Freshmen class presidents on the Honor Committee

In short, this election is a farce. People are about as likely to vote for the candidate that stopped by their room handing out Snickers as they are to vote for the candidate most qualified for the job.

What many freshmen do not know while arbitrarily voting for the one candidate whose name they actually know is that they are also selecting the person who will represent their class on the Honor Committee for an entire year. Choosing someone for such a significant office on the basis of such a laughable election is bad policy, and it’s not just bad policy because the election is so ridiculous.

Even if the selection process was less arbitrary, combining the two positions would still be problematic. Princeton students might reasonably want different qualities in their class president than they do in their representative on the Honor Committee. After all, the skills that make one effective at adjudicating cases of cheating are not necessarily the same as those that make one effective at ordering Taco Bell for study breaks or planning the famously awkward Freshman Formal.

Not only does this mean that class presidents may not be effective members of the Honor Committee, but tying the positions together also eliminates potentially qualified candidates from serving on the Committee. There is a host of people who lack the drive and extroversion necessary to run for class-wide office but who might be thoughtful and effective members of the Honor Committee. These people can apply for appointed spots on the committee but are still functionally ineligible for one-third or more of the seats.

I do not mean to criticize current members of the Honor Committee who joined through the freshman election. To the best of my knowledge, Alex Rosen ’11 has represented my class admirably. But even so, our class got Alex Rosen by luck of the draw — not because we presciently judged the character of all the candidates running. We could almost as easily have ended up with someone wholly inappropriate for the position.

This spring, several students plan to sponsor a referendum on the USG ballot to change the way that freshmen are represented on the Honor Committee. Under our system the freshman class would still have a representative on the Honor Committee. It is important that freshmen have someone in their class whom they can comfortably approach with questions or concerns about the committee.

Instead of having the freshman class president serve automatically, however, we will ask the Honor Committee to appoint a representative from the freshman class by application early in the fall term. Because the members of the committee would carefully review applications and know what Honor Committee membership entails, they can make more sensible decisions than the electoral process would. Whoever they select will serve a one-year term, at which point he or she can reapply to remain on the committee. To preserve some of the elected spots on the committee, the sophomore class president would automatically be added as a member. At that point, the class has far more knowledge of the people running for office, putting it in a better position to judge their fitness for the committee.

In principle, we would be willing to go farther than the referendum that we are proposing this spring. There is a strong case to be made for decoupling the Honor Committee and the class offices altogether and running a separate election for the elected spots on the committee. In this case, however, slow change makes sense. The Honor Committee handles crucial aspects of academic life at Princeton. Wholesale reform runs serious risks, especially on a committee that lacks the faculty to maintain institutional memory. For now, this relatively minor change would significantly improve one of Princeton’s most important institutions.