Which School Rules Should We Actually Follow?
By TMP 43rd Editorial Board
In theory, Milton’s disciplinary deterrent combines with norms against rulebreaking to develop students into young adults who would not lie or endanger themselves even if they knew no one would catch them. Administrators have even joked about how few community members actually read the Student Handbook cover-to-cover, placing their trust instead in the notion that people will uphold the “spirit of the rules.” However, in the 2025 State of the Acad survey, 35% of respondents admitted to committing DC-able whereabouts offenses, 23% admitted to drugs and alcohol offenses, and 50% admitted to some kind of academic integrity violation. Is the fact that some people break school rules evidence that those rules have failed? Of course not. Still, the constituents of any justice system must recognize that official punishment is not the only pillar of norm-building.
The blunt truth at Milton is that certain DC-able actions, harshly penalized in theory, carry little social stigma—not always unjustifiably, in our view. Meanwhile, trashed lunch tables, faked class participation, and scrolling online during conversations, while not technically violating any rules, still transgresses relatively obvious community values. We contend that if students are to contribute to this mismatch—between behaviors that are punishable by school doctrine and those students consider to be morally harmful in practice—they ought to embrace it in theory: some rules can exist as rules only, unenforced by student norms, while others require collective student social investment to help legitimize.
Some of Milton’s official rules are not enforced by student stigma at all. The Student Handbook demands that students report their peers for substance use, prohibits day students from leaving campus during free blocks without signing out with the Office of Student Life, and does not allow boarders to be outside of their dorms past 10PM on school nights. When only a fraction of the students who report these behaviors ever sit before the DC, we observe an unspoken understanding that reporting these violations is unnecessary. Clearly, not many students, even upperclassmen, would actually report a peer to the administration based on these rules, partially because many of us do not fully agree with them, as we learned during Stables on February 9, when the SGA told us that a hypothetical international student named “Wilhelm Becker” faced a threeday suspension for watching his friends drink in his dorm room.
The Milton Paper understands the ethical logic behind students’ refusal to report one another. Some decisions are undeniably reckless, but we advocate a culture of behavioral grace toward boundary offenses where students only get caught because they did not sufficiently hide their behavior, which can make said behavior more dangerous in the process. Grace can manifest through student DC members’ advocacy for their peers. Moreover, socially privileging certain rules, those that regulate behaviors that are arguably far more harmful and that cannot be enforced via school policy alone, requires some sense of selectivity.
That said, conscientiously taking the creation of de facto rules into our own hands obliges us to take up the burden of genuinely discouraging habits we deem harmful. As a student body, we appear to have already appointed ourselves the arbiters of which rule violations are actually morally problematic, or, at least, pressingly so. For instance, though trashed Forbes tables beget less adult opprobrium than the messy Stu did in years past, they reflect the same disregard for campus staff; only you can make your friends clean up their spilled rice. The same premise will hold true for discouraging cellphone use during social interactions outside of the school day, whatever the outcome of the campaign to restrict phones. Most of all, some dishonest academic practices, like falsifying lab data or pretending to have done a night’s reading, effectively cannot be consistently punished, leaving only “peer pressure” to keep learning authentic.