The CRR: No Compromise

CHANGING THE Committee on Rights and Responsibilities is no easy matter. Only the Faculty, by voting amendments to the 1970 Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities, could create a CRR with equal student-Faculty representation and open hearings.

Leverett House last week acted with good intentions but made the wrong move when it voted to send representatives to negotiate with the Faculty and administration for changes in the CRR. The sponsors of the Leverett CRR resolution admit they are vague on exactly whom their representatives should negotiate with; the vice president of the Leverett House Committee said last week that he thought it might be a good idea to work through the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life.

The point that Leverett House is missing is that negotiation with anyone, let alone the CHUL, could not change one iota the unfair basic structure of the CRR.

To change the CRR, students have to work to bring about a Faculty vote--no simple task, since last year the Faculty defeated a series of proposed CRR reforms that would have instituted the same changes that Leverett House plans to negotiation for. The best way for students to let the Faculty know they disapprove of the CRR is to show unified, absolute refusal to have anything to do with it. All the Houses should refuse to send representatives to the CRR and students should protest all attempts to revive it.

The CRR has been dormant for the last year and a half only because student protest at Harvard has also been dormant. The committee isn't any better now that it was in 1971, when it was expelling students in closed hearings and denying them appeals. Students must continue to remind the Faculty how unfair the CRR really is.