The CRR: What It Is, How It Works

At the height of student Vietnam War protests, Harvard in 1969 created the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR) to discipline students violating the faculty's resolution upholding individual freedoms and obligations, like freedom of speech and movement.

The CRR is completely distinct from the Administrative Board, the College's traditional disciplinary body, made up of senior tutors and deans. The CRR sets its own procedures and has its own sets of punishments--all of which it can levy independently, except for those of dismissal and expulsion, both of which require a vote of the full Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The CRR also allows students to serve as voting members, and permits defendants to represent themselves before the committee. However, house committees have refused to send students to sit on the CRR almost continuously since 1969, claiming that the committee could punish students for their political beliefs without appeal to a higher body.

Though the College invited students to serve on the CRR when it was reconstituted this past spring, students again refused, citing time constraints during what was then exam period.

The CRR is intended to be composed of six faculty members, six randomly chosen student delegates and one faculty chairman who votes only in the case of a tie. But because students have refused to serve on the CRR, it is empowered to proceed without them.

Last May, the Faculty Council revived the CRR--which had not heard a case since 1975--to decide discipline for 18 students involved in two spring anti-apartheid protests that highlighted the recent escalation of activist on campus.