Change the CRR

The Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life will consider today a series of sorely needed reforms for the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, a University disciplinary body that deals with political protestors.

The CRR as presently constituted is grossly unfair both in its conception and its procedures. It has all of the powers usually vested in judicial bodies--it charges students and tries and resolves their cases--but none of the strictures usually imposed on them. It can hold closed hearings, deny students the right to counsel and admit hearsay evidence. Although all the cases it hears involve students, its composition (four students and seven Faculty members) is stacked to let Faculty views dominate.

The CRR desperately needs structural changes even to approach being fair. The proposals facing the CHUL today recommend correctly that the CRR hold open hearings, have an equal number of student and faculty members, give students the right to counsel, and be allowed to try Faculty members. The CHUL should support these proposals.

But the CRR's problems go deeper than just its structure. It was founded the wake of the 1969 strike, when the Faculty discovered it had no way to deal with people who occupied buildings and demonstrated because they objected to University policies. The committee carried out the dictates of the Faculty's vaguely-worded Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities. Anyone who "obstructed the normal processes and activities" of the University was liable to be disciplined by the CRR; the resolution, still on the books, leaves the boundaries of political protest to the arbitrary discretion of the Faculty.

Students can protest, but only on the Faculty's severely restricted terms, and if they step out of line the Faculty, through the CRR, can discipline them as it pleases. The resolution that created the CRR sought to control the student movement by taking away from students the very voice in the University they were trying to gain through their protests. No change in the structure of the CRR will be meaningful unless the Faculty resolution is changed as well to acknowledge the legitimacy of students' attempts to influence the University.

It is unlikely that any of the changes the CRR so desperately needs will actually go into effect; the Faculty has repeatedly affirmed its opposition to changes in the resolution that created the CRR or in the faculty-student ratio of the committee. Students have refused to serve on the CRR since 1970, and should continue to do so if it does not change. If the Faculty will not acknowledge what a sham the CRR makes of the idea of justice, students must keep refusing to acknowledge its legitimacy.