Across the Committee Table

To James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government and a member of the Committee of Fifteen, this disciplinary body had a simple, methodical task to carry out in 1969--so straightforward a duty that he wonders why students to this day agonize over whether to continue their boycott of the University's disciplinary body. The CRR's mission: to decide which students should receive which category of penalties.

The committee members did not consider it their duty to consider whether they had any right to judge political expression. "The decisions we reached were based on uncontroverted evidence," Wilson says. "The only interesting question," then, Wilson adds, came in selecting the punishment that fit the crime.

In the cases of students who were dismissed, the CRR had lined up witnesses as well as photographic evidence. These witnesses were usually the same deans whom the students had allegedly harassed, former faculty members of CRR concede.

"Of course, some raised questions, you know, because some of the witnesses were those same people who had been manhandled," Benjamin I. Schwartz, Williams Professor of History and Political Science and a member of the Committee of Fifteen, says, adding, "And I can't say that it was absolutely infallible." But neither does he think it was an irreconcilable conflict of interest.

For the most part, Schwartz contends, the committee conducted its proceedings in "a very legal way." To those students who argue that these "legal" methods were less than judicially fair at times and the committee's penalties excessively harsh, Schwartz observes that "the committee at the same time was being attacked for being so soft in certain quarters." Many administrators and faculty during this first tense year "felt the whole University was being threatened with destruction," Schwartz says.

Faculty CRR members reject student charges that the committee targeted the political leadership of SDS, rather than uniformly assigning penalties to undergraduates on the basis of the actual rules they broke. "No, there is no truth to this," Wilson says. "They said this at the time; they said the CRR was targeting certain people. They said that to me as they threatened me [as he walked into the CRR hearings]. But to this day, I don't know who the officers of SDS were."

If some students received "warnings" while others who participated in the same rallies earned "suspensions" and "separations" from the University, Wilson says he can only conclude that some students got off easier simply because the committee did not succeed in matching their names and faces in the pictures. "It was just a case of not being able to identify people," Wilson contends.

Roger Rosenblatt, assistant professor of English and a member of the Committee of Fifteen, was hesitant about discussing his past association with that disciplinary body: "Ah, yes, I guess. What does CRR stand for again?" At the time, Rosenblatt says he remembers thinking that the University should not have to resort to such a quasi-legal, formalized process.

"At first, I felt like most of the Faculty did at the time--that you didn't need a resolution of rights and responsibilities." Rosenblatt says that back then he envisioned a "Quaker-meeting style" solution to the disciplinary problem, but adds, "Now, I don't think that is so anymore." Rosenblatt believes now that students would benefit from having a mechanism already set up to deal with political demonstrations, rather than waiting for the Faculty to devise one in the heat of the moment as it did in 1969. Perhaps now is a good, "more serene time" to sit down and examine that mechanism, Rosenblatt suggests.

The mechanism certainly should include students, Rosenblatt says. Other Faculty members are less sure. Schwartz agrees that "from the students' political point of view, it is better for them to know what is going on." But he is careful to add, "I am not that radical that I believe students should be represented in equal numbers."

Judging from his experience on the CRR, Wilson concludes that student members can contribute in "constructive" ways, but he also remembers that the students who served in 1969 and the early '70s were under sometimes unbearable pressures from other students.

"If I were to give my personal advice, it would be, don't join the CRR. Their [the students'] lives were made miserable. When it was done for me, I went home; they had to face the students in the dorm." Wilson recalls that one student on the Committee of Fifteen placed himself in the care of University Health Services for psychological trauma, which Wilson says was caused by ostracism from fellow students. Rosenblatt concurs: "They were seen as a kind of ghetto police."

In looking back at the CRR's practices, the Faculty members find little that they would alter. The committee "acted in good faith," Wilson still holds. As to the harshness of some sentences, Wilson points out, the students themselves engaged in "a good deal of pushing and shoving and violence" at the demonstrations. As for the violence students suffered at the hands of police, Schwartz agrees that the brutality did unsettle him and some of his colleagues. "But of course we weren't asked to adjudicate that," he adds.