Why We Sign the Honor Pledge

On behalf of the Honor Council, I'd like to welcome the Class of 2009 to DukeUniversity.

In a few moments, you will step out onto the Chapel steps in order to sign the Community Standard. It will be your first act together as a class; it will also be an expression of your commitment “ a resolution to honor the ideals of our community. On paper, the ideals are simple: integrity; respect; character. Ideals are wonderful on paper, but they do not make us act; traditions make us act.

Traditions are difficult here. We are young, dynamic, in flux; and in a place where we are not unused to being woken by the sound of jackhammers and bulldozers, where almost every month brings us a front-page Chronicle article on a new science center, or plaza, or library, or student village, it can often seem next to impossible to hold on to something firm and unmoving ”to a tradition. But by signing your name to the Community Standard, you will become part of perhaps the only tradition here as old as Duke itself. The 1897 Trinity College handbook asked its incoming students “ in proper Southern fashion “ to "pledge their honor as gentlemen," to a code known as the General Laws. The 1926 handbook laid out a grander vision: "bound together by honor, let us go ever onward."

Your parents would be pleased to know that the 1927 Honor System relied upon "the teachings of your mother" and "the honesty of your father." In the 1950s, a student movement “ led by the Women's College “ campaigned for a formalized honor code, an affirmation in writing of principles we long held sacred in action.

It is fitting that a public renewal of our values would occur in the 1950s, a period which gave us growth, enterprise, and a whole slew of new traditions. In the heart of the decade, exactly 50 years ago, the Duke Basketball team made its very first appearance in the NCAA tournament. The same year, 1955, would see one of our finest, Prof. Reynolds Price, graduate and set off for Oxford “ the only break from Duke for a writer whose 40 plus years here would mold an intellectual tradition. It was the same year that The Chronicle would challenge one of Duke's outdated traditions, declaring openly and boldly: "Segregation is wrong."

For the country, the year 1955 would be one of public reflection on the values of courage, character, and integrity. Late that year, in Montgomery, Alabama, an unknown black seamstress at the end of a long day's work would prove her own courage, by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. In 1955, a young Senator named John Kennedy put the finishing touches on a book called Profiles in Courage which, for a generation of Americans, would define what it meant to act with integrity.

In retelling the stories of eight former Senators “ who in spite of personal consequences acted with honor “ Kennedy might have been simply giving voting advice to the American people, a kind of how-to book for the electorate. His message may have been: Vote for a man like Thomas Hart Benton, the Senator from Missouri who lost his committee appointments, Senate seat, and nearly his life for voting against the introduction of slavery into new territories. Vote for another Edmund Ross, the Kansas Senator who refused to toe the party line and impeach President Andrew Johnson “ an act of conscience which cost him his Senate seat and cost his family its wealth and way of life.

But Kennedy wasn't simply writing a how-to for voting “ he was writing a how-to for living, as relevant now as it was fifty years ago. He asks us to remember that "to be courageous requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place, and circumstance." The same principles that guided Senators Benton and Ross must guide us here, at Duke.

Unlike the Senators, however, I have never once at Duke had to stand up in front of the public and vote about what was right and what was wrong. Our day- to-day challenges aren't that simple. No; for us the affirmation is continual; in the classroom and out of it, at an early-morning test or at 2 AM on the night of a term paper ”every day we speak. And let us trust that we are heard.

Alone in our rooms, at 2 AM, we'll be sorely tempted to throw the Community Standard in the trash with our first drafts; but even then it will guide us, if we listen. What you are about to sign is more than paper: it is an inheritance; it is the work here of a hundred generations. Those generations have laid their honor on the line for us. To break our word to them, to sign with our fingers crossed, or ”even worse ”to sign without thinking at all, is to spit on them. There's no greater disrespect.

Robert Kennedy reminds us in his foreword to Profiles in Courage that "what happens to the country, to the world, depends on what we do with what others have left us." You have been left a treasure. Honor it.