CRR Having Trouble Attracting Students

Three new committees organized last Spring during the continuing saga of Faculty reorganization have run into difficulty finding students interested in serving on them. One is the controversial Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR), the Faculty's disciplinary arm.

The CRR was created by the Faculty last May to administer the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities passed at that same meeting. It replaced the Interim Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (charged with enforcing the Interim Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities) which had replaced the Committee of Fifteen the previous winter.

The CRR was supposed to include six students, seven Faculty members and an Allston Burr Senior Tutor. But Quincy House voted not to send a representative, and Dudley and the GSAS sent representatives with instructions to disrupt the proceedings. At Radcliffe, one girl ran and won by default though at the end of last year there was a petition circulating for her recall.

So the Faculty passed legislation allowing the Faculty Council and all the student members of all the other committees to appoint students to fill empty or unused seats. The Faculty Council decided to let the students decide.

But the students-meeting informally last month-weren't sure they wanted to decide. They decided to let each individual committee-the student subcommittees of the Committees on Houses and Undergraduate Life, Students and Community Relations, and Education-decide whether they wanted to decide. And according to representatives, each student subcommittee seems to have decided informally at least that it doesn't want to have anything to do with appointing people for the CRR.

The CRR's duties are fairly outlined in the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities. But several Senior Tutors have expressed concern that the CRRmay be taking over duties traditionally in the province of their own disciplinary body, the Administrative Board. CRR member Phillip M. Weinstein, assistant professor of English, said last night the CRR will meet with the Senior Tutors soon to talk things over.

On June 10, the Faculty Council passed a resolution suggesting the CRR solve the problem of students elected specifically to disrupt it by requiring some sort of "showing of good faith" for candidates for the committee. Weinstein said the CRR considered instituting a loyalty oath but decided that "while disruptions are unpleasant, an oath could be worse."

Part of the confusion surrounding the CRR is caused by the fact that only one member of the interim CRR last term chose to run again. That one was D. G. M. Anderson, McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics, current chairman of the committee. Anderson has been meeting with students and Faculty members in an attempt to straighten things out.

There are two other committee. The Commission on Inquiry and the Committee on Temporary Suspensions were both created at that same Faculty meeting May 12. The first is supposed to have two students and three Faculty members, the second three of each. The Faculty members are supposed to come from the Faculty Council, the students to be selected "by and from" all the students on all the other committees.

The Commission on Inquiry is supposed to "serve as a clearing house for inquiries, suggestions, or complaints brought to it by members of the Faculty or of the student bodies of Harvard College, the GSAS, and Radcliffe College on matters of fact and policy within the purview of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences." The CSCR students are the only ones who have expressed interest in this committee.

"We might be interested in this one if it had any real power," David M. Parsons '71 of the CHUL said last night. "But I don't think anyone wants to serve on any clearing house."

Six Replaced

The Committee on Temporary Suspensions is supposed to replace last term's Subcommittee of Six, to exercise jointly with the Dean of the Faculty the power of temporarily suspending students "found to be engaging in activities unacceptable under the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities" pending permanent disciplinary acton.

None of the students has expressed any interest in serving on this committee. "This is an absolutely inane committee," one member of the CSCR said last night. "It's just some more stuff to read over the bullhorn during building takeovers."