By Helen Spencer-Wallace
I want to share some thoughts I have about honor and how it applies to my attendance at Reed in a broad sense. Because everyone has a different interpretation of the honor principle, I speak only for myself – but for the sake of encouraging others to have new thoughts because I have benefited from others doing so for me. I hear and think much about honor’s role in more specific issues on campus, but for me, the most profound and complex engagement with the honor principle has thus far presented itself in one of the biggest and most constant questions that I wrestle with at this school: Why am I at Reed, and why should I continue attending?
In many ways, I think that my attendance at Reed is dishonorable. There are probably a lot of people who could utilize my place at this school better than I can, and there are definitely many things I could be doing that would be much more immediately beneficial for other people and for the rest of the world. I know that a lot of us grapple with these thoughts every day, and I’m really thankful for those who help me look beyond the book in my face and consider the big world that contains my little life. This broadened perspective – which seems to me to be the point of the liberal arts – also encourages me to develop my application of the honor principle beyond issues internal to Reed (if you’ll permit me to imagine such an absolute distinction between our campus and the world of which it is a small part).
That’s why I question whether my attendance at Reed is dishonorable, and to seek answers I look in the only place that I can: other people. I continue embracing the privilege of being a student of my fellow students, professors, and community members. I don’t assume that I deserve it, and I shouldn’t assume that I don’t, but rather I learn from the people of Reed to constantly question the relevance, efficiency, and productivity of my actions. I carry on every day despite my confusion (to various degrees of self-satisfaction and to an unknowable level of success) so that I can continue educating myself by picking the brains that comprise this community.