Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities

The Faculty Council's recommendation Wednesday to revive the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities confirmed earlier indications that officials believe recent pro-divest, rent activities violated a 15-year-old Faculty declaration on freedom of speech and movement in the University. That statement, the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities, was approved by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1970 in the midst of intense student protest activity. It appears in the College's Handbook for Students and is reprinted below.

The student-faculty committee, charged with investigating violations of the resolution, last convened a decade ago to pursue disciplinary action against students involved in a 1975 sit-in at Massachusetts Hall. Since then, the body has alternately been the subject of controversy and neglect. No students have sought positions on the committee in recent years, and Faculty members formally appointed to the committee for this academic year say they are uncertain of the body's purpose. Administrators said yesterday that they will seek undergraduate representatives through House committees but will pursue investigations without them if no students express interest in serving on the body.

Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities

On April 14, 1970, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted the following Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities:

The central functions of an academic community are learning, teaching, research, and scholarship. By accepting membership in the University, an individual joins a community ideally characterized by free expression, free inquiry, intellectual honesty, respect for the dignity of others, and openness to constructive change. The rights and responsibilities exercised within the community must be compatible with these qualities.

The rights of members of the University are not fundamentally different from those of other members of society. The University, however, has a special autonomy and reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital par its existence. All members of the University have the right to press for action on matters of concern by an appropriate means. The University must affirm, assure, and protect the rights of its members to organize and join political associations, convene and conduct public meetings, publicly demonstrate and picket in orderly fashion, advocate, and publicize opinion by print, sign, and voice.

The University places special emphasis, as well, upon certain values which are essential to its nature as an academic community. Among these are freedom of speech and academic freedom, freedom from personal force and violence and freedom or movement. Interference with any of these freedoms must be regarded as a serious violation of the personal rights upon which the community is based. Furthermore, although the administrative processes and activities of the University cannot be ends in themselves, such functions are vital to the orderly pursuit of the work of all members of the University. Therefore, interference with members of the University in performance of their normal duties and activities must be regarded as unacceptable obstruction of the essential processes of the University. Theft or willful destruction of the property of the University or its members must also be considered an unacceptable violation of the rights of individuals or of the community as a whole.

Moreover, it is the responsibility of all members of the academic community to maintain an atmosphere in which violations of rights are unlikely to occur and to develop processes by which these rights are fully assured. In particular, it is the responsibility of officers of administration and instruction to be alert to the needs of the University community; to give full and fair hearing to reasoned expressions of grievances; and to respond promptly and in good faith to such expressions and to widely-expressed needs for change. In making decisions which concern the community as a whole or any part of the community, officers are expected to consult with those affected by the decisions. Failures to meet these responsibilities may be profoundly damaging to the life of the University. Therefore, the University community has the right to establish orderly procedures consistent with imperatives of academic freedom to assess the policies and assure the responsibility of those whose decisions affect the life of the University.

No violation of the rights of members of the University, nor any failure to meet responsibilities, should be interpreted as justifying any violation of the rights of members of the University. All members of the community--students and officers alike--should uphold the rights and responsibilities expressed in this Resolution if the University is to be characterized by mutual respect and trust.

(The Faculty regards it as implicit in the language of the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities that intense personal harassment of such character as to amount to grave disrespect for the dignity of others be regarded as an unacceptable violation of the personal rights on which the University is based.)