A Matter of Honor : Cheating. Lying. Stealing. With these kind of scandals dogging college campuses, it would seem integrity has fallen from favor. But in reality, codes of conduct are on the rise--and it’s often the students who are pushing them.

Without warning, a drum roll explodes in the darkness after midnight, echoing through the still barracks, jolting the cadets of the Virginia Military Institute out of their sleep. It is ominous and relentless, as urgent as it is foreboding.

At every door of the four-story complex, there is a heavy knock, an order to fall out and, above the drumming, a shouted, repeated announcement: “Your Honor Court has met . . . Your Honor Court has met.” In every room, the lights snap on.

Within minutes, dressed in robes and pajamas, chins tucked, chests out, all 1,200 young men of the VMI Corps of Cadets stand at attention in ranks around a dim inner courtyard, assembled for the excruciatingly painful ritual of a “drumming out.” One of their own has cheated. Hehas been banished for breaking their sacred Code of Honor.

Resplendent in dress uniforms, members of the Honor Court march through an arch into the yard. The court president announces the name of a cadet found guilty of violating the code and intones: “He has placed personal gain above personal honor. He has left the institute, never to return. His name is never to be mentioned again.”

It is a moment none of them will forget. After 30 years, Lt. Col. Mike Strickler, a VMI graduate now on the institute’s staff, vividly remembers the spring morning when a classmate was drummed out for cheating, just 10 days before he was to graduate. During one year while Strickler was a cadet, six members of the regiment were drummed out. In another year, there were only two. He remembers them all.

He also remembers the 12-word code that every VMI “rat” memorizes the day he arrives: “A cadet will neither lie, cheat, steal nor tolerate those who do.”

That code, said Danny Felton, one of about 225 fourth classmen due to graduate from the 155-year-old institute this spring, “is the cadet’s most cherished possession.”

Variations on this rule of conduct are embraced by 100 or so institutions of higher learning, in addition to the Army, Navy and Air Force academies and venerable military schools such as VMI and the Citadel. They range from small private schools such as Washington and Lee and Bryn Mawr to Princeton and Rice, and to the University of Maryland with 38,000 students.

At some, they are enshrined and forgotten in student handbooks; at others, they have become the cornerstone of academic integrity.

More often than not, honor systems have been installed at the urging of students, in many cases because of concern over cheating.

Although schools with viable honor systems remain a small minority, there is, says Samuel Sadler, vice president for student affairs at the College of William & Mary, “a decided movement” toward making codes a fixture on more campuses.

Typically, the codes explicitly forbid lying, cheating and stealing, and require students to take some action when they have knowledge of violations by their peers. Punishment is usually meted out by student tribunals. In return, the school administration allows unproctored examinations, with students sometimes taking the tests at a time and place of their choosing.

Nearly every week, Washington and Lee, whose campus adjoins that of VMI, receives inquiries or visits from other schools interested in its widely regarded system.

Students at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., are expected to vote soon on adoption of a code. An honor system is under serious consideration at Georgetown University in Washington.

Other schools, such as Duke and Johns Hopkins, have taken steps to strengthen their codes, and others, including Stanford, are contemplating ways to enhance honor systems.

Last month, University of Virginia students turned out in extraordinary numbers for an honor code referendum, voting by a margin of 3 to 1 to retain a system that, for 152 years, has required permanent expulsion for an honor code conviction. Codes have been stiffened elsewhere, too.

So why should this 19th-Century creation--expanded, codified and preserved by military academies and old schools for men of the Southern gentry--now flourish? Especially now, in a generation that hates rules? Even in mega-universities where neither race, gender, history, culture, aspiration nor personal acquaintance provide unity?

The answer is evidently a sharpened concern over academic integrity--a subject brought dramatically to mind by the cheating scandal that has dogged the U.S. Naval Academy for more than a year.

Cheating, studies show, is pervasive. It involves students struggling for A’s and admission to prestigious graduate schools as well as those flirting with academic failure.

A landmark survey of 6,000 students in 31 of the country’s prestigious colleges and universities two years ago found that nearly 70% had cheated--if all manner of minor infractions were taken into account. The figures approached 80% for non-honor code schools and 60% for those with codes.

In non-honor code schools, 20% of students acknowledged cheating three times or more. Only 5% in honor code schools admitted repeated infractions. “I think that difference is quite significant,” said Rutgers professor Donald McCabe, who conducted the study.

A generation ago, with campuses seething over Vietnam, honor codes seemed destined to become a relic. Some schools dropped their codes outright, concluding that they were unworkable. Others eased their requirements.

“During Vietnam, there was a clear assault on anything traditional,” William & Mary’s Sadler said, “and the honor system was just one of the traditions that came under attack. There was a tremendous passing of honor systems. One by one colleges and universities just peeled off.”

There were changes even at such honor code bastions as William & Mary and the University of Virginia. Both schools dropped their non-toleration clause, which had required a student to report any person he saw cheating or face punishment himself.

With expelled students exposed to the military draft, Virginia went four years without an honor violation being charged. Students were unwilling to bring charges because expulsion was mandatory upon conviction. In 1979, the non-toleration requirement was finally dropped from the code. For practical purposes, it had long since grown unenforceable.

The move back to honor codes is symptomatic of a larger change on college campuses, said Gary Pavela, president of the National Center for Academic Integrity, a consortium of 60 colleges and universities collaborating on issues involving honor codes, student ethics and academic integrity.

“All across the country, college administrators are beginning to take back authority that they gave up to students in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” he said. “But the area of academic integrity is the only one where authority is still moving toward the students. In part it is because faculty members are abrogating. They teach, do their research and get off campus. But there is a yearning among students and in society for more discussion of ethical issues, and honor codes provide a forum.”

The recent student vote left Virginia among a handful of schools--most small military academies like VMI--with expulsion as the required penalty for lying, cheating or stealing. The uncompromising attitude is unmatched even at West Point, Annapolis and Colorado Springs, the preeminent schools for Army, Navy and Air Force officers. But--ironically, perhaps--the revered national military academies have produced the country’s most notorious cheating scandals.

In 1976, 152 cadets were kicked out of the U.S. Military Academy for cheating on an exam. After a long investigation, 98 were reinstated the following year. In 1984, 19 Air Force Academy seniors were suspended for cheating on a physics exam, and cadet honor boards’ handling of academic cheating was temporarily halted.

The most excruciating cheating affair in the history of the military service schools is still being played out on the stately campus of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. There, a panel of senior officers appointed by the Secretary of the Navy is hearing the last cases of as many as 133 midshipmen involved in cheating on an electrical engineering examination in December, 1992.

What made the episode extraordinary was the ensuing cover-up and mishandling.

In the weeks after the incident, Navy investigators concluded that 28 midshipmen might have had prior knowledge of the exam’s contents. Honor boards eventually found that there had been 11 cases of code violation, but four of them were dismissed by Capt. John B. Padgett III, the commandant of midshipmen, and a fifth was dropped by Rear Adm. Thomas C. Lynch, the superintendent of the academy. The remaining six were ordered expelled.

The five whose cases were dismissed were academy football players.

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When the superintendent, himself the captain of the football team in 1963, went before the 4,200-member brigade to announce the results of the investigation and reviews, he faced a remarkable reception.

One midshipman asked point-blank about one of the exonerated football players, a friend of Lynch’s son, visiting the superintendent’s quarters on the evening before his case was reviewed. Lynch replied that he had not engaged in any substantive conversation with the young man, but his response was greeted by muffled jeers and chants of the football player’s name.

Last May, nearly five months after the now-famous exam, another midshipman came forward with new allegations, and the Navy’s inspector general launched another probe.

During more than 800 interviews, investigators encountered determined reluctance to cooperate by many midshipmen. They reported that some midshipmen lied to protect friends even after confessing their own guilt; 14, including 11 athletes, invoked the Fifth Amendment; eight swore to lies, and five refused to be interviewed “even in the face of the Superintendent’s grant of immunity and orders compelling their cooperation.”

When the investigation was all over in January, Vice Adm. D.M. Bennett, the naval inspector general, reported that as many as 133 students had been involved and that 81 had finally so acknowledged.

As did a separate report from the academy’s Board of Visitors, the inspector general’s findings called for fundamental changes. There had been no actual conflict of interest on the part of academy officials, the report concluded, but “there was a definite perception of a conflict or a lack of impartiality among the midshipmen.”

“The message the investigators received from the midshipmen,” the report said, “was that they viewed the honor concept as an ideal that simply could not be applied to many of the problems that arise in the daily life of a midshipman at the Academy.”

Many who study academic integrity issues do not find it surprising that the most notorious cheating scandals have come at the service academies, where personal honor is the keystone of education.

“Military schools,” said McCabe of Rutgers, “create a culture in which students strongly bond with each other, joining together and trying to help each other through the system.

“If you have a rigid set of explicit rules and regulations, you can reduce cheating, but if students see an opportunity to beat the system, they will. Honor programs do best where they create an atmosphere of trust, where everyone is involved, and the honor system becomes a part of the fabric of an institution.”

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Because military institutions are special cases, McCabe has excluded them from his surveys on cheating. The University of Maryland also excluded them when it studied other schools’ honor codes in designing a system for its campus.

The distinguishing feature of the Maryland system--aside from its being tried in a huge public institution--is its incentive for students convicted of cheating to recover.

In such a case, a student is given a grade of F-X. After a year, in which the person takes an ethics seminar, he is given the opportunity to take the course again. Otherwise the X, indicating cheating, remains a part of his permanent transcript.

At the Naval Academy, an effort is under way to restore the credibility and enhance an honor system that Midshipman Brigade Cmdr. Sean Fahey said will remain “student owned and student operated.”

Almost ready to be put in place is a “moral remediation” program for midshipmen found guilty of honor violations deemed insufficiently serious to warrant separation from the Navy. It will involve psychological counseling, performance of service, formal instruction in ethics and work with a senior officer, who will act as the student’s mentor during the remediation period.

Even as hearings continue for midshipmen implicated in the scandal, superintendent Lynch has begun meeting with classes and with individual midshipmen in an effort to establish the honor system more deeply in the academy’s conscience.

“They are very much ashamed of what has happened,” he said. “They feel they have all been tarnished by this brush. I can talk with four or five midshipmen and get four or five reasons why it happened. But we are going to keep the honor concept at the Naval Academy, and it is going to be stronger in the future than it has ever been in the past.”

Changes will not go so far as to adopt the single sanction that endures at VMI, several other small military and private schools, and, after 152 years, at the University of Virginia.

“There are some situations where we will say, ‘You are out the door,’ ” Lynch said recently.

“We will do that for drugs, for sexual misconduct and for serious honor violations. But the Academy is a learning, developing, maturing experience. You can have a medical problem or you can have an academic problem. But honor violations are in all gradations. They are never black and white.”