The Carolinian’s Creed

 While other campuses are instituting speech and conduct codes to address tensions among their students, the University of South Carolina is taking a very different approach. That institution’s vice president of student affairs explains what inspired them to create the creed reproduced in this issue and the effect it is having on students and everyone on campus. Readers who would like additional information about the creed and its development should contact the Office of Student Judicial Programs at (803) 777-4333.

By Dennis A. Pruitt
The University of South Carolina (USC) was founded in 1801 to create harmony in the state by providing a learning environment typified by the finest human qualities, such as mutual respect, integrity, and selflessness. The university’s motto, Emollit Mores Nec Sinit Esse Feros, means "learning humanizes character and does not permit it to be cruel." In the university’s earliest years, the faculty aimed to develop character as well as intellect. South Carolina’s history lent itself to supporting a grand experiment in shaping the student, the culture, and the university environment. The creation of the Carolinian’s Creed at USC was a natural evolution of the university’s historic mission.

The modern university is a complex organization. It is a special place of work and study, in which the standards for civil conduct exceed those required by law. But as U.S. institutions of higher education became more diverse – and as American society became less civil – campus communities started to experience some alarming student behaviors, especially in connection with students’ relationships with one another (hazing, date rape, racial and sexual harassment, among others). Troubled by the same problems, in 1988, USC decided to examine why these inappropriate behaviors were surfacing and what might be done to control or prevent them from disrupting our campus.

First, most of the incidents occurred in unstructured, unsupervised settings involving closely bonded groups, where the risk of discovery and of being held personally accountable for inappropriate behavior was extremely low. Second, students were motivated by a distinct set of values that prized approval from peers more than approval from authority figures, including the university. (No student affairs practitioner would be surprised by this!). Third, the university’s ethics governing relationships among students and its expectations for student behavior were not clearly articulated.

The Carolinian’s Creed expresses the values the university expects its students to adhere to in their peer relationships. It does not define violations, nor does it provide specific remedies or punishments (thus the choice of the word creed rather than code). It is a very simple statement, written in language students can understand and relate to.

Upon its completion, the creed was formally adopted by every major governing and decision-making body at USC, including the board of trustees, the national advisory board, the faculty senate, the resident hall association, the Greek councils, the parents association. One compelling factor utilized to convince these bodies to endorse the creed was a document analysis using the content analysis techniques developed by the International Values Institute. The analysis revealed that the values expressed in the Carolinian’s Creed were identical to those expressed in the university’s published mission statement; it would have been hard to reject one without rejecting the other.

The creed must be continually reintroduced to new students, faculty, and staff. Each fall, the university holds a new-student convocation on the day new students move onto campus. This convocation has in five years become a most anticipated and revered event, with all the pomp and circumstance of academic tradition. At the convocation, a first-year student is randomly selected to represent the freshman class as a participant in convocation activities. The student government president reads the creed to the new students (and their families) and then presents it to the selected representative, who receives it on behalf of the entire freshman class. It is always a heartwarming and meaningful experience.

The late Ernest Boyer told me that he would have liked to see the creed endorsed by every institution of higher education in the United States. The creed captures and articulates USC’s standards, ideals, expectations, and aspirations. It is a wonderful teaching tool for our students and a point of pride for the entire institution. It helps us teach our students how to treat one another and all that it means to be a Carolinian.

About Campus/May-June 1996