KNOXVILLE — The UT Knoxville community is 86 percent honest.
That’s the score the campus received in the Honest Campus experiment staged by Honest Tea, the nation’s top-selling organic bottled tea company.
The company set up an unmanned, pop-up tea store for three hours on Wednesday on the east end of the Johnson-Ward Pedestrian Mall, near Hodges Library. The Honest Campus store featured a selection of bottled tea for students, faculty and staff to purchase on the honor system. Each bottle cost $1. It was up to each person to decide if they would pay for their drinks. Hidden cameras recorded the results which were later tabulated.
The proceeds from Honest Campus store were donated to UT’s Campus Chest and Adopt-A-Spot, an initiative for student organizations to adopt areas of campus and keep them clean.
Honest Tea, which is 40 percent owned by the Coca-Cola Co., takes its honesty experiment to cities and campuses around the country.