The Honor System

There are three noteworthy things that happened that week. The first was a spectacle I only caught part of as I was walking to dinner. Outside of the campus library, there were a huge number of students in red who were chanting loudly. I had to meet some people at dinner (see the next post) so I didn't stick around, but the event was later explained to me in detail by a friend who saw it all. A student was caught stealing a library book. You are not allowed to check out books from the library, and removing them is considered a serious offense because they are a very limited resource (the most recent books on water management were published in the late 1960s-early 1970s). As it turns out, any student who is caught stealing anything is given two options: the first is to accept being turned into the police, following which you are fined and expelled from school. It's important to remember that I'm not in the US here- this is one of a handful of universities, and if you get kicked out, there goes 20 years of hard work and being at the top of your class down the drain, plus you would disgrace your whole family. That's why every student choses option number 2: let Commonwealth Hall deal with you. Commonwealth is the all male dorm at the top of the hill on campus. They are very much the jocks in the traditional high school setting. A sign outside of the building reads "Welcome to Vandal City", and they are well known for being rowdy know-it-alls, but are respected by the rest of the student body. The way they punish thieves is quite a process. The elected "chief" of Commonwealth Hall drags a cart all around campus where the offender stands only in his boxers with his head hung in shame, surrounded by students wearing red- the Commonwealth Hall color. They stop in front of the library where students collect water and throw it at him- not in a fun water balloon fight kind of way, but in a way where the water snaps, leaving welts on the skin. Finally, the group converges and dumps the thief into the pond by the library. I would be interested to assess how much biological activity goes on in that pond, because water never cycles through it and it has taken on an awful brown color. This whole process emerged after years of students complaining about thieves and the security guards on campus failing to direct resources to addressing the problem (they do, to be fair, have bigger fish to fry). I don't want to give the impression that students here are constantly wandering around in a tribal fashion like they just emerged from the bush (they are in many ways more prim and proper than I am), but while this anecdote is in many ways not representative of life here, in some ways it really highlights that there are some traditions that nobody bothers to explain or justify, that just exist because that's the way things are supposed to be. Identifying those things makes studying abroad really interesting, and I wonder what kinds of weird rituals we have at home to which I don't give a second thought.