A 1969 Relic May Rise Again

One year ago this week, an issue most campus radicals thought was long dead surfaced once again.

In a referendum held last November 17 and 18, Mather House students voted to begin selecting student members for the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR), a student-Faculty disciplinary body that students had boycotted since 1971.

The Faculty established the CRR to punish political protesters in the wake of the 1969 student occupation of University Hall, and students refused to serve on it, objecting to what they saw as its unfair composition and procedures.

Each year the Dean of College sent out letters telling House committees how to select CRR student members, and each year few Houses even considered cooperating.

But last year Mather House took the letter seriously and held a referendum on whether to begin the complicated selection process by drawing the names of 11 Mather sophomores and juniors.

After the Mather action, other House committees debated the CRR boycott, and all decided to uphold it.

The 11-member Mather panel eventually voted not to nominate any of its members to the CRR, and so preserved the boycott.

Late last fall, students from Dunster House organized an ad hoc committee to reform the CRR that by April had drafted a series of detailed proposals.

Student objections to the CRR centered around its composition (weighted in favor of the Faculty), its procedures (which allow hearsay evidence against students and lets the CRR deny students the right to counsel), the vague definition of offenses for which students can be prosecuted, and the lack of a separate appeals board.

Undergraduates approved the proposals in a College-wide referendum. However, only about 1200 of a possible 6400 turned out to vote--perhaps showing that the CRR was no longer a burning issue.

About a half-dozen members of the ad hoc committee are still at Harvard, including Stuart E. Peskoe '76, now a first-year graduate student in Engineering and Applied Physics and still an active advocate of CRR reform.

Peskoe is now negotiating with Phyllis Keller, assistant dean of the Faculty and secretary of the Faculty Council, to put the CRR reform plans on the Council's agenda soon. If all goes well there--and it probably won't--the draft proposals would move on to the full Faculty.

The last time the Faculty considered a student-written plan to change the CRR, from the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life in 1973, it rejected the reforms with little debate. It is possible that the Faculty would do the same this time, but Peskoe and the committee think that student interest may again increase.