Introduction and College Information

The decision to join this academic community requires acceptance of special rights and responsibilities that are essential for its effective functioning and the realization of its mission.

All members of the community share the responsibility to uphold the highest standards of academic and personal integrity, community engagement, and commitment to principles of equity and inclusion that are central to the mission of the College. Failure to accept and act on this responsibility threatens the rights of the rest of the community by undermining the trust upon which the community is built.

Students, faculty, staff, and administrators assume a commitment to the academic community that supports teaching and learning in an open environment based on mutual trust, respect, and concern. All members of the community have the right to careful and constructive analysis of their work, and they have the responsibility to provide a serious response to the work of others.

Each member of the academic community has the right to benefit from its collective knowledge and resources as well as the responsibility to contribute to them. Failure to adhere to these principles and standards may result in sanctions.

— Adopted from the Academic Honor Board’s Statement of Policies and Procedures
mtholyoke.edu/academicdeans/academic-honor-board

Mount Holyoke College believes in the right, indeed the necessity, of free inquiry and free expression for every member of the College community. The College aims to provide an environment hospitable to open interchanges of knowledge and opinion in the terms of reasoned and civil discourse. An individual’s right to free speech, free movement, free association, peaceful assembly and orderly protest extends to every member of the College. So does an individual’s responsibility to uphold the law and to respect the rights and feelings of others.

The goal for the 21st century must be to build a community of faculty, staff and students devoted to intellectual and creative freedom, critical inquiry, personal honor, ethical discernment and responsibility. The College encourages openness and candor, dialogue and debate, and the creative engagement of all constituencies in building a genuine community. A college does not become a community by so naming itself. Community is a dynamic condition, difficult and necessary to achieve, reached by active synthesis, by the consensus of free wills and free intelligences agreeing to pursue objectives in common, in an atmosphere of general empathy, forbearance, respect and trust. When such conditions prevail, there should be little occasion for coercion or violence, bias and discrimination or for punitive response, and the very occurrence of such actions suggests that the community has failed, at least for the time, to achieve its common purposes. Ultimately, the quality of life in the College is the property of the conscience of all its members.