DISCIPLINE AT HARVARD

When three Harvard undergraduates got drunk and went carousing in 1676, then Treasurer of Harvard College Thomas Danforth didn't have to worry about how they should be disciplined. He just put on his other hat as justice of the peace and arrested them.

Since that time, disciplinary procedures have gotten a little more complicated and more controversial.

The majority of discipline cases are currently heard in secret by the Administrative Board, a 25-member committee made up of faculty and administrators.

The Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR), which theoretically has both student and faculty members, rules on those few cases that are judged to be infractions of the 1969 Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR), which calls on the University to protect freedom of speech and movement on campus.

In recent years, students have criticized the Ad Board for its secret meetings and the CRR for appearing to single out political protestors.

The Administrative Board yesterday announced that students will be able to plead their cases before the board and to bring an adviser with them in addition to their Senior Tutor.

In addition, a plan to scrap the CRR entirely and create a new student-faculty body is currently being considered by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' steering committee. A final version of this plan should be released within a few weeks.

The CRR is itself a recent innovation, created in the aftermath of the 1969 takeover of University Hall, but students have been demanding more openness from the Ad Board since its inception in 1891.

In the 1890s, having the entire faculty vote on disciplinary cases was not a particularly successful system. Half of all faculty meetings were spent on disciplinary cases and the growing size of the faculty had threatened to jeopardize the personal nature of the process, according to published histories.

Therefore, the faculty voted to delegate its power to oversee student discipline to a small committee of teaching faculty. The Ad Board's small membership, fewer than a dozen people, was designed to allow the body develop a consistent policy for dealing with academic and behavioral infractions and with petitions for exceptions from regular Harvard rules.

The entire faculty must still vote on expulsion and dismissal charges, and it retains the right to overrule the Ad Board.

During the early years of the Ad Board, students who were caught breaking rules were summoned to University Hall, where one of a bevy of assistant deans would hear their side of the story and then present the case to the entire body. Students frequently complained that they had not previously met the deans who dealt with them.

From the very beginning, the Ad Board process was supposed to be educational rather than adversarial. The person presenting the case to the Board was expected to take a step back and look at the whole case rather than act like a defense attorney at a trial.

The 1952 creation of senior tutors substantially altered the way the disciplinary process worked. The senior tutors sat on the Ad Board, nearly doubling its size, and were supposed to further personalize the discipline process by acting as advocates for students within their house.

Since the senior tutors lived within the houses in theory, they already knew the students whose cases they presented and therefore could provide a more personal angle on the case. In addition, the senior tutors were expected to spend several days dicussing each case with the student before going before the Ad Board in order to further the educational nature of the process.

Students were provided additional personal input into the process when the Ad Board added and appeals function in the early 1970s. If the Ad Board agreed to hear an appeal, students were permitted to appear before the Board to present their own case.

The Ad Board also tried to respond to student complaints about secrecy by issuing a report on its philosophy and methods in 1981.

In recent years students have questioned whether the senior tutors--or in the case of freshman the freshman advisers--can provide true personal advocacy.

"[Our senior adviser didn't know any of us. She thought we were irresponsible," says Glendon Abel III '89, one of the eight freshman involved in last May's computer case. The Ad Board at first required the students to withdraw for having programmed the University computer to print out, "This computer test sucks" during the Quantitative Reasoning exam. The students appealed in person, which they said proabably played a key role in helping them reduce their sentences to probation.

Two Leverett House sophomores voiced similar complaints last February after they were required to withdraw for series of pranks which culminated in a small fire. They said their senior tutor had not represented them and their case fairly to the Ad Board.

Despite student complaints, the Ad Board has only been overruled by the whole faculty once, in the winter of 1968. The Ad Board, by a narrow vote of 8-7, had required five students to withdraw for staging a sit-in at a faculty meeting where ROTC was being discussed. The faculty voted to suspend the sentence. One administrator explained at the time, "The action proposed by the Board was more severe than the faculty wanted."

That overruling helped set the stage for the creation of a new disciplinary body in the wake of the April 1969 occupation of University Hall.

Immediately after the incident, the faculty voted to take the protesters' cases out of the hands of the Ad Board and created an ad hoc student-faculty committee to hear those cases and formulate a plan for a new, permanent committee to hear similar cases.

The committee, made up of 10 faculty members and five student, heard 132 cases resulting from the sit-in. Thirteen students were required to leave Harvard for varying lengths of time, 20 were required to withdraw but their sentences were suspended and the remaining 99 were placed "on warning."

The committee also issued a report on Harvard's discipline system which resulted in the creation of the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities.

Although Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the radical group which led the occupation, attacked the ad hoc committee as illegitimate, it won praises from many in the Harvard community for imposing mild punishments on all but a few of the University Hall protesters.

The CRR, on the other hand, has been boycotted by students virtually since its inception because it appears to single out political protestors and has no appeals procedure. The body was supposed to have seven faculty and six student members, but no student has sat on a CRR which has heard a case.

One student representative checked himself into University Health Services after serving one term on the CRR, citing psychiatric trauma due to ostracization from his peers.

Between 1970 and 1975, the CRR ruled on 369 cases stemming from 13 incidents--including a 1972 six day sit-in at Massachusetts Hall by 32 students--resulting in 63 students being required to withdraw.

The last student representative to sit on the Board was sent by the freshman council in 1978 with a formal list of student demands including one for open hearings and another for an appeals process. The delegate was withdraw when the faculty turned down the demands.

The CRR faded out of sight during the next 10 years, and then Dean of the College John B. Fox Jr. `59 stopped asking the house committees to send CRR delegates in 1980.

However in the spring of 1985, the body was revived amid widespread student protest over Harvard's refusal to divest of its South Africa linked investment. It heard the cases of 25 students who were involved in two separate divestment protests at 17 Quincy Street and Lowell House. All 13 house committees voted not to send delegates to the CRR.

The deliberations, which carried over the summer, resulted in 10 students put on probation. Eleven were admonished and the charges were dropped in four cases.

Since that time, the CRR has not heard a case, and the house committees have continued to boycott it. Divestment protests last spring, including the construction of shanties in the middle of the Yard, did not result in any disciplinary cases.

A November blockade at the Fogg Museum resulted in the arrest of two undergraduates, but when the Ad Board reviewed their cases, it decided not to impose any punishments. The CRR never took action on the cases.