Last spring, Haverford students received an email from the President’s office outlining several institutional policy changes in the wake of political and social turbulence. One of the key changes was to the Honor Code, of which President Raymond wrote,
“Our student-led Honor Code is foundational to Haverford’s approach to the student experience. And, as is the case with all our institutional policies, the Honor Code exists within, and must comply with, federal and state legal frameworks. In order to address some misalignments between the Code and the current legal landscape, effective May 20, the College will enact a revised Honor Code temporarily.”
Since April, a student committee called CSCAR (Committee for Student Community, Agency, and Responsibility) has been established to review and revise the Honor Code in order to both comply with recent legal requirements around DEI language, and to reinvigorate the student body in its relationship to Haverford’s core values of trust, concern, and respect.
A small student committee, made up largely of prior Students’ Council members, met several times over the summer to develop a preliminary vision for CSCAR, and discuss past versions of the Code to get a sense of its evolution over time. By the start of the fall semester, the committee was ready to begin its work in earnest, inviting the community at large to take part through an email sent by current Honor Council Co-Head, Sofie Quirk ‘28, and Students’ Council Co-Treasurer Ben Perez-Flesler ‘27, who will be leading CSCAR.
Ben Fligelman ‘26, Students’ Council Co-President and member of the summer committee, explained, “we decided we couldn’t do this on our own. We did a lot of valuable work — thinking, reading, discussing, but what we realized was that we needed to be as transparent and open as possible. That meant re-writing the Code during the academic year, through a new committee that anyone could join, and that was entirely open to the public.”
As such, an email went out to all students in the first week of the fall semester, with the subject line, “we want YOU to help write the NEW HONOR CODE.” The communique emphasized CSCAR as a “think tank, liaison, and advocacy group,” and brought around 20-25 students to an initial interest meeting in Chase Hall on September 17.
Over the course of 90 minutes, Quirk and Perez-Flesler covered the birth of CSCAR, the revision timeline, and key challenges in a slideshow presentation, then leading a group discussion on how current students are experiencing the Honor Code’s impacts in daily life.
The role of CSCAR, they explained, is not only to make written changes, but to actually affect the material culture of the College. The committee seeks to remedy social stratification and the emergence of an academic culture more plagued by academic dishonesty than it has been in the recent past.
At spring plenary of 2025, former Honor Council Co-Chair Luke Smithberg ‘25 and Caroline Yao ‘27 explained the increase in instances of academic honesty on campus and pleaded with students to remember that the Code only holds firm if everyone invests in its tenets. They mentioned faculty losing trust in their students and in the Code as a whole, social lines dividing those who respect the Code and those who treat it as a mere facade. Their final message to the community was one of warning: “Put simply, the current levels of academic honesty we’re seeing at Haverford are not compatible with there being a future of the Honor Code. Either we change course, or it goes away.”
CSCAR is taking on that change, writing an Honor Code from the bottom up. A full draft will be proposed by October 20, and the committee will put it through a legal review with the College’s lawyers before opening it up for feedback from the larger community until October 31. The fall plenary packet, released on November 2, will contain the finalized document. Students will vote on adopting the new Code, and altering the constitution such that ratification of the Code occurs during both fall and spring plenaries. Assuming the revised Code is passed, CSCAR will then pivot back to its larger goal of nurturing a community culture truly built on trust, concern, and respect.
But this work isn’t made easy by time constraints, or by the current political landscape. Much of the initial discussion which followed Perez-Flesler and Quirk’s presentation surrounded the degree of censorship which the new Code might undergo. One student attendee asked exactly which sections had been redacted in response to new federal and state legal policy. Quirk noted that sections about the relative privilege of certain students have raised alarms, as has language about marginalized groups. However, she added that “just because they [the College’s lawyers] say something puts us at a bit of a risk doesn’t mean we can’t have [include] it. So we will still be including things about marginalized communities. It’s about calculating how much risk we can afford, and making sure we’re definitive in our language when we do skirt this line so that it doesn’t stand out more than it needs to.”
The conversation eventually moved to how current students are experiencing the Honor Code’s impacts in their daily lives, if at all. Several first years, who have spent barely a month on campus, mentioned the methods by which they were taught about the Code during Customs Week (Haverford’s orientation process). Though every new student was told to sign a large poster copy of the Honor Code preamble, that moment took place on the way out of the building where the class was first addressed as a whole. Several first years felt that the act of signing was more of an afterthought in the process. Sonya Ravipati ‘29 mentioned that it didn’t “lend itself to mindful engagement.”
Another key topic of discussion was whether the Code should be shortened in its revised form. More than a few students admit to never having read the Code in its entirety, which has been attributed in the past to its length and complexity. Several attendees of the CSCAR meeting, however, took issue with the idea that the solution would be abridging the official document. Kyle Moreno ‘27 said, “I’m of the opinion that shortening the Honor Code would be treating a symptom rather than the illness, where the symptom is that nobody wants to read something long. But we were all accepted to this college, and we’re all capable of reading 30 pages.”
Last on the meeting agenda was taking a look at the 1989 Honor Code, during which attendees pointed out elements of the introduction that stood out or differed from the current Code’s language. A thread of dialogue emerged on the Council’s restorative justice approach to Code violations, segueing into a greater explanation of restorative justice, and the relative benefits and drawbacks of these practices. Quirk noted, “the public opinion about restorative justice and the actual experience of those who go through it are very disconnected. A confronted party can grow so much from the experience, while others [might] see the process as a lack of consequence.”
These conversations are continuing weekly; committee members have been assigned to working groups, each of which will address the rewrite of a given part of the Code, including the Academic, Social, Confrontation, Council and Community, and Constitution sections. Three weeks from today, the first draft of a new Honor Code will be complete.
Perez-Flesler said of their first few weeks of work, “Our meetings have been full of lively, productive discussion from everyone involved, including the many non-committee members who regularly turn up. We face a lot of difficult challenges, but our peers’ enthusiasm and thoughtfulness is making the task ahead far easier than we could have hoped. We have very high hopes for the final product we’ll turn out, and for what we can accomplish with our community the rest of this year and beyond.”
The committee’s first progress report will be sent out to the community next week, and all are encouraged to submit their feedback and commentary through this form.
Addition: A previous version of this article did not include the information that although the summer committee was made up of solely Students’ Council members, of the 16 students currently working on rewriting the Code, only four are Students’ Council members.
Correction: A previous version of this article wrongly attributed the following quotation to Perez-Flesler, when it was in fact said by Quirk: “just because they [the College’s lawyers] say something puts us at a bit of a risk doesn’t mean we can’t have [include] it. So we will still be including things about marginalized communities. It’s about calculating how much risk we can afford, and making sure we’re definitive in our language when we do skirt this line so that it doesn’t stand out more than it needs to.”
Correction: This article previously stated that Kyle Moreno is of the class of 2026, when she is in fact a part of the class of 2027. The Bi-College News apologizes for the above errors.
