Roger Mudd, Donald McCabe Speeches to Launch W&L Institute for Honor

Newsman Roger Mudd, a 1950 W&L alumnus and widely respected journalist, and Dr. Donald L. McCabe, one of the country's leading authorities on academic integrity and collegiate Honor Systems, are the featured speakers at Washington and Lee University Founders' Day events and the inaugural session of the W&L Institute for Honor.

The Jan. 18-19 festivities, which include students' initiation into the Omicron Delta Kappa honor society for leadership achievements, are designed to highlight the launching of the W&L Institute for Honor.

The institute and its anticipated annual sessions are being financed by $750,000, raised by Billy Schaefer '60 from members of the Class of 1960. The institute's goals are still being formulated but include promoting academic integrity in secondary schools and colleges, while also emphasizing ways that alumni can further promote integrity in the professions and in the workplace, institute organizers said.

In 1992, Washington and Lee was among 24 founding institutions of the Center for Academic Integrity, formerly spearheaded by McCabe and now based at Duke University's Kenan Institute of Ethics. The center's 1997 annual convention was hosted by W&L on its national historic landmark campus in Lexington. Today, the center has about 250 institution members, including many of the country's most eminent colleges and universities.

Mudd, who has become in recent years an avid commentator and speaker on professional ethics, will launch the weekend events with his Founders' Day convocation address, "Honor: Is It Absolute or Is It Relative?" The speech, which is open to the public, is at 11:30 a.m. Friday, Jan. 18, in Lee Chapel.

Mudd will discuss how W&L's Honor System leaves little room for debate with its single penalty of expulsion. But it is after students graduate, Mudd says, that they face a complex world, in which they must juggle conflicting responsibilities and conflicting interests in government, politics, law, business and journalism.

In addition to his work as one of the country's most senior journalists, Mudd is a member of the board of the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges, from which W&L receives financial support each year. It was Mudd who took the initiative in organizing the annual "Ethics Bowl" competition among the foundation's 15 members. Last spring, W&L's team won the 3rd annual Ethics Bowl.

McCabe, a Rutgers University professor of organizational management, will deliver the institute's keynote address at 11 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 19, in the Law School's moot courtroom.

McCabe specializes in the roles honor and academic integrity play in developing ethical decision-making and ethical behavior among college students. He has surveyed collegiate honor systems across the country three times since the late 1980s and completed a significant survey of academic integrity in American high schools in 1999.

The institute's inaugural two-day session will include a series of workshops and discussions, which are not open to the public, featuring Mudd, McCabe, members of W&L's faculty, University officials and outside speakers.