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Duke Honor Council Celebrates 25th Anniversary During Integrity Week

Part of the Stories About Duke's 2019 Rhodes Scholars Series
The students who lead the Duke Honor Council
Duke students lead the Duke Honor Council
Geoffrey Mock

For 25 years, Duke students have helped take the lead on maintaining classroom integrity. To recognize the anniversary of the Duke Honor Code, the student-led Honor Council is organizing a series of events next week to mark Integrity Week.

The events are part of a year-long series of ethics-themed programs, with events ranging from research integrity to a sexual misconduct panel with student leaders.

Integrity Week will include events focusing on ethical issues in higher education, in business and in our own community, culminating with a March 30 talk by Rubenstein Fellow and former Federal Reserve Gov. Sarah Raskin.

“The goal of Integrity Week is to raise awareness about the history of honor at Duke and spark conversations about what moral courage means in today's day in age,” said Kushal Kadakia, the student chair of the Honor Council. “Duke is a relatively young honor code school compared to peer institutions, with formal systems for academic integrity evolving over time on campus from the honor system in the 1960s, to the honor commitment in the 1980s, to finally the honor code in the 1990s, which became the foundation of the Duke Community Standard at the turn of the century.”

Duke Integrity Week Integrity Week events include:

  • Monday, March 26: Suzanne Shanahan, director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics, 6 p.m. Holsti Reading Room, Rubenstein Library
  • Tuesday, March 27: Durham Mayor Steve Schewel, a Duke alumnus and Sanford School instructor, 7 p.m. 139 Social Sciences Bldg.
  • Wednesday, March 28: Bill Boulding, dean of The Fuqua School of Business and a nationally known expert on business ethics. 5 p.m. 067 Brodhead Center.
  • Thursday, March 29: Sarah Raskin, former Federal Reserve Board governor, 6:30 p.m. 068 Brodhead Center. Following Raskin’s talk, she will moderate a panel of three generations of former Honor Council chairs to discuss how integrity has evolved over time at Duke.

Kadakia said the students on the Honor Council are working “to bring ethics to the forefront of campus life.” Some of the effort is visual – including the installation of plaques of the Community Standard in classrooms.

But the Integrity Week events are part of a larger effort to just make honor and integrity integral outside the classroom as well.

“At Duke, this community of support and culture of accountability was created and has been sustained by students, staff and faculty for generations,” Kadakia said. “Integrity Week for the Honor Council is a celebration of this tradition at the heart of the Duke experience -- the values of ethics, honor and integrity."

For more about the Honor Council and Integrity Week, click here.