In an open letter to BYU students posted yesterday at the BYU News site, Honor Code Office (HCO) Director Kevin Utt announced additional procedural changes to the way the HCO does business. I’m just going to paste the relevant part of the letter that identifies the three identified changes:
Students have also shared with me the anxiety they and others have felt when coming into the Honor Code Office. We believe that we can help reduce this apprehension with increased transparency, and we want our students to know that the following improvements have been made:
* You will know at the start of our first meeting why we have asked you to come to the Honor Code Office and the nature of the reported violation. If you are self-reporting, we want you to have a clear understanding of what we need to know to help you remain in, or return to, good standing within the university. I want to reiterate that you will NOT be presumed in violation of an Honor Code policy unless you either accept responsibility or the investigation process makes such a determination.
* As part of our process, you will be told the name of the person who has reported the violation, except in situations where it is a matter of safety to a member of our campus community.
* From the first meeting with us, you will be given an explanation regarding what the investigation process entails and support resources that are available to you as you participate in the process. This includes an explanation of the steps we will take to find information that corroborates or disputes the original report; the preponderance of evidence standard that universities use; and the possible outcomes if found responsible for the policy violation.
Of course, I applaud these changes. But this also shines a light on the way the HCO did business for, say, the past forty years. It would appear that, in the past, (1) students were often not told what violation they were being investigated for; (2) students were often not told who had reported the violation; and (3) students were often not given an explanation of the investigation process, what resources they could use to defend themselves against the charge, and what the HCO would or would not do to support the charge. Well, no wonder BYU students have been so upset about the HCO!
These are all procedural changes. Keep in mind that in the law there are several types of rules that apply to a trial or proceeding. There is substantive law, such as a criminal code that identifies specific crimes and the elements required to establish the crime; there is the law of evidence, stating what is or is not admissible to prove or disprove the elements of a specific crime a person is charged with; and there is procedural law, like the various Rules of Criminal Procedure that are enacted by each state, which identifies what things a prosecutor and the Court must, can, and cannot do in the course of a trial or proceeding. These changes are not to the substance of the Honor Code or to evidence that is or is not allowed against the accused student, just to the procedures the HCO follows or at least promises to follow. The procedural changes announced in the letter are very encouraging, at least if your view of the HCO is that it ought to be fair to students.
I won’t launch into a review of additional steps that might be taken. Let’s run with the good changes announced for now. Okay, just one: there is no mention of any actions or consequences for false reports to the HCO. Based on several of the many student accounts of interactions with the HCO that have been publicized over the last few months, this is sometimes a problem. And given the prior guilty-until-proven-innocent approach of the HCO, it could be very difficult for an accused student to refute a false allegation. The only way to reduce false reports is to hold those making them accountable. Maybe that will be part of the next set of procedural upgrades.
Some additional coverage of the letter announcing the changes: Deseret News article, Daily Universe article. In addition, a month ago there was a Q&A with the new HCO Director posted at BYU News.
Wheat & Tares 
These changes are positive but they don’t really address the bigger issues with the Honor Code. For example, are current BYU students still expected to report on other BYU students who violate the HC? Since that issue was not addressed I assume the answer is YES. That’s poison. But the bigger issue is the needed separation of ecclesiastical issues from academic and honesty issues. Most students don’t mind being held to a high standard on the latter but would like their bishops, not the HC Office, to handle issues related to the former. Otherwise they will continue to lie in order to stay in school. Finally, this would have been a good time to delete the dress code and beard ban. But no, the Pharisees live.
The changes announced yesterday are positive but they do not address most of the issues that have been communicated recently by former and current students. It appears that BYU students are still are encouraged to report on each other over HC violations. That’s poison. It appears that the HC still covers issues related to morality and WoW, issues better handled by loving bishops. That will lead to more lies by students who don’t want to kicked out. And it appears that the dress and “modesty” codes still exist. That leads to a major victory for the Pharisees. So these “changes” are really a lost opportunity for positive change.
A step in the right direction. But still so much more change is needed.
Improvement, yes. The two biggest issues I still see are: 1) that they don’t seem to be batting an eye at the utterly incomprehensible idea that there are “self-reporting” students, and 2) that false accusers have no consequences (or at least not outlined) when in reality, students can use the HCO as a weapon of retaliation or even a form of sexual harassment toward other students. The first one is the most insidious because it’s so widespread. When I attended BYU in the late 80s / early 90s, we didn’t have an annual ecclesiastical endorsement, and the HCO was much, much smaller. It was still irritating that students could rat each other out for ridiculous things, and that students’ futures were held in the palm of the Dolores Umbridge-like HCO, but bishops weren’t requiring students to self-immolate by throwing themselves on the dubious mercy of the HCO for things dredged up in a private interview.
The other thing that didn’t exist back then was social media which this neatly avoids addressing. Students who’ve seen their HCO files state that innocuous photos from social media when they weren’t even students at the school have been copied into their files. We’re not just policing the behavior of students, but trying to go back in time and Minority Report them!
If Kevin Utt has a conscience (jury’s out for me on that one, I know BYU does not), his only goal in life should be to work himself out of a job by shutting down the HCO. Issues of dishonesty and plagiarism should be handled by the Dean of Students like at others schools, and that’s the only thing the school should be concerned about. If students are violating housing rules, let the landlords take care of it or let the school revoke their BYU approved status. That doesn’t need to be a student investigation, putting someone’s future in jeopardy!
@josh harrison – “issues better handled by loving bishops”
This assumes that there is a consistent protocol when a bishop counsels students. My experience is that BYU bishops run the gamut, as they do in family wards, and what one bishop may handle in a loving manner, another might bring down the hammer on.
* As part of our process, you will be told the name of the person who has reported the violation-
It’s so weird reading all of this and the comments having gone to school in California. I get the honor code system so that you have a safe and “church laws” conducive place for your kids to go to.
On the other hand,it’s really cool to learn how to be responsible for yourself and not having others tell on you because you sinned.
Especially when what you did, you didn’t consider to really be a sin (like many people’s view of the WoW).
“Personal responsibility” vs “Everyone needs to be obedient to the HC” is where I see a gray area and where I’d rather see people be personally responsible and not tell on each other.
I think you missed a very relevant part where it said “investigations of reports of sexual misconduct are handled by the Title IX Office; the Honor Code Office is not involved. ”
Hawk, I totally agree that they need to add repercussions for false accusations.
Thank you for this. I have followed the HCO news with great interest from here in Australia. Such a system, and the way in which it is enforced is relatively foreign to our culture.
Comparisons are never perfect, however I decided after reading this post to take a step back and view the honour code office and all its machinations as if I had never heard of it before.
I’m not sure if I was surprised or not, but I ended up on the Wikipedia page for totalitarianism. A copy of some of that page.
“Totalitarian regimes are often marked by political repression, personality cultism, control over the economy, restriction of speech, mass surveillance and widespread use of state terrorism. Historian Robert Conquest describes a “totalitarian” state as one recognizing no limits to its authority in any sphere of public or private life and which extends that authority to whatever length feasible”.
It doesn’t directly overlap, but the last mentioned notion of the state (in this case the HCO) having little to no limits in recognising the distinction between public and private life rings fairly true.
“The only way to reduce false reports is to hold those making them accountable.”
#BelieveWomen
There can be no false reports. Anecdotes (of which I have more than a few) don’t count.
Removing the anonymity of reporting and having to justify/prove what one reports will hopefully make the weaponizing and the false reporting decrease in numbers. I see so much of this as being about power and there is less power (and more fear) if one has to back up what one said happened. If nothing else, the ‘tale bearer’ risks their own reputation within the social group, especially if they do it more than once.
The Honor Code Office reports to the Dean of Students. BYU’s current Dean of Students was formerly the BYU Title IX coordinator, who in 2016, the Salt Lake Tribune reported “would “not apologize” for referring abuse victims for discipline” during a BYU rape awareness conference. That policy was later reversed due to its nation-wide negative coverage. The fact that BYU later promoted the coordinator to be the Dean of Students dropped my jaw. It sent the message that changes are made begrudgingly and that leadership doesn’t really see the problems with how the Honor Code Office conducts business.
Angela, I suspect students self report if they are trying to get ahead of upset roommates reporting them or perhaps for sexual screwups their partner reporting the event to BYU at the request of a Bishop.
I definitely agree that one remaining big problem is lack of accountability for false reporting. I suspect making known who reported you helps a little there by providing at least social consequences. I don’t think that enough. The other remaining issue is questions of staff and whether there is accountability for misbehavior. My sense is that the majority of problems aren’t due to the stated policies but individual people at the HCO doing improper things with no apparent oversight. (The lack of transparency makes it impossible to know if there even were consequences for these employees)
Of course many of us think the HCO is important just that it’s been mismanaged.