code’s more strict dress code norms such as no beards, no second piercings for women and no piercings for men, and knee length shorts. Students also seek a relaxation of the code’s curfews and prohibitions on using bathrooms in opposite sex apartments. [1] Since the code was theoretically created by the students, then theoretically the students should have a say in how it is enforced and when and how it is modified. I have a hard time believing that between 1992 (when I graduated) and now, anything approaching a majority of students felt that the code should become more stringent; yet it has. Given that the current petition has over 16,000 signatures (despite a stated fear that signing them will put them in the cross-hairs of the HCO), the university either needs to listen up or quit saying the students create the code.

It makes me question whether the Honor Code is really a golem, a thing the students created (in the 1970s, mind you) that has taken on a life of its own (and its own office full of employed enforcers) and now you can’t easily disempower it. The golem is a Jewish mythical creature with a holy word on its forehead that brought it to life. Someone would create a golem to carry out routine tasks like household chores, and eventually the golem would get larger and more powerful and dangerous and had to be taken down. The way to do this was to remove the holy word from its forehead, thus deactivating it, but the golem-creator was often injured by the flailing, threatened golem in the process. A valuable cautionary tale.

The Honor Code Office recently issued a Q&A to explain its actions and processes as well as a Tweet in response to the social media campaign:

So far so good. The Q&A from Honor Code Office director Kevin Utt also shows some promise, although he neatly elides some of the more important trends noted in the Honor Code Stories shared by students. You can read his remarks in their entirety here. I really do believe that his and the office’s intentions toward the students, at least in response to these stories, are caring and positive, and that he wants to uphold the university’s tradition of gospel-committed students of faith. I believe they are sincerely listening and hoping to make improvements. [2] Positive aspects and/or changes:

• They appear to be addressing training gaps (if not hiring gaps) in their staff as pertains to psychology of students being reported.
• They acknowledge and express concern about the anxiety their office and the process of being accused causes, even though there are no specific plans to curtail or address this outlined in the Q&A.
• They claim the office’s role is rehabilitative and conciliatory, not punitive. Even if this is just an aspirational comment, it could have some positive effects.
• They state that students will not bear consequences for not turning in other students.
  • This contradicts some honor code office stories that I personally heard at school (particularly if a student was unwilling to name a sexual partner), but here it is in writing which will hopefully empower students not to be bullied by administrators or teachers into tattling on other students. Please, BYU students, if you are reading this, know that your Religion Professor may tell you it’s part of being your Brother’s Keeper to tell on him (or a video about a fallen comrade may imply such. Hmmm.), but it isn’t so.
  • The downside here is that false accusations also hold no consequences to those who target others.
• They claim that they do not act on anonymous reports, but with the caveat that they will if a student’s safety may be in jeopardy.
  • This begs the question exactly what do they consider to be “safety” (are there some Dolores Umbridge-like HCO employees who stretch the limits to include, for example, “spiritual safety” in which case, the safety caveat is meaningless.)
• They talk about the importance of context in determining outcomes, specifically: motivation, intent, openness of the student (yikes), impact, and relative severity of behavior.
  • There is still plenty of risk in the ability of these HCO employees to assess such things when handling a distressed student whose life may feel upended by an accusation.
• They explain that the office does not receive information from bishops about students unless the student has given prior written consent for that information to be released. That’s a game changer there, and I suspect that it’s about the first time any students have ever heard of that, but it should be shouted from the rooftops and nailed to the door of every BYU student-approved housing apartment.
  • This statement in the Q&A made me go “Say what now?”: “By far the majority of cases addressed through BYU’s student conduct office are initiated by students reporting themselves for a violation.” The only way I can imagine this statement to be true is if you consider the previous bullet: that students go to a bishop and don’t specifically require that the bishop retain what is said in confidence. I can only guess that the default setting is “Bishops have leave to spill the beans.” Students, as The Clash put it, Know Your Rights! Is there a caveat when you sign the honor code that you agree that your bishop can share your confession with the office? If so, YOU MARK NO.
  • There is some implication in the Q&A that bishops may not understand the confidentiality requirement and may unknowingly violate such and bring information to the HCO. In ecclesiastical trainings, bishops and stake presidents are invited to a meeting with university administration in which the HCO states: “We also emphasize that private information is not shared between ecclesiastical leaders and the Honor Code Office unless a student has signed a privacy waiver.” Something about this feels a bit hinky. They remind them at a non-mandatory meeting not to rat out students to the HCO for confidential confessions, but . . . how do they ensure the bishops aren’t violating confidence without express written consent?
• The Q&A states unequivocally that if a Title IX violation is found, the case with the HCO is immediately stopped and referred to the Title IX office. As he points out, this is one of the most important reforms made in 2016 to address sexual assault.
• Students have the right to request a staff member of a specific gender. As a woman, I’m not sure which gender I’d request because generally speaking they are both awful to women, but hey, at least it’s an option, and it will be honored if possible.

There are some elements to his answers and omissions, though, that are unsatisfactory, questionable or potentially misleading. Here’s a list:

• There is no consequence for students who weaponize the HCO to attack other students or who make specious allegations about their fellow students. From my own time there, I was told that my informant’s identity was held confidential, and even though it was deemed a groundless complaint, I should be on my guard anyway, that it was my responsibility to defend against accusations. The accuser had no burden of proof to meet. The identity of this mysterious creep was sacrosanct, and I was told there would be no consequences to him for wasting everybody’s time and blowing my week up with needless worry.
  • This is particularly concerning if there is a trend of disproportionate targeting of LGBT students, even when they are not in violation of any school policy, as appears to be the case.
  • In my own experience, I found that women were frequently harassed by unwanted suitors through the honor code. I even found an RA who was peeping into my roommate’s window, “looking for honor code violations.” I can state with utter confidence that the “Standards” office that was in place back then would not have cared one whit that an RA was creeping around the bushes outside our apartment if they felt my roommate was breaking the school’s precious honor code, but as I pointed out to the creepy RA, the police probably would, and that’s who I would call if I ever saw him doing that again.
  • There’s a “fruit of the poison tree” line of thinking missing from the HCO evaluation of accusations. They should not accept information from bishops or off-campus police officers if these are people who should not be sharing information, regardless of what that information is.
  • From a credibility standpoint, they should be equally skeptical of every single complaint they receive to ensure it’s not the product of jilted exes or spurned suitors or jealous roommates / classmates or homophobic kids just figuring out their place in a church school. Haven’t these people ever watched Law & Order?
• The ecclesiastical endorsement was a one-time thing when I attended BYU, something we did to be accepted into the school. We weren’t required to reaffirm our beliefs and commitment to the code every single year (as students are now). This was newly instituted in 1991 as an annual requirement. It seems that the issues with bishops violating confidentiality are an off-shoot of this more frequent forced interview process.
• While there is some reason to believe that emotional states are part of the context being considered, it’s also incredibly hard for non-therapists to accurately assess things like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder related behaviors, and trauma-induced promiscuity. I had a roommate back in the 80s who was a survivor of childhood incest that resulted in her freezing up in sexual situations. As she told me, she just let the guys she dated do what they wanted because what she wanted didn’t matter. She wasn’t in a position to manage these encounters due to her childhood trauma, and she was suffering from depression. She was receiving counseling through the university (she was a Psychology major). Had someone turned her in to Standards, I can only imagine what would have happened, and it wouldn’t have been good for her.
• He doesn’t mention the fact that the HCO keeps a file on students. Back in the day, we only had a file if a complaint had been made. There was no social media policing and people still had to guess at your private thoughts. Not so anymore. No wonder the office has grown so big. But that’s a huge part of the problem, too. Things that should be private, like conversations with bishops and what posts you like on Twitter, are being evaluated by a third party to ensure ideological and behavioral purity.

It’s encouraging that the school is listening. There’s still more to do, though. My list would be:

• Scrap annual ecclesiastical endorsements and go back to entry-only.
• Do not police social media accounts of students or accept such policing from fellow students. Someone’s academic standing shouldn’t be in jeopardy because a nosy parker read the tea leaves of their social media Likes and other emoticons.
• Restrict “honor code” investigations to cheating and plagiarism like other schools and manage them through the Dean of Students. Keep the code or not, but completely scrap the culture of tattling and enforcing that currently exists that is truly unique at the BYU schools (come on, saying that “all schools have one” is disingenuous at best given the tattling environment that exists at BYU). Don’t reward or encourage or enable tattling, full stop.
• Provide better access to free non-ecclesiastical counseling for students with emotional or psychological issues. Educate ecclesiastical leaders on these issues much better than they are at present.

Failing those reforms, my only recommendation would be for students to follow the excellent advice from the Book of Mormon, Jacob 6:12.

O be wise; what can I say more?

Let’s see what our readers think.

Discuss.

[1] I graduated from BYU in 1992, and back then I and the students I knew thought the beard restriction was dumb. Admittedly, I was in Humanities. Additionally, most of us ignored the curfews and prohibition on bathrooms, at least where I lived, and there was no restriction on piercings because that wasn’t a thing yet, still just an unexpressed preference of not-yet-President-Hinckley. I had three in each ear through my whole mission because who cares.

[2] This is a stark contrast to what I experienced as a BYU student, although my generation had no social media to empower us or allow us to be heard. My own encounters with the HCO (then called Standards) during the late 80s and early 90s can be found in a post I did many years ago on this blog.