CRR Reform

"WE'RE GOING to play a little hardball with the administration on the Widener issue and even send a letter to Dean Spence," Richard S. Eisert '88 said last week before beating out an empty field of challengers to retain the Undergraduate Council's top position. Eisert was referring to council initiatives to open the Widener stacks on Sunday while menacing the top man in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dean A. Michael Spence, with direct correspondence.

We're suitably impressed with Eisert's new get-tough stance. We wish council members could have heard more about it during the pre-election address Eisert largely devoted to recounting what he called the council's most significant accomplishments of his first term, including hosting milk and cookie breaks during reading and exam periods and extending house dining hours by 15 minutes.

The chairman prefers the stance of the battle-weary pol when reporters corner him to talk about the pending plan to revamp the College's disciplinary system. Although the plan bears little resemblance to the one the council outlined last year, Eisert painstakingly explains that it is the best students can hope for right now. Students, Eisert continues, must put aside futile confrontation and do what they can to make the College a little better when they leave it than when they entered.

Eisert is more or less right, of course. But he has the facts of the disciplinary review all wrong. The proposed disciplinary reform would create a body of students and faculty who would hear unusual disciplinary cases, presumably including some of those stemming from political protests.

While decisions would accrue to become a sort of common law, students would have no idea whatsoever of the community's rules. But the body would be free to hand down unjust decisions and later cite them in support of other unjust decisions.

Why chance it? What students need is a clearly stated code of laws which they could debate, endorse and use as a basis for their defense if they were facing disciplinary procedures. Eisert has said the Faculty is not ready to accept such a revamping of the process and that pressing for one would only jeopardize the partial "reform" the council provisionally voted to support last Sunday.

Yet the Faculty and administration value student input--or at least the appearance of student input--a great deal. Student dissatisfaction with the CRR led to the current review despite the wide confidence the body enjoys among faculty and administrators. Without student support for a new disciplinary body, it would become--like the CRR--a focus for student protest and a headache for the administration.

Undergraduates, who fund the council with $10 term bill fees, should not have to watch their student government squander an opportunity to influence the way Harvard enforces the standards it sets for students. The council voted Sunday night to approve the plan if the Faculty accepts eight amendments the council proposed. The council should revoke this provisional approval and demand real reform. The council should call for--and help draft--a law code that attempts to reconcile the competing interests of the Harvard community. Then the council should respectfully but firmly advance the code to administrators.

Tough talk about significant but lesser issues is certainly fun for the council and good for diverting the attention of the rest of the community. But it won't get students the fair disciplinary system they deserve.