180 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



are foreign. The greatest stimulus to effort is success, and the love 

 of conquest in competition will continue indefinitely to incite students 

 to activity in apparent disregard of utilitarian ends; but with all 

 due allowance for this well-known fact in human nature, popular 

 ideals have changed to such an extent that the maintenance of the 

 honor system must be based on a foundation different from that which 

 maintained it during its early development. 



A college degree involves an expenditure of much labor, and often 

 of money that the student can ill afford. In preparing for his ex- 

 aminations he is at times compelled to grapple with topics that are 

 unattractive, subjects that would be sedulously disregarded if they 

 were not prescribed as requisites for the degree sought. If credit can 

 be secured for success without full payment in labor, if deception can 

 be practised for the avoidance of irksome tasks, is such procedure 

 different from current practise j n the world of business? Can the 

 student be expected to rise in the college class-room above the ordi- 

 nary standards of honor in society, in the street or on the athletic field ? 

 If the most conspicuous leaders in politics, the organizers of great 

 business corporations, the presidents of railroads and insurance com- 

 panies, grow rich and prosperous by taking advantage of their oppor- 

 tunities to appropriate unearned dividends, to concentrate on the 

 favored few what belongs to the unprotected multitude, is it remarkable 

 that a student under temptation should profit by such lessons and 

 make the best of an opportunity to win an unearned degree, or secure 

 unearned credit for an examination by misrepresentation? The honor 

 system in college is merely an application of the standards of Wash- 

 ington and Jefferson and Lee in political life. If such standards are 

 too antiquated and simple for twentieth-century politics and finance, 

 nothing can maintain them in the twentieth-century college. 



But the honor system is not yet extinguished, hopeless as may be 

 the outlook for it in some quarters. Its existence in any institution 

 of learning is possible only where the demand comes from the majority 

 of the students rather than from the faculty. If such a demand is 

 based on local tradition alone it is doomed to inevitable extinction. No 

 tradition can survive in opposition to the consensus of contemporary 

 thought and feeling. But it has its reason for existence, quite aside 

 from tradition, in the sense of justice and fair play. The majority of 

 young men under normal conditions are disposed to uphold what they 

 conceive to be just. In general society penal laws are necessary to re- 

 strain criminals, and the criminal is the exception. The college crim- 

 inal who cheats in the performance of college duties is found in every 

 college, but he too is exceptional. If he and his friends are so active as 

 to necessitate penal laws that imply hardship to the student body as a 

 whole, the majority have a right to demand the expulsion of the 

 offender. 



