Inside the CRR

(The author is a fourth-year graduate student in English. Last Spring he defended twenty people before the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities and attended many other hearings as an observer. He is presently writing his doctoral thesis on the theme of justice and its absurd procedures in Shakespeare, Brecht, Camus and Kafka.)

(This is the first of a two-part feature on the CRR. Part two will appear tomorrow.)

JAMES Q. WILSON, chairman of the CRR, was looking me in the eye. He had never done this before in the two months and countless hours we had been sitting opposite each other. This was the last hearing, positively the last hearing, of the year. Tomorrow was Commencement. Wilson had checked off all the boxes in his mimeographed schedule of cases. I was not pleading this case, I was one of three observers the accused girl was allowed to bring in addition to one advisor. The facts of her case were exactly like 18 others which had already been decided, which is perhaps why Wilson found the time to look at me.

This was not really a hearing, it was a processing. The prosecution's only evidence, a photograph, showed the girl standing on the steps of University Hall with approximately 100 others while Samuel Williamson, Assistant to Dean May, had tried to get into his office. The girl's boyfriend, who was also her advisor, was arguing the case. He was standing next to her in the photograph the prosecution had presented but no one mentioned this. She was on trial, not him. She had been identified in the photo by her dean, he had not. These unusual circumstances were no problem for the CRR; after all this time the Committee was jaded and bored.

At that moment, while the defense advisor went through the arguments which the CRR and I had heard a countless number of times before, I was concerned with Wilson's eyes.

They seemed to say one of two very different things. Either they were saying to the girl, "Yes, yes, I know. I know what compelled you to do this. I know how serious you are, I know what moral stress you were under." Or they were saying to me, "Krcisberg, you've been here before, you know what the story is, we've heard all this before. Let's get the hell out of here and get this case over with."

Whichever it was, it did not make a difference, nor was it going to. The procedures had already been decided. The girl would receive a suspended requirement to withdraw (SRTW in CRR talk) and the case would be closed. The CRR, by last June, had already worked out all the minor kinks which developed in the long course of Harvard's attempts to discipline and suppress political activists.

In the begining there had been no Committees. The first political cases in recent history-the Dow-Napalm recruiter and the sit-in at the Paine Hall faculty meeting to discuss ROTC in the fall of 1968-were decided by the Ad Board, a body previously concerned with shoplifting and panty-raids. When the Ad Board, in 1968, voted 8 to 7 to require 5 students who had been in Paine Hall to leave Harvard, the faculty overturned this ruling. The Paine Hall 5, the faculty decided, would receive a "suspended" requirement to withdraw. They could stay in school as long as they behaved.

Most people were happy. "Faculty Saves Everyone-Overruling Ad Board" was the banner CRIMSON headline. "The faculty's action was just," reasoned most people. It was justice tempered with mercy and reason. It was a moral decision. The students' actions had been weighed in light of the issues, in light of Vietnam.

But such weighing in political cases could prove explosive to the faculty. It had already split 192-99 in this case, and the debates, both on and off the record, had been hotter than anyone could remember. Moreover, the executive branch of Harvard was displeased. President Pusey called the faculty's action, "very disturbing."

The faculty would prefer, with good reason, to have no part as a body in student discipline and student politics. Yes, the faculty had indirectly in this case taken a moral stand; but few members of the faculty would wish to repeat it. The next time there would have to be a Committee. The next time was the occupation of University Hall in April and there was the Committee of Fifteen.

Committees, like Thoreau's notion of the lawyer's truth, are more concerned with consistency and expediency than they are concerned with substantive issues. The ideal committee, as absurdist dramatists have pointed out, would concern itself solely with its own procedures and forms. When a committee is forced to consider a matter outside of itself, the best it can hope for is consistency and symmetry. The Committee of Fifteen had to settle for a baroque symmetry-they ruled that everyone in April was guilty, the Administration as well as the students. Issues like ROTC were consigned to unofficial memos and other committees. The administration, the Committee reported, had violated "the spirit, if not the letter" of the faculty's resolution. The students-138 were punished, 16 were required to leave Harvard. Baroque, but still symmetry.

The faculty had created the Committee of Fifteen, and that Committee had created the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, which now handles discipline in political cases. It is important to realize several essential facts about the CRR. The great debates I have heard about its fairness and its existence only rarely takes these into account.

First and foremost: The CRR, although technically the grandchild of the faculty, is in practice an organ of the administration. It is merely a processing and channeling agency. In many ways it is a draft board in reverse. In almost every single case of the more than 250 which the CRR has heard, the complainant has been an administrator. (The only exceptions to this are the charges growing out of attacks on the CFIA. There, Robert Bowie, director of the Center, pressed charges.) The CRR does not decide ultimate guilt or innocence, nor does it examine the issues. It punishes radical students. It is not empowered, as Wilson was fond of saying, to hear complaints against the administration. The CRR is an instrument of the Harvard administration designed to punish students. It is only programmed one way. There will never be a CRIMSON headline reading "CRR OVERRULES DEAN MAY-SAVES EVERYONE."

Second, student participation on the CRR is public relations for the administration. Students have little or no part in determining CRR policy. Most important, of course, is the policy which had already been decided by the legislation empowering the CRR to punish only students. But even the CRR policy about its procedures is the handiwork of its faculty members.

THE CRR which is active today took office in June when its eight faculty members were seated. According to the legislation of the faculty meeting of May 12th:

The Committee on Rights and Responsibilities shall be deemed duly constituted, regardless of any vacancies that may exist, when the Faculty members of the Committee have been elected and when either all student members have been scated or 14 days shall have elapsed since the election of the Feculty members, whichever is sooner.

Not surprisingly for the month of June, the 14 days elapsed before six student members could be scared up and the eight present faculty members quietly took their seats and constituted the Committee. Actually, several students had already been elected by various cryptic procedures, but due to a technicality-they had not yet been "appointed" by their deans-the Committee did not seat them in June, nor in fact early this year.

The faculty members of the CRR wrote and approved its operating procedures before the students were seated. These are mostly an elaboration of last year's procedures: closed hearings, no external appeal, and no mechanisms for bringing charges against the University Administration. After the structures were set, which is to say after the ball-game was over, the students who had been elected were graced with their dean's anointment and seated. In the course of the year, should any student resign for any reason, he will be replaced by a student appointed by the Faculty Council and the Dean of the Faculty. These are some of the "technicalities" which make the CRR a working part of the Administration's bureaucracy.

No understanding of the actual nature of the CRR is possible without examining its "constitution," the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities. The CRR exists to enforce "by due process of law" this Resolution. The Resolution attempts to lay the ground-rules of conduct for all members of the University. ALL members. That is the theory. In practice, however, the radical chant, "You're right, we're responsible," is not far from the truth. The Resolution essentially boils down to two points: First, students should not touch or obstruct administrators; second, administrators should be alert to what students are saying, and give "full and fair hearing" to "reasoned expressions of grievances." Further, administrators should also "respond promptly and in good faith to such expressions and to widely-expressed needs for change" (italics mine). That is the theory, which, if you are of a theoretical, metaphorical, transcendental cast of mind sounds fair enough. The CRR enforces the first part, and God enforces the second.

But lately God has been replaced by something even less substantial. The Committee of Inquiry, another "student-faculty" Committee, was set up this Fall to hear complaints against the Administration and to channel these complaints to the proper administrators. In the words of its chairman, Roger Rosenblatt, Acting Master of Dunster House and one of the original members of the Committee of Fifteen, it is meant "to take the jargon out of communication." Mr. Rosenblatt has not yet indicated with what the committee plans to replace the jargon. At any rate, this jargonless Committee is also powerless. It is intended only as a clearing house and channeling agency.

It took the powers-that-be about a year and a half to set up the Committee of Inquiry. In that time, the other side of the coin, the CRR and its predecessors, had punished in various ways over 220 students. Fifty-six students were required to leave Harvard. The Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities is in theory a two-way street, but in fact the traffic only flows one way: "We're right, you're responsible."

THE INEVITABLY one-sided and unfair enforcement of the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities was the basis of an appeal to the CRR last Spring. I should like to present in some detail the history of this appeal.

Bob Cox was a senior scheduled to graduate last June. In 1969, the Committee of Fifteen had given him a suspended requirement to withdraw for one year because he had remained in University Hall. On last May 11th, he was identified by his senior tutor as a member of a picket line set up in front of University Hall. Some 400 students joined the picket line to protest the invasion of Cambodia and Harvard's refusal to act on President Pusey's declaration that striking campus workers would be paid.

Bob Cox was never charged with obstructing a Harvard official. Rather the catch-all charge of "actively participating in an obstructive demonstration" was brought against him. This was in accord with one of the CRR's ground-rules for dealing with the massive picket lines last May; it declared that everyone who could be identified as present on the day of an obstructive demonstration was guilty of "actively participating" in the obstruction even though the obstruction may, in fact, have taken place later or earlier. (One student was punished for briefly standing on the picket line as he talked to a friend; he left immediately after Dean May's announcement that such action violated the Resolution; his appeal of the CRR's punishment was denied without hearing or explanation.)

On June 2nd, nine days before he was to graduate, the CRR "regretted" to inform Bob Cox that he could not graduate and must withdraw from Harvard for one year.

Cox's appeal argued that he had been denied a "full and fair" hearing before the CRR both times it punished him (in May 1970 and the year before). Sine Cox could not bring before the CRR charges against the Corporation for its intransigence inregard to student and faculty resolutions on ROTC, and since he could not bring charges against, or even force to testify at his hearing, any of the men who were denying Harvard workers the right to strike, he argued that he was getting less than a full and fair hearing. Evidence which might have demonstrated extenuating circumstances, and therefore the need for mitigation of the punishment-if not a total dismissal of the charges-was being systematically excluded from consideration. Cox argued further that, in both cases in which he was punished, the Administration had in fact been the first party to violate the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities by not creating, as it was theoretically pledged to do, "an atmosphere in which violations of rights and responsibilities were unlikely to occur" and by not having "developed processes by which these rights [were] fully assured." In view of this, Cox asked only for the suspension of "withdrawal" as a possible punishment for students until such time as procedures had been developed to make possible full enforcement of the Resolution-that is, to hear and investigate student complaints of negligence, duplicity, and intransigence on the part of the Administration.

The CRR justified its outright denial of all parts of this appeal with a paradigmatic example of that Jeremy Bentham, in a different context, called "nonsense on stilts." As for Cox's assertion that the CRR's procedures denied a full hearing, the Committee readily agreed-but instead of finding this grounds for sustaining his appeal, the Committee used it as an excuse to apologize. I quote from the CRR's reply to Cox:

The Committee is aware of the lack of such machinery. Many of its members have endeavored in their other capacities to devise such machinery. And the Committee is aware that there are many serious and legitimate grievances that require a careful and attentive response.

The denial continues and CRR spells out its own limited function-just in case anyone still had the notion that it was anything more than a faculty committee constituted to throw students out of school:

But the Committee is also of the view that its function-applying basic rules of conduct in student affairs-cannot and must not be a part of any procedures designed to identify or hear complaints about University policies or official behavior. (Emphases are mine.)

What follows this must be given careful attention because it is such a distortion of logic and reason, such a grand fallacy, that we almost assent to the argument in a brief, but heady, moment of romantic absurdism:

To suggest that there should be such a connection [i. e. between the CRR's job of punishing students and hearing complaints about the administration] is to argue that disciplinary decisions should be influenced by the political objectives of those who engage in the misconduct.

Their argument runs as follows: the CRR is supposed to punish students and students only; therefore, the request that the CRR should also consider complaints against administrators is denied because it would force the CRR to rule on "political" questions.

The only problem with this definition, of course, is that those "causes" which the CRR considers "political"-and therefore avoids like death-are frequently cases of administrative duplicity. This was the case both times Cox was punished.

Asking the CRR to consider violations of the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities by the Administration is asking it to become "political." Of course, by not taking into account the Administration's guilt the CRR remains neutral. Quite simply the CRR has told Cox that since it can only punish students, only students can be guilty. This is their idea of judicial neutrality.

Let me give you one other of the countless examples of the CRR's intentional double talk and bad faith. In January, the Committee received a petition requesting among other things that CRR hearings be open. Here is the Committee's response:

The Committee believes it is in the best interests of most of the students charged before it that the hearings not be public. We believe that many of the students who have appeared before the Committee would not have done so if the hearings had been public; [note: 25 people appeared before the Committee, 22 signed the petition asking that the hearings be open] if the option to make the hearings public had been available to the student, we believe many would have found themselves under considerable pressure from their fellow students to exercise that option and open hearings to a gallery.

The CRR argues that opening the hearings might put "considerable pressure" on those students who might have preferred closed hearings. Their novel solution to this patently unlikely problem is to close everyone's hearing. No options, no problems. This solution, after all, will make all the hearings consistent and expedient. The Committee's memo continues, bringing more of this same fairness and logic to bear on the point:

Most importantly, we think the hearings ought to be private because a private exchange between the student and his adviser and the Committee offers the best opportunity for learning about the motives, purposes, and opinions of those who are charged with violating the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities and for enabling the Committee to form some judgment about the quality and significance of the student's actions. It also offers an opportunity for the student to question the Committee and the complainant and to discuss informally with both a wide range of matters, some only indirectly related to the specific charge. (C. F. Cox's appeal) A public hearing . . . would inhibit many if not all parties to these discussions and lead the Committee to play the role of silent judge.

This almost beggars belief. The CRR refuses to open its hearings so students can discuss a wide range of matters. It neglects to state that in most cases the party bringing the complaint is not present at the hearing but is represented by a lawyer. It also neglects to point out that students are often told to shut-up at hearings when they try to discuss this "wide-range" of matters. Their last reason, which still puzzles me a year later, is that the CRR will not open the hearings because this would force it to become a "silent judge." Evidently, closed hearings allow the CRR to make more noise and less judgment.