Please allow a teacher of English to take exception to your castigation of Student Body President Jen Daum (The Daily Tar Heel, "Unexcused Absence," 9/23/02), for taking part in a mock Honor Court session, instead of the "perhaps more honorable" choice of attending a Town Council hearing on rules affecting rental property in Chapel Hill.
Actions are either honorable or not. Your "perhaps" suggests an uncertainty which, I believe, results from comparing two events too different in kind for one to be "more" or less honorable than the other.
Proposed changes in the Chapel Hill land-use ordinance could have important consequences for everyone: students, landlords and other citizens. Many public discussions must take place before all implications become clear. Jen Daum's absence at the first of those meetings may have had its origin in simple practicality, or as you noted, in elementary physics, but since neither her personal honesty nor public esteem were challenged by her absence, the question of honor cannot arise.
She did not, after all, falsely claim to have been in two places at once.
Neighborhoods change for better or worse, and this is properly the concern of the Town Council and of the many active neighborhood associations in Chapel Hill. The health of the intellectual climate on campus, however, is what makes being a student, a teacher or a citizen of Chapel Hill valuable in the first place, and the court is both an expression and a guardian of that fundamental ecosystem. Honor is its oxygen. Its care is primarily the responsibility of students, not the Town Council or other citizens.
All of us, however, are challenged in the intellectual climate at UNC. It requires all of us -- faculty, students, administrators and staff -- not to claim to be other than we really are nor to profess to know more than we know.
Your president's willing participation, like the mock trial itself, was an appropriate, imaginative and instructive exercise of responsibility. I am sad that more students were not present to witness the hilarious and serious consequences of not believing that integrity in taking an exam is as important as breathing clean air.
I learned from the mock trial how enormously the honor system has improved in the past decade. I believe that when more faculty understand how proposed reforms will improve it further, more faculty will participate in it and support it than at present. It is as much in our interest to do so as it is in yours.
Robert Kirkpatrick
Professor
English
The length rule was waived.
