The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 68, No. 21, Ed. 1 Thursday, January 29, 1981 Page: 2 of 24
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A matter of honor
The miserable attendance at Tuesday's open meeting of the
University Council subcommittee on the Honor Council was
disappointing but far from surprising. The committee's study
has been hampered by its own and the Honor Council's
sluggishness—we will assume it is not reluctance—to examine
the issue.
The problems that precipitated the study occured over a year
ago and the issues those problems raised have lost their
immediacy. Most of the students who were involved with the
controversy last year have moved on. Yet the trouble last year's
council faced were not completely solved by the revisions that
council made in the Honor System last April. The inherent
difficulty with appeals in a system where the same body hears
both the trial and the appeal were apparently solved by last
year's council (it is difficult for anyone outside the council to
know anything with any certainty). At that time, they lowered
the quorum for an appeal from ten to three and required the
appeal board to consist of council members who had not heard
the original case.
But the council has still not defined the role of the
ombudsman sufficiently, nor have they provided a mechanism
by which those ombudsmen can be adequately trained. The
ombudsmen can still enter cases without any real knowledge of
how the system works at all—to the detriment of the accused
(especially) and of the council.
The Honor System usually works well for most of the
student body, but it can only work as long as the members of
the council are pillars of justice and integrity. But that may be
too much to expect from the members of any organization, and
certainly from a student organization (after all, Honor Council
members must be students, too). The issue is crucial, because
The Honor Council can dramatically affect the life of a Rice
student. A cavalier attitude towards the Honor System could
prove disastrous for the few individuals that must face the
council every year.
That so few students deal directly with the council underlies
the problem the University Council subcommittee is facing.
Few students have given the system any thought since few are
directly affected by it. Even if they wish to discover how the
system works, they can't; the myriad of procedures and secrecy
rules prevent them. Members of the council have argued in the
past that there is no need for the system to be more open, since
everything is spelled out in the Honor System Constitution.
But that constitution is only casually related to the actual
mechanisms and procedures the council uses.
At minimum, the council's hush-hush mannerisms
discourage student—and faculty—participa on in the system.
The people who have had enough contact v h the council to
make a considered criticism may have reason not to make their
criticisms public—although it may be in their best interest in
the long run to do so. The remaining students have little to
contribute.
1 don't think we can conclude from Tuesday's meeting that
the student body does not care about the Honor System. Nor
do I think we can conclude they are satisfied with it. The study
was begun to examine certain fundamental issues about the
system that were raised both by the Thresher and by the council
itself. The study must continue until those issues are adequately
resolved.
The system needs some definite changes. The ombudsmen's
role should be expanded so that they can actively advise the
accused during trials of the procedures the council is using and
of his rights in the system. Total secrecy need not be eliminated
from the system (though I am not sure that any secrecy is
justified), but the council should publish its procedures and
subject them to the scrutiny and approval of the student body.
Only then can the students have any inkling of what they will
face if they must come before the council.
— Richard Dees
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SPANNING THE HEDGES/bv David Dow
Our frustrating ordeal with the
mindless mob in Iran should teach
us several lessons. However,
exhortations from the Right for
increased weapons expenditures
threaten to drown out the moderate
voices. More important than being
loved, the reactionary logic runs,
we need for other nations to fear
the American military machine. In
contrast, the less bellicose plead for
a deeper understanding of foreign
mind-sets so that we might preclude
atrocities with benevolence instead
of deterring them with bombs.
What makes the appeal of the
Right so attractive is that the
horror stories the former hostages
are telling about their captivity are
infuriating. It was not enough for a
raucous, barbaric Iranian mob to
incarcerate innocent victims for
444 days. They had to make the
imprisonment uncomfortable.
Excruciatingly uncomfortable.
Savage terrorists beat defenseless
human beings; they crowded them
into tiny rooms like cattle in a
boxcar; they fed them meager,
unsanitary gruel; and worst of all,
they staged mock executions: They
marched men in front of bogus
firing squads and amused
themselves by pulling triggers on
unloaded guns which happened to
be placed against the heads of their
quivering, blameless victims.
Reports of such bestial behavior
make us want to do something.
Somebody must pay. Therein lies
the problem with the Rightist or
military solution: "Somebody"
must pay. That is only fair. But not
just anybody. This crucial
distinction is the most important
lesson we can learn from the past
15 months. That lesson is that
individuals, not an intangible
entity called Iran, perpetrated this
crime. For that reason, the solution
proposed by the moderate voices is
the superior one.
Their proposal aims at
understanding the roots of the evil
instead of wiping out masses of
humanity and hoping to destroy
the undesirable elements in the
process. The moderate asks: What
makes a fanatic? How does his
mind work? What allows him to
torture human beings he has never
before met? Battlefield encounters
are special because they are so
fleeting. A burst of bullets, and the
enemy falls. The soldier does not
eat, sleep, and live with his
adversary for over a year and then
kill him. Military men ignore the
humanness of the opposing
soldiers. That is an essential part of
their war game. They commit a
despicable crime by pretending
that human beings on the other
side are less human, but it makes
their job psychologically tolerable.
In Iran, the militants gradually
came to know their hostages —and
know them well — yet barbaric
treatment continued. Why?
It is too easy to attribute their
actions to blind devotion. Of
course they were blindly devoted.
The important and more difficult
issue is: What disposes any given
individual to be so devoted? And
even more intriguing: How is such
a feverish atmosphere maintained
for so long? We need to learn
because the degree of fanaticism
exhibited by the Iranian terrorists
is never salutary; such extremism is
uniformly and inevitably
pernicious. Christian Crusaders,
Red Brigade, Baader-Meinhoff,
and Palestinian terrorists, and
white supremacist Ku Klux
Klansmen all manifest a common
denominator: a self-righteous
certainty which abhors compro-
mise. Extreme groups do not
present a danger simply because
they are extreme; they pose a
threat because they are blindly
extreme. They are far too certain
that their cause, and their cause
alone, is just.
This attitude surfaces most
frequently in religious and
nationalistic allegiances. If some
individuals need to believe in a
supernatural deity, that is too bad;
however, when their inherently
close-minded belief turns to
aggressive proselytizing and when
their irrational devotion to a
"higher cause" emboldens them to
gloss over the fact that
nonbelievers are as human as they,
then religious convictions become
dangerous. Similarly with
nationalism: Cheering for the US
hockey team over the squad from
Finland is as innocuous as rooting
for the Astros over the Phillies, but
when nationalism begins to take
precedence over justice, when it
becomes so intense that
individuals judge disputes not on
their merits but on the basis of
preexisting alliances — which
seems inexorably to happen — the
time has come to put the damper
on nationalism. In the post-
Iranian crisis, for example, the
Soviet Union has agreed with
Iran's outlandish charges that the
US brainwashed the former
hostages into believing they were
tortured. An a priori policy decision
to oppose US interests on reflex—
not a conscious sense of justice—
inspired the Soviet statement
which a State Department
spokesman has labelled
"absolutely scurrilous." He chose
his words too generously: Far
more appropriate would be
"deluded and insane." The fact is,
though, that nationalism, like
religious devotion, inspires
fanatical insanity.
Even if the Iranian travail has
not explicated the inner working of
the extremists' mind, it has
poignantly underscored the
necessity of obtaining such
knowledge. At a distance, blindly
dedicated zealots often appear as
weak individuals who happily
trade their autonomy in return for
security, the security that comes
with certainty. Up close, once they
impinge on our lives, once they
stop handing out flowers in
airports and begin holding our
neighbors as hostages, once they
live up to their potential, the
character of these blind followers
comes out: They are amoral
escapist puppets who subordinate
human ethics to causes which
range from silly to amusing to
frightening. That is to say, they are
dangerous. If nothing else, Iran
has shown that we better begin to
deal with such devotion before it
decides to deal with us.
*rvnri —-v RICHARD DEES
Editor
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holidays, by the students of Rice University Editorial and business offices arc located on
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The Rice Thresher, Janurary 29, 1981, page 2
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Dees, Richard. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 68, No. 21, Ed. 1 Thursday, January 29, 1981, newspaper, January 29, 1981; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245461/m1/2/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.