Rights and Responsibilities A Delicate Balance

THE Committee off Rights and Responsibilities is turning a lot of trees into newsprint these days. Some of it is serious, some not so. "We're right and you're responsible." chants the Radical Arts Troupe as it mimics the committee in its dispensation of justice at Harvard College. Yet they are actually pretty heavy concepts, rights and responsibilities. Just the sound of the words is heavy. Maybe it's the juxtaposition of the monosyllabic against the poly, It's hard to say what gives sounds their meaning.

In any case there is one little known fact about the committee-how it got its name-that is within one paragraph of becoming better known. It is not particularly crucial to the political or other serious discussion whirling around behind the three locked doors of perception of the committee's hearings. Yet in some small way it might help. Certainly for the historian it is important to note that there is a reason for the name of the committee. It could have just as easily been the Committee for Justice. or the Committee on Freedom and Obligation. But it came to us as the CRR.

Somewhere imbedded in the bladder of the Administration someone is reading Albee plays. The line "rights and responsibilities" was taken from A Dclicate Balance. The play concerns a family group headed by a man named. Tobias and his wife Agnes. Into their home come their best friends, Edna and Harry. They occupy a room and give as their reason that they were sitting at home one day and were caught by a terror. They never really explain what that terror is. They issue no demands but refuse to leave. Tobias, pressured by his 35-year-old daughter, must decide whether Edna and Harry must leave.

He who thought up the name of the CRR so deserves the plaudits of the literary world. A Delicate Balance comes very close to being a representation of all that the Committee is. Tobias, like the Committee, must try to strike a balance between fantasy and reality, humor and tragedy, order and chaos. Above all he is trying to hold together a social system, that of his family, which has become clearly outmoded. Like the bricklayers who work on Sever Hall early in the morning, he is trying to shore up a disintegrating structure.

By the end of the play the social system is back in some kind of order. Tobias never really made a clear decision, but for some reason Edna and Harry left anyway. A crisis has been avoided, though not through an active decision. "Well, they've safely gone," says Agnes at the end of the play, "and we'll forget... quite soon."