Wheel to Cover Maulings By Honor Council’s “Integrity Grizzlies”

Emory University’s Honor Council announced in a college-wide email yesterday that it would partner with the Emory Wheel to publish detailed accounts of every mauling carried out by the council’s “Integrity Grizzlies,” grizzly bears who have been bred and trained for the sole purpose of detecting, pursuing, and mauling honor code violators.

“In order to increase the visibility and transparency of the honor code process and educate students about academic integrity, we feel it is helpful to show Emory students that a grizzly bear attack is a very real consequence of cheating or plagiarism,” wrote Jason Ciejka, associate director of the Honor Council, in yesterday’s email introducing the sleuth of killer bears.

The email described the process the Honor Council used to train grizzlies to detect the scent of academic dishonesty, noting the ease by which the grizzlies could “pick up the scent of a cheater.” Upon discovering the offender, the bears are trained to “toss the student about like the bear would treat a salmon swimming upstream in the Pacific Northwestern United States.”

In order to protect the privacy of each honor code violator, the Wheel has offered to remove any personally identifiable information from the mauling reports if asked before publication. The grizzly bears have also demonstrated their willingness to make sure the remains of their victims are not identifiable.

“We’ve joined this partnership because we truly believe in the Honor Council’s mission to protect academic integrity by way of fear and 900lb bears,” wrote Priyanka Krishnamurthy, Editor-in-Chief of The Emory Wheel, in an email to The Spoke.  “In the interest of media integrity, however, we’ll agree to not publish certain tantalizing details.”

The email acknowledged the risk that honor code violators may evade the integrity grizzlies by escaping to the trees conveniently planted around campus. In light of this potential flaw, the Honor Council has announced plans to train an auxiliary force of tree-climbing black bears before the start of the 2014-2015 academic year.