On Our Honor Past presidents of Washington and Lee University’s Executive Committee reflect on how it prepared them for a life of values-driven leadership.

By Kelsey Goodwin
January 21, 2025

“My impression then and now is that our Honor System remains unique. In addition to being run entirely by students, it’s flexible — it moves with the times, but it remains a constant.”

~ Ben Bailey ’75

Washington and Lee University’s Executive Committee, the entirely student-run governing body that oversees the university’s Honor System, manages student organization approval and budgets and addresses student concerns, has served an essential function in keeping the campus vibrant since 1905. In that time, it has also prepared its student representatives and executive officers to take the values of honor, integrity and civility with them into the world.

As Executive Committee President Harris Stripling ’25, a business and politics double major from Bluffton, South Carolina, prepares for his next chapter as an investment banking analyst at Lincoln International in New York City, he reflects on how his work on behalf of the Honor System during his time on the EC has shaped his values.

“For me, a successful life is not defined monetarily or materialistically,” Stripling said, “rather, it is a life where you strive to prioritize honor, civility and integrity.”

Stripling will soon join the ranks of a long list of alumni who have served in the role of EC president and who count it as a similarly transformational and defining component of their time on campus.

Steele Burrow ’13 served as a class representative before becoming EC president during his senior year and said the role was one of the best educations in leadership he could have imagined.

“The Honor System was one of the school traditions like the Speaking Tradition that attracted me to W&L as a community that emphasized values and development outside the classroom as much it did academics,” Burrow said. “There are few schools that have anything close to W&L’s Honor System, which gives students a unique kind of freedom throughout their college experience, and I think that plays a big role in the types of students who apply to W&L. The opportunity for students to participate in the Honor System, both as participants and as leaders through the EC, is a particularly unique aspect of W&L’s approach.”

Burrow, who works in policy research in Washington, D.C., and recently made his debut as a documentary filmmaker, noted that serving on the EC is an unusual student opportunity in terms of the level of responsibility that comes with the job.

“Students on the EC manage real budgets and make decisions based on the single-sanction Honor System that have very real consequences,” Burrow said. “It’s a heavy responsibility, but an important one, that gives students invaluable experience in leadership, management, self-governance and the type of civic values that I think W&L prides itself on instilling in its graduates.”

W&L Trustee Helen Sanders ’04, who is W&L’s first undergraduate woman to hold the office of EC president, started her EC career as a class representative during her sophomore year. She served as secretary her junior year and was elected president her senior year. Sanders said she fell in love with W&L as a prospective student because of campus values such as the Honor System and the Speaking Tradition and remembers quickly realizing she wanted to get more involved with the EC shortly after arriving on campus.

“The folks on the Executive Committee that I knew were people I truly liked and respected, and I wanted the opportunity to work with them and to get to know the system, because I could see the value of it and what it brought to campus,” she said.

While at Washington and Lee, Sanders also served as an Outing Club trip leader and a manager for the Traveller Safe Ride Program, and she played on the varsity basketball team her first year. She belonged to Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, coached basketball for Rockbridge Area Recreation Organization, tutored an eighth-grader at Lylburn Downing Middle School and volunteered at the Kendal at Lexington retirement community. As an alumna, she continued to serve W&L as president of the South Carolina Piedmont Alumni Chapter, on the Class of 2004’s fifth and 20th reunion committees and as co-chair of the Class of 2004’s 10th Reunion Committee. Sanders has served on W&L’s Board of Trustees since 2017.

Sanders said the civil and respectful way that the EC conducted its work, even with making difficult or unpopular decisions, was a lesson she has carried with her in her approach to leadership and conflict resolution.

“It was the most formative experience of my life,” Sanders said. “The experiences I had in the EC meeting room formed the building blocks of the way I approach communication, relationship-building and decision-making. I wouldn’t trade my experience for anything.”

Waller T. “Beau” Dudley ’74, ’79L was encouraged by a friend to run for EC president during his time in law school and served as president during the 1978–1979 academic year. Dudley noted that his time on the EC taught him the importance of approaching disciplinary matters with genuine empathy for the individuals involved.

“The committee handled these cases without any grandstanding or the sense that anyone was out to ‘get’ anyone else,” Dudley recalls. This focus on fairness and balance, he said, stuck with him as he transitioned into legal practice.

“A lawyer’s reputation and credibility are almost as valuable as their raw skill set,” Dudley said. “I think that I began building that here at W&L, even before I ran for EC president. By that time, I’d already experienced four years of living under the system, so I was certainly a believer by then, as I am now.”

Dudley said serving on the EC gave him a deep appreciation for the power of student self-governance and the importance of trusting those who are directly involved in administering the Honor System, a faith in student leadership that he said carried over into his later roles with the university. Dudley retired as executive director of alumni engagement at W&L in 2022, having served in the role since 2006. Prior to returning to W&L, Dudley had a distinguished legal career as a business litigation partner with McGuire Woods LLP in its Washington, D.C., area offices, and served the university as president of the Alumni Association from 1992–1993 and as a member of the university’s Board of Trustees from 1998–2006.

Elizabeth Formidoni ’96, ’99L ran for EC president during her time at W&L Law School after having the chance to see the Honor System in action for four years as an undergraduate and said the experience was a confidence-builder.

“I’d always thought of myself as a more reserved person,” said Formidoni, who prioritized getting out on campus and speaking to student groups as part of her campaign. Formidoni served as the university’s first female EC president during her 3L year, which coincided with Washington and Lee’s 250th anniversary, and she said the timing offered her additional opportunities for public speaking and to attend official university events. Formidoni has pursued a diverse career path, initially clerking for a judge and practicing law before returning to culinary school and becoming a chef. After a stint as a stay-at-home parent, Formidoni entered a new career chapter as an admissions officer at a private K-12 school in New York City. Formidoni feels her experience as both an EC president and a philosophy major at W&L made her a more empathetic and ethical thinker, which has informed her approach in her career as well as parenting.

“It was probably the most transformative experience of my life, in terms of personal and professional growth and development,” Formidoni said.

Elizabeth Mugo ’19, the first Black woman to serve as EC president, said the role prepared her well for her public policy and service aspirations. Mugo is currently a Master of Public Policy candidate and Rackham Merit Fellow at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and continues to serve on the Shepherd Advisory Board.

“I had the opportunity to get to know people from different parts of campus,” said Mugo, who was both a Bonner and Questbridge scholar and who also served as vice president of the EC her junior year. “As I built those relationships, I was also able to create connections between groups on campus who might have similar goals and be able to combine resources. I find myself thinking about that often in terms of how governments function and wanting to find ways to put energy and funding into making those processes run more efficiently.”

Kevin Batteh ’95, ’98L had served as Interfraternity Council (IFC) president and as a student investigator in an honor case before serving as a 1L and 2L class representative during his time at W&L Law, so by the time he ran for president his 3L year, he had become well-versed in the collaborative decision-making process required in leadership roles on campus. Still, he said, he likens his experience on the EC to taking an additional course in law school.

“Two people hearing the same set of facts and the same arguments could come to completely different conclusions, and that fascinated me,” Batteh said. “That was a preview into what it would be like to be a juror or to try to convince a jury.”

Batteh added that the role also requires balancing advocating for students and maintaining a constructive relationship with the administration, which he said helps students develop the kind of communication and relationship-building skills that will benefit them in their future careers. Batteh, who began his career as a trial lawyer and is now a partner at Delta Strategy Group, a regulatory strategy and government affairs firm in Washington, D.C., has spoken to students in the Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics and alumni about his work in the regulation of digital assets and blockchain technologies. He is also an active member of W&L Law School’s Law Council and Law Alumni Association and said his commitment to serving the institution has continued to expand.

“My love of the place has only grown over the years,” Batteh said.

Wilson Miller ’17 held multiple positions on the EC, moving from class representative to secretary to vice president before his election to EC president his senior year. Miller sought to create a more structured, communicative and transparent funding process for student organizations during his time on the EC. Miller said the EC’s dual role of overseeing honor matters and student government work is often the role’s greatest challenge, but also an opportunity for more dialogue.

“I felt like doing the student government work helped me get a sense of what students felt was important to them in terms of honor and integrity on campus,” Miller said, “because they would ask about EC matters in conversations about student organization matters. It meant that these conversations happened organically.”

Miller, who is now an associate attorney at Haynes and Boone law firm in Dallas, said the preparation, attention to detail and the opportunity to gain experience working on rules and regulations gave him insight into the kind of work he wanted to pursue.

“It was in those moments where I was given a very challenging task, such as analyzing evidence and making a decision under the standard that we apply, that I found I could stay up really late working on it and still feel energized and interested in doing that work,” Miller said.

Ben Bailey ’75, who went on to attend Harvard Law School and has enjoyed a storied legal career that has included serving as counsel to the governor of West Virginia and founding his own law firm, Bailey Glasser, said adjudicating the honor process provided him with early insight into the value of confidentiality and discretion that subsequently served him well in working with clients. Bailey served as a class representative on the EC before serving as EC president his senior year, and he views the Honor System as excellent preparation for students as they enter a working world where thoughtfulness and strong principles should matter.

“The goals of our Honor System — the core principles that enable you to trust one another and to lay out some general rules for making a society work well — are the same goals you would want to have in any profession,” Bailey said, “whether you are a lawyer, doctor or journalist, if you want to create an environment where people behave honorably and follow the kind of guiding principles that put others first.”

During his time as EC president, Bailey also helped then-W&L President Robert E.R. Huntley and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Professor of Journalism Ethics Louis Hodges create a legal ethics course that he returned to as a visiting speaker for several years after graduating from W&L, noting that students in the course seemed to reach the same conclusions about the Honor System that he had during his time on campus.

“My impression then and now is that our Honor System remains unique,” said Bailey, who is co-chairing the 50th Reunion Committee for the Class of 1975 this spring. “In addition to being run entirely by students, it’s flexible — it moves with the times, but it remains a constant.”

Will Bolton ’20 served as EC president during his senior year, a crash course in leadership in trying times. After graduation, Bolton was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army and quickly rose through the ranks as a platoon leader and executive officer. Bolton is now an Army captain stationed at Fort Liberty in North Carolina and said the Honor System instilled in him a faith in others that has positively impacted his life.

“A few years in the Army have shown me that people generally live up or down to your expectations of them,” Bolton said. “If you treat people like they are reliable and trustworthy, they generally will act that way. And I think one of the best parts about W&L and the Honor System is that it teaches you to assume people are trustworthy. I’ve found that I work with others best when I approach things that way.”

Bolton said friends encouraged him to run for a class representative position his sophomore year, which Bolton saw as a way of supporting “the whole reason I came to W&L — the Honor System.” Bolton said it also pushed him out of his comfort zone, which he found helpful.

“It put me in a position to leave W&L a little bit better than I found it, I hope,” Bolton added, “which is always something that I strive to do.”

On a recent swing through Lexington, Bolton had the opportunity to connect with Stripling and see the EC’s new office and meeting space in Elrod Commons. Bolton said the continued strength of W&L’s student self-governance is something he has appreciated even more in his time away from campus and that it is a shared culture of which alumni can be proud.

“Being a W&L graduate means you can always hold your head high in any company,” Bolton said.

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