INFORMATION FOR

Honor Council chair and Undergraduate Judicial Board co-chair Jane Chong T'09 addressed the members of Duke University's Class of 2012 at Convocation on Wednesday, August 20. Below is the text of her speech (reprinted with permission).

Good morning, Class of 2012. I’ll skip the fancy introduction in favor of speaking frankly. Frankly, I’m tempted to shock you into listening as I expound on the importance of our honor code, the Duke Community Standard. But the concept of honor and its crucial place in an intellectual community is nothing new to you. Your dorm room is new. Your P.O. box is new. The faces to your left and to your right, these are new. You are new. The notion that lying, cheating and stealing are bad –old news.

The Duke Community Standard is more than that. But like all stirring, all-encompassing, carefully worded pledges, it runs the risk of seeming unnecessary and sounding lofty and abstract. The same probably goes for my appeal today that you make the Standard a living, breathing part of your everyday life.

So let’s take a little break. This is a bit unusual for the formal occasion, but how about some audience participation? Please, repeat after me. Honor. Honor. Honor, honor, honor.

Kind of loses its meaning after a while, doesn’t it? For two decades, you’ve been asked to conduct yourselves with honor; you’ve been told character counts in a hundred witty ways. Not only have these words gradually lost shape and weight, but here you are, finally a college student, keenly aware that you sit surrounded by strangers. Honor is not the most pressing issue on your mind. And yet, never has it mattered more.

Looking at the Community Standard critically is not the same as looking at it cynically. It is up to you to personalize the Standard, to put faces and stories to what otherwise amounts to pretty words. To start, community is the person sitting to your left and the person sitting to your right. Standards are what you inspire in them, and what they inspire in you.

I use the word “inspire” because the word “expect” does not do you justice. The Standard is often referred to as an aspirational document for this very reason: because it is one thing to memorize the student bulletin and abide by university policy. It is another to believe in the principles that inspire the policies and to take action, whatever action you feel is right, when you see the Standard being compromised –because you recognize that your community is worth it.

This hall is filled with your future lab partners, significant others and potential lifelong friends. But your relationships with them will be only as strong as the principles that bind you to them, the principles that should bind all of us, though we may be, for the moment, strangers.

Today when you exit these chapel doors, you will have the chance to sign the Community Standard, to symbolically reaffirm the pledge you made the moment you accepted Duke’s offer of admission.

Sometime in the next four years or four days, in class on a Monday morning or in line on a Friday night, you will find yourself in a situation where the safe thing to do is sit back, stand down, blend in or bail out. But remember your pledge, sealed with your signature. Remember the story of Valentino Deng, who closes this year’s summer reading book with a promise. “I will be fierce. I will argue when necessary. I will be willing to fight.”

Be willing to fight. Love the present, but be able to look back on it proudly when it’s past. Don’t just enter the tradition of honor; make Duke’s tradition yours. Make honor more than just a chant.

On behalf of the Honor Council, I congratulate you, Class of 2012, on all that you have done, and all that you have yet to do. Welcome to Duke University. Welcome home.