Knightly News

Honor Council President Nate McLean reflected on the Episcopal Honor Code at Upper School Convocation. He reminded classmates of the importance of effort, respect and accountability and the role of the Honor Code in student life.

Good morning. I am Nate McLean, and this is my third year serving on the Honor Council. We are gathered here today to witness the freshman, new students, and new faculty sign the Honor Code. But before you all sign the Honor Code, I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about why it is important. Although there are many principles of the Honor Code that deserve recognition, in the short time that I have I would like to discuss what I believe to be the most important values: effort, respect, and accountability.

Firstly, effort is an important aspect of life, one that has much to do with your own honor and dignity. When you sign the Honor Code, you make a vow to follow its ideals. While the ultimate goal of the Honor Code is to create a better communal life together, it fundamentally starts with your own personal efforts to uphold the code. Sure, you could come here, sign the Honor Code, and then completely disregard it. You could cheat and Chat your way through high school, if you get away with it. But you wouldn’t just be going against the Honor Code (which you wouldn’t care about in this scenario), you would be sacrificing your own honor itself. Sure, you made it through high school without trying, but at the expense of your character and your pride. Only through effort and intentionality can you build character and uphold your honor. 

Additionally, the Honor Code encourages us to be honorable by reminding us to respect those around us. When signing the Honor Code, we vow to respect others, not undermine our life together, and not infringe upon the rights of others. This respect is necessary for a community in which we can safely express our interests and opinions. 

It seems like a simple task, respecting those around us, but it takes a good bit of effort and understanding. Respect may look different for different people: someone may feel disrespected if their friend doesn’t talk to them in class while they’re doing classwork, but someone else may feel more respected if they’re mostly left alone to do their work. Either way of feeling about the situation is equally valid, which shows that it takes patience and understanding to figure out how to best respect your peers. Respect should be taken into account alongside the first value, effort, because you have to put in effort to learn how to best work with others. 

Lastly, accountability is another important value reflected in the Honor Code. When signing the Honor Code, we vow that our “word will always be trusted.” If we want to be trustworthy people, we must first be responsible and accountable people. Becoming accountable has a lot to do with honesty: we have to be honest with ourselves and with others if we want to learn from our mistakes. 

Let’s say I put a blasphemous image of my friend Tyler on the senior wall without his permission and no one noticed it. It doesn’t seem like such a big deal if no one noticed it. And it would be ridiculous for me to turn myself in when I could just leave it alone and not get in trouble. But to be accountable in this situation, I should be honest with myself and think about the impact beyond “not getting in trouble.” Such an action might be destructive to our friendship. I’m not saying I would turn myself in in this situation, but I guess that’s kind of the point of having accountability: you should be able to make the right decision even when there’s no punishment. The accountable thing for me to do would be as simple as just taking the photo down. 

So even if you walk out of here and completely forget about everything I said, I hope that you at least retain the idea that putting these principles of Honor into action. Being accountable for your actions, respecting other people, and actually trying in life go beyond the Honor Code itself. The real importance of the Honor Code does not lie within itself, but in your actual efforts to be honorable. Because when you graduate and look back on your time here, you’re probably not going to think about whether or not you followed the Honor Code to a T, but whether or not you actually tried to be a good, honorable person.

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