Failure to Act

The Honor Code. Often cited by the administration as what makes Connecticut College  unique and by tour guides as a reason to come to Conn, most students do not come into close contact with the tenets of the honor code unless they are self-scheduling exams or being read its clauses in an Honor Council hearing. This is likely due to the length, and at times the tediousness of the Honor Code, a long rainy-day read to say the least. However, there is one clause of the Honor Code that I personally have noticed crop up frequently this semester: the citation of Failure to Act in the form of campus safety write ups. The Failure to Act clause reads as follows:

“-Complicity with or failure of any student or organized group to address appropriately known or obvious violations of the Honor Code or Student Code of Conduct. If a student is made aware that a member of the Connecticut College community is in imminent harm or danger, s/he is expected to immediately inform an appropriate College staff person. The Honor Code includes an expectation that students will encourage individual(s) responsible for violations to report these incidents.”

Now this clause does not seem unusual at a glance, and in theory it is a reasonable and well-founded expectation for students to follow. In practice, however, it has been used in a different way.

Students have been cited for Failure to Act in scenarios where students in large settings are written for Honor Code violations by Campus Safety. These violations may include commonly illicit drug use or underage drinking. Campus Safety then proceeds to cite students present at the time of the write-up who have not participated in said activities with Failure to Act. Simply, the idea is that students are breaking the Honor Code by not reporting their peers for breaking the Honor Code.

The first issue I have with this procedure is that in these scenarios, the students in question are among friends or acquaintances, and are thus extremely unlikely to report their friends for activities that are, let’s be honest, very common on this campus. It is unfair and borderline mean-spirited to give students the ultimatum of either reporting their friends, who would most likely cease to be friendly, or face disciplinary consequences. When I spoke with Dean Cardwell on the matter, she made it clear that “we do not incentivize reporting,” speaking on behalf of the Honor Council and campus safety, but it seems that this policy is being used to do just that. In addition, Cardwell noted that this is not a new policy and that she has not noticed an uptick in Failure to Act citations presented to the Honor Council.

Cardwell also stated that “the scenarios where Failure to Act occurs the most is in the village or with smoking pot,” which brings up another issue with the use of Failure to Act.  Students cited with Failure to Act are being caught “in the act”, so to speak, and this means in order to avoid a citation, they are expected to preemptively or immediately report the students they’re with before being caught by campo. This also undermines the 24-hour window provided by the Honor Code for self-reporting. It is also an impossible standard to hold as it expects students to report their friends and colleagues before or during the time an infraction occurs.

While I’m not trying to make a big deal out of this, as indeed Cardwell states “people aren’t getting Disciplinary Probation for Failure to Act,” (which is true, although other disciplinary action might occur, such as Honor Council meetings or fines), the premise that you can be written up for not reporting your friends does not sit well with me, and I see this policy as just another practice campus safety uses, in their power-trip fueled quest to destroy Saturday nights on Conn’s campus and to get college kids in trouble for doing college kid things. Furthermore, no similar policy or ruling exists in criminal law, adding to the “Big campo is watching” Orwellian feel that this campus nightlife has had in recent months. •