No Reform

Like gods dissembling from atop Mount Olympus, the Faculty has spoken: the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities will not be reformed, nor will the Resolution that charters it be revised. Although purportedly distressed by the evaporation of the student trust that is supposed to have once existed here the Faculty inexplicably erects yet another barrier to the redemption of that trust by refusing to consider even the most modest attempts to reform the disciplinary process.

We are almost back to where we started: discussion of revising the Resolution has been quelled and the CRR itself has been told to do what it wants. A minor--though possibly significant--resolution calling for a re-examination of the Commission on Inquiry has passed, but this victory is a small one. In the face of this disheartening defeat, what are students who desire an equitable disciplinary process to do?

To begin with, last week's victory regarding the Commission is minor, but it could provide leverage to pry the community free from its past conceptions of rights and responsibilities. Students and sympathetic Faculty members should make sure the slated re-examination is swiftly carried out, and then utilize the hopefully energized Commission to air their complaints against the Administration and the Faculty.

The Commission was initially envisioned as a counterpart to the CRR, providing its offices to maintain an atmosphere of trust in which students would find recourse to confrontational protest unlikely. At present, the slanted language of the Resolution makes it impossible for the Commission to serve this function effectively. Still, with the increased prominence given the Commission by the Faculty vote, more pressure can surely be brought to bear--both on the issues of the moment and on the contradictions within the disciplinary process itself.

But what of the future of the disciplinary process? Some would now argue that because the Faculty has proven itself temporarily intractable, students should extend the olive branch. If the Faculty will not accept reforms, so the argument runs, let us at least settle for what we can get--limited student participation on the CRR, for example. Although perhaps well-intended, this view is hopelessly cautious: it asks accession to an unjust situation merely because the CRR seems to have staying power.

The CRR's apparent stability does not render it legitimate. We must continue to demand that the Faculty live up to its professed ideal of maintaining a community of free and rational discourse characterized by reciprocal rights and responsibilities. The Faculty must be made to see the chasm between its beliefs and its actions: the Resolution must be rewritten before reforms in the CRR can be considered.

Students over the past several years have always indicated in referenda that they favor some sort of disciplinary procedure, but they have just as vehemently opposed the existing one. This position is reasonable and consistent. It should not be abandoned merely because the Faculty remains petulantly opposed to progress.