Houses Vote To Continue CRR Boycott

Winthrop, Leverett, and North Houses and the Student Assembly voted over-whelmingly last night to boycott the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR) at least until Faculty approval of reforms proposed by former student members of CRR.

The House committees and the Student Assembly may reconsider the boycott issue if the Faculty accepts the reforms, chairmen of the groups said.

Adams House and South House last week also voted to support the boycott. Other House committees have scheduled consideration of the CRR issue for upcoming meetings.

The Faculty formed the CRR in 1969 to consider cases of students who were charged with disrupting the University during the student strikes in April, 1969.

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Several of the House committees have delayed consideration of the CRR boycott because their members lack information on the issues involved. The Currier, Kirkland, Lowell, and Quincy House committees will hear pro-reform and anti-reform speeches at their next meetings.

A motion to boycott the CRR unconditionally on the grounds that disciplining students for political reasons is wrong failed in the Student Assembly by a large margin.

The effort to reform the CRR began two years ago when the Class of '80 voted to send representatives to the CRR with the explicit intent of reforming the committee.

After much negotiating with Faculty members of the CRR, last year student reformers persuaded the committee to vote unanimously with one abstention to endorse a series of reform proposals that would equalize the number of students and Faculty members serving on the committee, create a special appeals board, bar hearsay evidence, allow the release of transcripts of the hearings if both parties agree, and prohibit the presence of legal counsel at the hearings.

Last spring the Faculty Council told student members of the CRR it would not endorse a proposal to bar hearsay evidence from the hearings.

Students seeking reform of the CRR may still bring the contested reforms before the full Faculty although Faculty Council members will explain to the Faculty their reasons for opposing the reforms.

Phyllis Keller, associate dean of the Faculty, said last week, "To the best of my knowledge we [the Faculty Council] are waiting for a reply from CRR on whether they wish to devise exact wording on a number of reforms that were mutually agreed upon and whether they wish to send these reforms before the full Faculty."

The CRR has not convened yet this year because Francis M. Pipkin, associate dean of the Faculty, who is supposed to organize the committee's first meeting, has been ill, Nicolaas Bloembergen, last year's CRR chairman and Rumford Professor of Physics, said yesterday