Gavels Falling

PSA: I wrote this Sunday night, but completely forgot to post it yesterday. I’ve back-dated it, and you can expect an entry today and tomorrow (they’re already ready).

So last night I was at work, and I was also working on a bit of a mental kink in the chain link fence that is the Code of V (get it, working… work…). For those of you who don’t know it, or have never dealt with the ramifications of breaking this code, it is basically the principles I try to live by, cultivated over the last few years of experience, and occasionally salient here, evidenced by entries like this one.

The situation currently before the judge involves a case of academic dishonesty involving one of my classmates. A lot of the details are now bound up in various forums protected by confidentiality (professor meetings, committee hearings, class settings), but I have been thinking a lot about my own reactions to the situation as it arose, developed, and particularly now that judgment is due, and not by me–by the university.

A lot of my initial reaction was righteous indignation, perhaps rightfully so. A lot of my classmates, people I’ve grown to consider friends, were put in a compromising place by our other classmate. (In fact, we all were compromised, as the behavior in question risks an ethical violation by collusion if not reported.) My staunch protective instinct regarding my friends, plus my own sense of threat, plus a variety of other factors immediately lead me to a very fire and brimstone concept of what “fair consequences” might look like: Failure! Expulsion! Professional Disgrace!, shouted the voices on the jury.

But last night, I was simmering in my righteous pit of justice, trying to figure out why my reaction has been so strong. Surely action must be taken, but what about second chances? In the spirit of Fairness and Justice (two more of the capital-letter tenets in the Code of V), everyone deserves one chance, and most people (*cough* ex boyfriends *cough*) get many. (In all honesty though, I have a feeling that this particular situation arose from too many such chances, but that is not part of the current case.) Who am I to play God, or rather, Draco in my judgment? Even the program, in the goal of acting judiciously, surely shouldn’t aim for Personal Disgrace! in seeking a solution.

And after all, I’ve had many, many second chances. For starters, who still loved and accepted me after Catie was born? Who supported me through my legal woes? The answer to such questions in this discussion isn’t a specific person so much the fact that such a person exists at all.

So maybe my focus should not be on swift and crippling fairness. Maybe my own focus has improperly shifter from a hope in the goodness of each person, where it belongs. The pest part of realizing that you’re being too strict is the contentedness and blind confidence that’s borne of realizing that you can instead hold out optimism that this second chance will be the one that works.