Time for Fairness

UNIVERSITY OFFICIALS ANNOUNCED last week that they have completed a tentative plan for replacing the notorious Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR) and will seek student reactions to their proposal in coming weeks. Crucial features of the new plan have yet to be released, but as they are, students should keep in mind the serious problems with the CRR and be sure that the Harvard administration is not just retiring an unpopular name without addressing the issues of fairness and legitimacy that have plagued the Vietnam-era body.

Students have challenged the legitimacy of the CRR from its inception in the fall of 1969 because it was used only against students involved in political protests. Moreover, the committee was only used against protesters sporadically, in attempts to intimidate and disrupt successful protest movements. The University ostensibly created the CRR to afford extra protection for cases involving rights of free speech, assembly and movement. In reality, it provided extra repression.

Obviously, protesters should be disciplined like everyone else when they break rules. But rather than designing special disciplinary procedures--like those of the CRR--for controversial or political cases, the University should adopt a single process which will adequately protect the rights of all students not only to free expression, but also to due process and a fair and open hearing.

The newly proposed Student-Faculty Committee on Discipline, which is to replace the CRR, would function as a standing body for appeals from the Administrative Board. As long as the new committee will hear appeals in all kinds of cases and will not become a second prosecutory body, it will be a welcome change.

To make the new disciplinary body legitimate and fair, standards of evidence, standards of punishment, criteria for calling witnesses and cross-examining them must all be explicitly stated in the new committee's charter. Most important there must be a clear procedure for determining which cases it will hear. Establishing an appeals body that will not artificially distinguish between political and "apolitical" cases is all well and good. It will be to no avail, however, if the faculty majority on the committee can refuse to hear cases. Saying, as the University has suggested, that the committee will make such decisions according to an evolving body of common law is to say nothing at all.

There must be an explicit code describing the kinds of cases that are entitled to be heard on appeal regardless of their apparent merits. At the least, students must have an automatic right to a hearing in cases in which the Administrative Board has required students to leave Harvard for some period of time.

The proposed committee, however, will not solve all the problems with the disciplinary process at Harvard. There are a variety of flaws in the way the Administrative Board operates--among them its closed procedings without witnesses and having members function as both advocate and judge of the accused. The right of appeal to a committee bound to follow fair and open procedures makes the problems with the Ad Board less urgent, but they are real and will have to be addressed.

Equally disturbing is the contrast between disciplinary procedures for students and those followed by the Commission of Inquiry (COI) for investigating grievances by students against administrators, faculty and staff of the University. The COI is an impotent panel that has only stalled and obstructed progress on student complaints in the rare instances it has been used.

University administrators have taken almost two years to come up with a proposal for a new disciplinary body. Throughout the process they have professed a genuine interest in creating a body that will be fair to students. Let's hold them to it.

Dissenting Opinion

THE MAJORITY IS CORRECT in observing that the most important issue about any proposal for a new University judiciary body is what kinds of cases it will consider. But having the body hear charges brought against students for both politically-motivated activities and more mundane behavior hardly satisfies the requirements of fairness. The new committee should have authority to make findings of fact about charges brought against faculty, staff and administrators and at least to recommend appropriate disciplinary actions. Only by making all members of the community subject to scrutiny will all be afforded equal respect.

The CRR and its charter document, the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities (RRR), are fundamentally flawed because they purport to protect the rights of all members of the community but only authorize sanctions against students. Meanwhile, students have no means of redress if their rights are violated by other members of the community who happen to be paid, instead of paying, to be at Harvard.

The procedures for protecting the rights of students at Harvard from being violated by non-students are simply farcical. If students have a problem, they are to go to the administrator who supervises the person against whom they have a complaint. If their complaint is ignored, the impotent and bureaucracy-bound COI will politely ask the administrator to investigate his own department. It is no surprise that nothing came of charges of brutality and improper conduct levelled against the University police after their confrontation with anti-apartheid protesters at Lowell House in the spring of 1985.

A modicum of symmetry in protecting the rights of all members of the community need not violate the newly proposed disciplinary committee's status as an appeal body nor give students innappropriate authority over University employees. Let grievances against non-students be pursued first through existing channels--just as complaints against students will go first to the Administrative Board--but give complainants, whoever they are, the recourse of appealing to a committee bound to follow fair procedures.

Empowering a student-faculty committee to make findings of fact and recommendations about charges against non-students would neither violate contract rights of employees, usurp the authority of administrators nor involve the committee in judgments that are substantively different from those they would make in cases where the accused happen to be students. It would, however, indicate that students at Harvard also have rights as well as responsibilities and would finally assure them of a fair hearing for their grievances.