Freshmen, Adams Suspend CRR Vote

A packed meeting of the Adams House Committee last night unanimously voted to set aside its original vote to break a ten-year student boycott of the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR) and, instead, to hold a House referendum on whether to send representatives to the disciplining body.

The House Committee will also attempt to launch a University-wide student investigation of the CRR, the review board created in 1969 to discipline students involved in political demonstrations, and work with students in other Houses to establish a united undergraduate stand on CRR.

In a protracted debate, Adams House residents disputed the original decision by the House Committee to end the boycott, with several students arguing that the issue was too politically significant to leave to a committee and warranted a House debate.

It's not a House Committee issue, it's a political issue," Lisa Davis '81, an Adams House resident, told the committee, adding that the students who might get called before CRR will not be House Committee members, but students involved in gay, Black and feminist politics.

But Frank Streeter '83, one of the students elected to represent the House on CRR, said that "anyone who wanted to" could have attended the original House Committee meeting that decided to break the boycott.

Val W. Slayton '81, a House Committee member, answered that no matter how many students had attended the first meeting, only the 20 committee members could vote.

Noting that committee members who favored ending the boycott had referred to the students opposing CRR at the meeting as "malcontents" and had called their politics "emotional," John L. Johnson '82 called the committee "very unrepresentative and unsympathetic to where I am coming from."

Benjamin H. Schatz, another Adams House resident and president of the Gay Students Association added that the students who would end up sitting on CRR would probably not understand his point of view.

Streeter suggested to Schatz that he run for CRR, but Schatz said that he would consider that "a conflict of interest," since his activities could bring him before the CRR.

Other students arguing against breaking the boycott asked students to recall CRR's history. "We should remember the Vietnam protests of ten years ago," Barbara M. Watson '81, a House resident, said, adding, "By breaking the boycott we are saying we don't believe in what you worked for. They can set up another committee [to fulfill CRR's function] if they think they need to, but there is no reason now for us to say, yes, we have forgotten."

Mark A. Sauter '82, the other student elected to represent the House on CRR, told the House Committee that boycotting CRR would not abolish it. He added that students who disapproved of CRR's methods should sit on it so they could reform it from within. Pointing out that he had found time to serve on CRR despite his political activities on the Conservative Club, he advised the gay students who objected to the CRR to do the same.

One of the committee members asked if anyone could explain what students found objectionable in the CRR charter. No one responded.

Johnson said he thought it was "interesting that the people who voted to break the boycott are the same people who can't explain what CRR is."

But one student, who asked later not to be identified, described the experience of a friend called before the CRR ten years ago for participating in anti-war protests.

Characterizing the board as a "kind of trial by judges," she recounted how the CRR administrators had charged her friend with excessive involvement in extracurricular political activities, to the detriment of his academics, "even though he had straight A's."

Because few students seemed familiar with the structure and procedures of CRR, which has not met to review a case since 1975, the House committee agreed to post information about CRR around the House