ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, May 13, 1996 TAG: 9605130130
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Above
HOW DID a Washington and Lee University honor case get written up in the latest edition of film critic Roger Ebert's video guide?
This tale starts with a movie. A love story.
Two young people meet on a train in Europe. They talk. They decide to get off and walk around Vienna together. The American and the Frenchwoman fall for each other and, as they part, agree to meet on the train platform again in six months.
The film - "Before Sunrise" - plants a seed in one moviegoer's mind.
He meets a woman on a train heading from Philadelphia through Virginia. She's dressed just like the woman in "Before Sunrise." He tells her about the movie. Instead of getting off in Charlottesville, he stays on the train with her and they spend a couple of days together in Atlanta.
Then the story goes awry. The young man has missed a class exercise back at college in Virginia - at Washington and Lee University Law School.
Reaching for an excuse, he tells his professor he was sick. But the story is too juicy, and almost everyone in the law school knows what happened. Someone reports the law student to the university's honor court for lying.
The honor court kicks him out of school.
The case becomes a source of controversy at the law school and, briefly, breaks open the secrecy that surrounds the university's honor system. The expelled student claims the system has as much to do with settling grudges as it does with questions of honor.
Then there's an odd denouement: Hoping to get attention for his case, the former student writes to Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic. Ebert recounts the tale in a column in the Chicago Sun-Times. To top things off, the column gets included in the 1996 edition of Roger Ebert's Video Companion.
For defenders of W&L's honor system, it's a story of someone unable to take responsibility for his own dishonorable conduct.
For Daryl Elfield, the moviegoer and now ex-law student, it's a case of standing up against too-harsh justice. He admits he made mistakes, but says he was wronged by the honor system.
He suggests this name for his real-life story: "After Sunrise."
"Before Sunrise" is a modest film. Two people in their early 20s - an American on a Eurail pass (played by Ethan Hawke) and a French student returning to Paris (Julie Delpy) - meet on a train, start talking and decide they like each other. He persuades her to get off the train and walk around Vienna until his plane leaves for the U.S. the next morning.
"This sort of scenario has happened, I imagine, millions of times," Ebert wrote in his review. "It has rarely happened in a nicer, sweeter, more gentle way."
Daryl Elfield saw "Before Sunrise" while he was visiting Philadelphia last spring.
It made him angry, he said, because he saw it as a case of Hollywood "telling us what love should really be like." Still, he liked the idea of meeting someone on a train.
After boarding an Amtrak to head back to school, he wrote Ebert, "I met a woman dressed exactly like Julie Delpy and about as beautiful."
The woman was Jessica Turner, a Spanish teacher from Maine. "I really was wearing one of those black dresses, like the woman in the movie," she told Ebert.
"Actually, I started talking to him. I had stopped to see a friend in Baltimore, who packed me a bagel and wrapped it in a note that said, `Don't talk to strangers.' I saw Daryl sitting at the next table on the train and told him what the napkin said. We started talking, he told me all about the movie, and when we got to Charlottesville, I asked him if he wanted to stay on the train and spend some time in Atlanta....
"I vaguely remember him saying that his professor would never believe his story."
Elfield returned to school two days later. He'd missed an oral argument, and spoke to his professor the day after he got back.
"I really did intend to tell him everything, but you can imagine it was a fairly embarrassing situation," Elfield said recently via e-mail. "I screwed up! ... Faced with telling him a rather sordid story, I just grabbed for the easiest explanation."
He wasn't trying to gain any advantage by telling his professor he was sick, he said, because the assignment was ungraded and he didn't ask to do it over, anyway.
A week later, Elfield said, he went to the professor and confessed. The professor "was upset, but glad that I had told him the truth."
Elfield said he thought the matter was cleared up. It never occurred to him, he added, that his lie might be an honor code violation.
Elfield, who was born in the United States but grew up in England, was a first-year law student at W&L.
While in Atlanta, he had called a couple of friends back at school and told them where he was. The story quickly spread.
He was called before the school's honor court. Under the honor code, the identity of his accuser has been kept secret, but Elfield believes he was turned in by a fellow law student "who openly despised me."
W&L has a "one strike and you're out" honor code: If you lie, cheat or steal, you're gone.
The honor system's supporters say it's perfectly fair: Students are told the rules when they arrive at school, and agree to abide by them. Any breach "is unacceptable," one student leader wrote last year, "and, indeed, honor is not measured in degrees."
Elfield contends the code allows some people to flout the concept of honor and get away with it, while students who don't fit in with W&L's "old-boy network" can be kicked out for "petty indiscretions."
He pleaded his case at a closed-door hearing, but to no avail: The verdict was against him.
Alison Kitch, one of his professors, told Roger Ebert she sympathized with Elfield. "But he indeed broke the rules. He got thrown out for what the honor book says you will be thrown out for: He lied."
If he'd told his professor the truth, Kitch said, "he might have gotten a bad grade, but he wouldn't have been thrown out of school."
Another law professor, Gwen Handelman, believes the punishment was too severe. She weighs the seriousness of his offense against the "incredible number of accomplishments" Elfield left behind in a few months at the school. He helped create a Public Interest Law Students Association chapter, which aims to encourage the legal profession to represent the poor and other clients who usually can't afford lawyers. As an aggressive activist, Elfield clashed with the school's conservative atmosphere.
Handelman says the case "raises the issue of whether the honor system is used to target students" who don't adhere to the conservative political beliefs that dominate the student leadership.
Elfield didn't leave Lexington quietly. He stayed for weeks after his expulsion, apparently hoping, his father Mark Elfield said, to stir debate about the honor system. Eventually, campus security forced him to leave.
He wrote a letter to the W&L Law News laying out his criticisms of the honor system. The honor board first tried to keep the letter from being printed, then succeeded in getting the Law News to black out certain parts. Honor rules say honor cases must be kept secret, and the board's president argued that Elfield shouldn't be allowed to mention specific witnesses, because they were forbidden from responding.
Elfield said the censorship proved his point: that he had run afoul of "an arcane and perhaps medieval system of justice" that operates beyond the light of day.
Todd Rehm, executive editor of the Law News, stuck up for the system's fairness, writing that "living honestly brings rewards, and dishonorable behavior must be discouraged. What happens to a lawyer who blows off a court date and lies to the judge about his excuse?''
Another law student, Jim Hankey, wrote that Elfield had acted foolishly and, in general, "always seemed to me a bit arrogant, and I doubt I will miss his presence."
But Hankey said Elfield's case raised serious questions. When "trivialities" count as violations, for example, what's to prevent a witch hunt that hounds unpopular students out of school?
For him, there's a "big difference between instilling honor in students and using scare tactics to bully students into submitting - temporarily - to an all-or-nothing code of conduct. ... Who among Mr. Elfield's accusers and investigators can say they have never lied, stolen or cheated? I dare say that some of them might well have committed some of these sins here at W&L, but never been caught."
Daryl Elfield said he "wanted to get a lot of publicity for what had happened, but I didn't really know how to go about it." He decided to write Ebert, telling him "the link between the movie and my life seemed so strong I felt someone in the industry should know. Make of it what you will."
A copy of Ebert's column - which didn't take sides - eventually made its way to W&L and was passed around the law school.
Daryl Elfield's relationship with Jessica Turner, the woman he met on the train, lasted a short time.
He moved to Berkeley, Calif., to live with his father, Mark. Soon after, he met a woman from New Zealand on the Internet and began a relationship with her. She visited him, then he visited her. Then his dad kicked him out of the house. By going to New Zealand, Mark Elfield said, Daryl violated the contract the father and son had made - that Daryl would work and save while living at home so he could pay off the credit card debts he'd run up at school.
Eventually, he married the woman from New Zealand and went across the ocean to live with her. Mark Elfield said his son left the country owing thousands of dollars, including big bills he'd run up calling New Zealand from his dad's house and a software company where he'd worked in California.
It was, Mark Elfield said, a violation of honor that made the "white lie" he told his professor pale by comparison.
The father still thinks his son's punishment at W&L was too harsh and that the school's honor system operates in too much secrecy. But he said his son also needs to learn from his experience.
For his part, Daryl Elfield says he's trying to get on with his life. He hopes to get into law school in England this fall.
In the end, what did he learn from his experience?
He admits he made a mistake in blowing off school and then lying about it. But looking back, he talks mostly about how he was treated by the honor system and the students who run it.
"I think I misjudged how much power these people could have over me," Elfield said. "I was warned by a professor when I first arrived that I stuck out like a sore thumb and that I should be careful. I think I underestimated her words."
Fellow law student Hankey wrote that he hated to see Elfield's legal career end "over such a brief act of madness - for essentially feeling like it was not OK to truthfully admit that romance was, for once, more important than law school."
From what he'd heard around school, Hankey added, it seemed the only lesson anybody had learned from the whole episode was this:
If you violate the honor code, don't blab it around.
LENGTH: Long : 192 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Chart by staff: Washington and Lee University - Theby CNBHonor System.