There Can Be No Punishment

IT WOULD be more pleasant if everyone at Harvard accepted the same basic system of social and political values. Then the whole community could discipline the few who transgress against the general will.

This is not the case at Havard today. The sociopolitical goals which divide the community are in many senses as great as those which bring it together. No appeal by Faculty members or Young Americans for Freedom can paper over the division on the basic goals of the community. Many feel, quite rightly, that the daily study can only come while the University is making strides toward achieving justice in its relations with those students and workers within the community and those without. If the University does not meet the just demands of these groups, then Administration activity will be interrupted by those seeking change.

According to the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, all power is given to the Corporation and all intra-university power is dirived from it. This small group of men administer a large financial trust-a billion dollar holding company. The members of the corporation naturally seek to defend this trust against those who challenge its policies.

The Corporation and its Administration have chosen to interpret the interruption of the normal administrative routine as an attack on scholarship and academic freedoin. Students and Faculty members should recognize the serious nature of this red herring. No classes or research were affected by demonstrations this Fall. The scattered instances of class disruption last Spring, during a voted university-wide strike, were not sanctioned by any group. Academic freedom has not been at stake during the demonstrations of 1969. Ernest R. May was not obstructed on November 19 because of his well-known views on American diplomatic history. He was obstructed, perhaps unwisely, because he had identified himself with the University's racist employment policies by speaking at a news conference on November 11 with the University Personnel Director to "explain" the painters' helper issue. No classes are taught in University Hall, the Faculty Club, or the Gund Hall construction site.

The Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, like the Committee of Fifteen last Spring, has accepted the rationale of the Corporation and its Administration for punishing those students who have disrupted this historic University. As the Committee's news release said, such obstructive demonstrations "can substantially impede the work of members of the University and contribute to a general atmosphere of intimidation."

In this divided community, the Committee has accepted the rules, and definitions set up by one side: it punished those who violate those rules. Ordinary discipline is political punishment when it is carried on by one party, based on its set of political values, against another party in a polarized community.

THE COMMITTEE on Rights and Responsibilities and the majority of the Faculty which have accepted the Administration's argument that obstructive demonstrations are an attack on academic freedom are acting unwittingly in the interests of the Corporation and its Administration. The Committee punishing those who were protesting the Corporation's racist practices and immoral employment practices is perpetuating those practices.

In order for the Faculty or the Committee to assume a neutral position, the Administration would have to be subject to discipline. Neither the Code nor the Committee is designed to prosecute the Corporation and the Administration. The Faculty would have to establish legal power over the Corporation in order to punish it. This would require a change in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts a very unlikely event.

The people who were punished before vacation and those who are scheduled to be punished in the next few weeks have been organizing against racist employment practices, against a Defense Department-funded computer project which will serve to carry on future wars like Vietnam, and ultimately against the Corporation and its billion dollar trust invested in numerous racist companies around the world. The students who put their futures on the line were right in their actions.

Those who believed in changing the Corporation's policies on ROTC. expansion, and Black Studies, and believe now that racist employment practices should be changed, must not be deceived by a disciplinary committee acting in the interests of the Corporation. Students should join together in opposing these political punishments.

THE STUDENTS who accept the Corporation as benign should take a close look at the extremely political nature of the punishments and the apparatus which made them. Any concern for academic freedom and legal procedures of the Administration has been sacrificed to insure that those who have attacked the Corporation most strongly will be kept from other students. The Committee on Rights and Responsibilities transgresses its own professed beliefs in order to make its very political punishments.

Though all-white juries have been found unconstitutional in the civil courts, the all-white Committee on Rights and Responsibilities feels qualified to discipline black students acting against racism. This white racism can't be climinated by token appointments. As long as this community cannot agree on the meaning of racism, there is no hope of establishing a disciplinary body which can discipline across racial boundaries.

The University feels that it has found a solution for some of the more than 75 students who participated in the November 19th demonstration in University Hall. Virtually all the students in the demonstration participated by linking arms, obstructing Dean May, chanting, and keeping him from carrying on official business (a telephone call). But May charged only 25 of the students with these crimes. And in May's opinion, in fact, some of the charged students were guilty of more than chanting and linking arms, some of lesser offenses. A few including the chairmen of SDS and the leaders of the painters' helper campaign, were charged with all counts-from "entering the Office of the Dean of Harvard College without invitation" to "intervening with...the freedom of movement of the Dean of Harvard College by bodily resisting his efforts to depart from his office." Others were charged with lesser counts; many were not charged. It is significant that those students with the most serious charges were the leaders of SDS and a few freshmen who had been very active in radical politics.

Dean May has said that the other 50 students couldn't be identified. There is evidence to indicate that this isn't the case. Barbara Slavin, who testified at her trial before the Committee, reported that every person in the University's photographic evidence had a letter or number next to his or her head. Some of those clearly visible toward the front of the pictures were not charged, though Miss Slavin thought they were known to the Administration. For the most part these people were new to radical polities. Why wouldn't the Dean not want to charge all those he possibly could? The University realizes that if it charged too many, the students community would object. Instead the radicals are kicked out in small groups, and others are given stiff warnings so that they will be suspended after the next demonstration.

This is not to say that those students who weren't charged will not be punished for the demonstration in the future. The Committee on Rights and Responsibilities said in its report on those disciplined in the November 19 demonstration that the harassment of Dean May was more serious in several of the cases because they had harassed May in earlier demonstrations when no charges had been brought. This is in violation, of laws of jurisprudence, as well as the Code of Rights and Responsibilities, which state that a suspect can only be charged and found guilty for crimes with which he has been charged.

THE TRIALS themselves are as "intimidating" as anything Dean May felt in the nasty November 19 demonstration. They are closed meetings, where only witnesses and one person for counsel are permitted. Three policemen escort each of the defendants through four sets of locked doors on the way to the trial. Each set of doors is carefully unlocked in front and then locked behind the defendant before the next set is opened. No press is allowed, even if the defendant asks for his testimony to be made public. Virtually all those charged in the political demonstrations of the past year have asked that the trials be open. The Bill of Rights guarantees "a speedy and public trial, before an impartial jury" in all civil trials, but apparently the Harvard Faculty which approved the Code on Rights and Responsibilities and the by-laws of the present committee did not feel that such safeguards were needed at Harvard.

Even if the proceedings were made public, they would continue to violate the impartial jury clause of the Bill of Rights. The Committee consists of three students, three Faculty members, and three representatives of the Administration. The last three are payed by the Corporation to handle the business affairs of the University.

The Faculty members of the Committee were elected to the Committee of Fifteen last Spring. One of these men-all are men-told Miss Slavin who was attempting to present her defense by applying the Code to the Corporation's responsibilities, "I wrote that section of the Code; I know what it means. Your interpretation is not what I meant." It is an interesting separation of powers between legislator and judge which governs Harvard discipline. Another of the Faculty representatives told one CRIMSON reporter recently he would always accept the story of a dean about an incident when choosing between the dean's testimony and an SDS member's testimony. "The SDS member would bend the truth to serve his political ends," he said. This jury is far from impartial.

As for the student members, it must be remembered that the Code of Rights and Responsibilities and the Committee were established after a onehour discussion in the Faculty meeting when few students were on campus last June. There was no consultation with the student body-no attempt to move through all the "democratic channels" in the community. The three student representatives were chosen by those students who were selected from the lottery of those elected from the Houses last April. These hastily conducted elections barred students involved in the University Hall turmoil and permitted no statement of qualifications or political views. They were, as the CRIMSON pointed out at the time, elections in name only. The students were denied any grounds for choice. The three students on the Committee now represent what can only be considered the ultimate in indirect non-election. Unfortunately, it would make little difference if the students were elected by a direct election next week, for a majority, three administrators and two Faculty members, is enough to convict and sentence on the Committee.

Appeals can only be made to the Committee itself. These appeals can, and have, been summarily dismissed. The joint appeal of the November 19 demonstrators was dismissed the day it was made because of "insufficient grounds" for appeal. The appeals system reinforces the Commtitce's procedural injustices. Without any system of review, the Committee's closed and "secret" deliberations are relatively insulated from criticism.

THE PUNISHMENTS are as objectionable as the supposedly democratic procedures behind the Committee. Students who are suspended must prove that they have left the "Harvard community" for the entire period before they are readmitted. The "community" has been liberally defined; one Harvard student suspended last Spring for a semester has not been readmitted because he has remained in the Harvard "community." He is living in Boston and organizing for SDS at Northeastern.

Those who deny political repression at Harvard should ask themselves why students engaged in local radical activity should be denied readmission when their formal term of suspension ends. Why are these students never to be permitted to speak on campus without "formally" being readmitted? Is it not curious that virtually all of the SDS leadership both from last Spring and this Fall have been suspended or dismissed? and that the leaders of the November Action Coalition at Harvard and OBU were charged a week before Christmas?

BY CREATING the illusion that the Committee of Fifteen was acting as an impartial jury, rather than a committee to punish those who had demonstrated against the Harvard Administration last Spring, the Faculty and its Committee were acting as agents of the Corporation. The Faculty and the Committee had accepted the Corporation's analysis of the actions-that students and Faculty had violated the rules of the community in the demonstrations. There was no procedure for charging, much less disciplining, these who called the police last Spring; and, there is no procedure for disciplining the Corporation for continuing its racist employment practices. The Committee on Rights and Responsibilities is perpetuating these injustices. Its racist, unconstitutional, and very partial character is not a coincidence but an unwitting reflection of the interests of the Administration.

Only when the Corporation can be suspended and criminally prosecuted for its racist policies, when it appears on campus, will it be possible to construct a legitimate disciplinary body for this community.