Honor and Loyalty
A West Point scandal serves as a reminder of the enduring tensions between time-honored values.
Steve Cohen
May 17, 2021 The Social Order
Last spring, the United States Military Academy suffered its worst cheating scandal in 40 years, when 73 cadets, many of them athletes, were accused of collaborating on a take-home calculus exam. Fourteen cadets left the academy, six were exonerated or saw the charges dropped, and the rest were held back for a semester or a full year. In response, senior West Point officials took an extraordinary step: they admitted that an adjustment they had made to the academy’s fabled honor code had failed. While the impetus for that adjustment was understandable, it failed because it sought to take a shortcut around two important but competing values.
At the heart of West Point’s values is the honor code, which says, “Cadets will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.” Cadets enjoyed due-process protections, but convicted violators faced swift and harsh punishment—typically expulsion, followed by a multiyear period of enlisted service in the Army to pay back the investment that the country had made in the errant cadet.
https://www.city-journal.org/west-point-cheating-scandal-shows-need-to-balance-honor-loyalty?wallit_nosession=1
