Honor pledge to improve ethical awareness on campus

By Kevin Cape
Online Forty-Niner
Contributing Writer

The Academic Senate unanimously approved a university-wide honor pledge last month after hearing supporting statements from Associated Students, Inc. representatives and Dean of Students Mike Hostetler.

The pledge is one of many recent efforts by Hostetler and his office in a push toward improving ethical development in the university.

"I don't care if you're a big school or a small school," Hostetler said. "Or whether it's 1950 or 2004, [as a university] you ought to be trying to find any means possible to remind students that part of getting a higher education should be thinking about the development of the philosophies that will drive the decision making for the rest of their lives."

Hostetler said the pledge is just one part of his office's effort to raise awareness of the university's belief that college should be a prime time for students to consider "their own ethical status, ethical growth, and ultimately, how the issues of ethics interfaces with their philosophy of life."

The pledge reads: "I pledge on my honor that I have not given or received any unauthorized assistance on this assignment/examination," and will not be mandatory for students to sign. Hostetler will recommend faculty include a copy in their syllabus and offer copies after exams, but some students and faculty think that the pledge will be ineffective if not mandated.

"I think it will turn into another thing [on the syllabus] that you just won't read," said Cindy Romanowski, a junior International Studies major. "The idea behind it is good, but it's not going to stop cheating."

Max Rosenkrantz, a faculty member from the philosophy department, said he won't use the pledge.

"I think it's kind of silly. To put a signature on a line isn't going to make a difference," Rosenkrantz said.

But Hostetler stresses that the pledge has not been instituted as an answer to cheating. He tabs it as an "idealistic symbol" that will contribute to the university-wide push towards ethical development.

The effort is in its fourth year, and values philosophy and awareness over concrete statistical results. Along with the pledge, the dean's office has distributed ethics propaganda, posted ethics posters in various locations on campus, held ethics luncheons for student leaders and hosted a California State University system-wide Judicial Officers Conference in the summer of 2002.

Hostetler said the need for the initiative was born out of new challenges in the higher education arena.

"The problem is this," Hostetler said, resting a hand on his computer. He said that students know better than to copy lines straight out of a book without citing its author, but when it comes to the Internet students view the pages as a wealth of free information, and that this belief is what makes the lines of plagiarism fuzzy to some.

"Students now live in a more sophisticated age, so there is a greater variety of [ethical] difficulties they face," Hostetler said.

Since the new century began, a host of universities both public and private have begun to adopt honor codes or revamp existing ones. Hostetler has modeled Cal State Long Beach's initiative after the University of Maryland's ethics program, an effort he deems as one of the most successful in higher education.

Maryland's pledge was initiated by the students, according to the school's official Web site. The first version of it was signed by hundreds of students before it was even approved by the University Senate.

At CSULB, Hostetler informally presented the pledge to faculty members after A.S.I. initially endorsed it in 2003. Some faculty were concerned students would react negatively to it, seeing it as an assumption that they were cheating, so Hostetler took the pledge before the A.S. Senate again in February 2004, and again it passed unanimously.

"I think it's absolutely 100 percent necessary," A.S. Senator Morgan Wheeler said. "Cheating discounts the quality of an academic institution, and an honor pledge will help create a stronger sense of accountability."

Hostetler hopes to get the pledge into the catalogue of classes and the campus regulations handbook next year to solidify the pledge's place in official campus documents.