CRR and Faculty

Last week's undergraduate referendum on reform of the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities showed clearly that students are dissatisfied with the CRR's present structure and procedures. Although the turnout in the referendum was disappointingly small----only about 1000 students voted----over 90 per cent of the students agreed that the CRR must be reformed, and approved four specific proposals for change in the CRR.

The ad hoc committee to reform the CRR noted some of the most objectionable of the CRR's problems: its power to deny students who come before it the right to legal counsel, its power to admit hearsay evidence against a defendant, its Faculty domination, the broad discretion allowed the University in defining a punishable offense, and the lack of a separate board of appeal. On all these counts, students agreed that the CRR needed reform.

The ad hoc committee will submit the results of the referendum, along with its extensive proposals for changes in the CRR and its charter, the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities, to the Faculty for action. Unfortunately, the Faculty Council will apparently delay action on the proposals until next fall.

There is no place for the CRR in an academic community where students should be free to express their disagreement with University policy through political protests. The CRR should be abolished, and students should continue to boycott it as they have since 1971. Short of that, the Faculty should adopt the changes proposed by the ad hoc reform committee. Those changes, while they may make the CRR more equitable in practice, will not alter the principles of repression that lie behind it.

The CRR is an outdated creature of the reaction that followed the events of 1969 and 1970, and the Faculty should take this opportunity for repudiating the principles of political repression the CRR embodies by abolishing it.