Shipboard student’s action causes dilemma for U.Va. Honor Committee

CHARLOTTESVILLE -- The University of Virginia's Honor Committee is facing a dilemma: How should it treat students who have a sort of dual status in the university community?

Add to this the fact that they're on a ship halfway around the world as part of the university-affiliated Semester at Sea program.

For a single-sanction system, where the only punishment for lying, cheating or stealing is expulsion, there doesn't seem to be any easy answer.

The concerns were sparked by the case of Allison Routman.

The Ohio University student was one of two people expelled from the Semester at Sea program in 2008, a decision that also banned them from ever applying to U.Va. In Routman's case, a shipboard honor hearing found her guilty of plagiarism for using phrases from a Wikipedia article in a class assignment.

Now U.Va.'s Honor Committee is wrestling with the way the university polices conduct by students on ship. As it stands, a panel of shipboard students judges the accused.

Routman was expelled by a committee made up entirely of faculty -- a practice that has since been abolished. Her father said that makes her an aberration in the system's more than 100-year history.

But Honor Committee members are worried about the seeming dual status of shipboard students who come from schools other than U.Va.

The participants are, after all, told that for the purposes of their shipboard journey, they're U.Va. students.

But Honor Committee members worried at a recent meeting that the students aren't culturally U.Va. students -- that they haven't been thoroughly immersed in the culture of honor on which U.Va. prides itself.

It's a concern that cuts both ways. Committee members seemed uncomfortable with the idea of nominal U.Va. students passing single-sanction judgments on full-time U.Va. students.

Routman's father, Brent Routman, said recently that students who aren't from U.Va. don't have the necessary experience with the honor system.

So they're exploring a pair of proposed setups for shipboard justice. Both would backstop on-ship proceedings with trials in Charlottesville.

One would allow people found guilty on the ship to request a new trial in Charlottesville. Under the other plan, anyone facing a shipboard trial would trigger an honor investigation in Charlottesville.

Committee member Alexander Cohen, who proposed the second plan, made it clear that either will veer from the tradition of the single sanction. "In either case it is possible that somebody will be dismissed [from the ship] and not really dismissed [from the university]," he said.

The first proposal failed a vote by a margin of roughly 2 to 1 on Oct. 25, but it wasn't immediately clear if that vote reflected support for the alternative or the desire to keep working on the proposed changes.

Brent Routman, an intellectual property lawyer, spoke to the committee at the Oct. 25 meeting, and says his daughter faced quite an ordeal.

He said that both proposed systems would be an improvement, though he thinks non-U.Va. students shouldn't be subjected to single-sanction proceedings at all.

But he said he thinks the situation is unlikely to repeat itself.

"It's a great program, and I'm sure that this will never happen again," he said.

Ted Strong is a staff writer for The Daily Progress in Charlottesville.