Midterms are in the air at Davidson College. As the quizzes begin to roll in I, along with my fellow Economics majors, have begun to make my way to the Quiz Center. Once inside, we’re met with a system that’s the result of years of bad decisions. Tests are often mislabeled or not present at all, accommodations improperly communicated and poorly provided, and proctoring cursory at best. How did we get here? Davidson has long made the Honor Code a central part of its messaging, a prominent feature advertised to prospective students both online and physically. I myself was drawn in by the Code, applying Early Decision to Davidson in large part due to the allure of take-home reviews. Yet, on the ground, the systems around us suggest that honor is but a fleeting memory on this campus.
My colleague Nic Cutler wrote in The Honor Code Prisoner’s Dilemma that the “suboptimal stable state” on campus today was the outcome of an unfortunate feedback loop, students and professors in a deadly downward lockstep of reducing trust, neither party to blame or with the power to break out. But a feedback loop has to start somewhere. The Honor Code is tied to the foundations of Davidson itself, dating back nearly two centuries to its inception in 1837. The Honor Code has withstood the Civil War, two world wars, integration, and co-education. What it could not withstand, however, was a deadly combination of societal pressures that began to combine only recently.
The first of these factors is, ironically enough, the declining value of the college degree. At the time of the Honor Code’s formalization, not even 10% of Americans went to college; today the figure is over 60%. The commodification of the bachelor’s degree has had consequences that range far and wide across American society, but the one most relevant here is that having a college degree means far less in 2026 than in 1966. The degree has become an expectation instead of a qualification, a box to check when applying for almost any white-collar role; today, most college graduates do not end up working in a field related to their degree.
On campus, this decline in value manifests in additional pressure, both academically and in extracurriculars, with students needing to “do more” with their time in college with every passing year. As employers begin to expect extensive leadership experience, several summer internships , and a straight-A average for even “normal” jobs, the pressure upon students inexorably grows, and the option of an easy way out becomes steadily more attractive. Even this duress, though, was not enough to really show the cracks in the Honor Code until recently; Davidson students, after all, are selected for both their honor and their ability to work under pressure. But honor and resistance to pressure cannot remain when the barriers to cheating disappear.
The advent of generative AI has been a watershed moment for academia as a whole, but Davidson has felt its effects particularly keenly. It takes so little effort to run that paper through ChatGPT, to ask Claude to touch up your coding assignment, to query Gemini about the film that you just didn’t have time to watch. Generative AI strikes at the heart of the twin pillars that kept the Honor Code afloat—individual compliance and strict reporting. In practice, this means that cheating is both significantly more accessible and extremely difficult to accurately report, creating a student body where misconduct is as widespread as its reporting is not.
It’s easy to point fingers and assign blame—to students for cheating in the first place, to the Honor Council for its passivity, to the college’s administration for its slow and inadequate response to AI. I think what matters more, though, is the reality we’re now living every day on campus, an effective “worst of both worlds” where the Honor Code is used as an excuse for inadequate testing procedures and wasted class time. These conditions are only going to get worse as entry-level jobs are cut and generative AI continues to improve. Any student who now chooses to follow the Code is at a disadvantage, and we’re seeing the consequences in real time. I’ve personally witnessed several professors publicly lamenting the fact that they can’t trust students anymore. We can either do nothing and watch student life continue to deteriorate under an imaginary Code—or face reality. The main problem isn’t an institutional failure nor externalities. The problem is us.
You have broken the Honor Code. I have broken the Honor Code. We have all broken the Honor Code, broken it and beaten it into a shape which scarcely retains any memory of its original. An institution which was once the beating heart of Davidson is now at best a decaying husk, subsumed by layer upon layer of calcified untruth and mistrust. We aren’t turning back, aren’t taking action, aren’t changing the system. This cannot continue—but it will, unless we do something about it.
As Davidson students, students who signed the Honor Code, it’s our responsibility to force college leadership to address the situation on the ground. Even as the death throes of the Code echo across campus, marketing material and admissions spokespeople continue to extol the virtues of take-home reviews. It’s in the college’s interest to keep up the charade as long as they can—to retain the tremendous recognition and advertising power that the Honor Code’s still-untarnished reputation affords them. Actually taking steps to restore the “community of trust” we once had won’t happen without pressure—because it requires acknowledgement that something’s gone wrong in the first place.
This acknowledgement won’t be easy to obtain; it might not be possible, given how easy it seems to be to paper over the cracks. But that shouldn’t matter, economic incentives shouldn’t matter. As Davidson students we are honor bound to hold ourselves and our community to the highest possible standard. Allowing deceit to slip through our fingers unnoticed is the ultimate vindication of the death of the Code. It could be as simple as going to office hours and talking to your professors about what it could take for them to trust students again, or making integrity the central issue when you respond to the Campus Climate survey. All I ask is that you try.
I don’t know if we’re ever going to return to the academic climate we once had—the pressures to cheat today might simply be too strong, the trust between parties on campus too eroded. Rebuilding trust is, as Nic Cutler wrote, far harder than breaking it. That makes it all the more important that we cherish and uphold the trust we do have on this campus, the trust that allows us to leave our bikes unlocked or our laptops out in Flibs all day without a trace of worry. We still have something special here at Davidson—let’s promise to ourselves that we won’t let it slip away.
 | A guest post by
|