CRR Reforms May Fail In Faculty

Faculty Council members said yesterday there is little chance the council will approve of the entire set of proposals for reform of the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR).

The reforms, which have been endorsed by both student and faculty members of the CRR, will make the CRR a more equitable body for disciplining students, advocates of the reforms contend.

The committee was formed in 1969 to consider cases of students who were charged with disrupting the University during the April 1969 campus strike.

Stanley H. Hoffman, professor of Government and chairman of a special Faculty Council subcommittee formed last spring to study the CRR reform proposals, said yesterday, "I don't see a ghost of a chance for the Faculty Council accepting the reforms wholesale as they (the CRR) proposed them."

Students who are attempting to push through the reforms yesterday urged House committees and the Freshman Council to boycott the CRR until the full Faculty votes to accept proposed reforms of the committee.

Laura E. Besvinick '80 and Tim Sellers '80, two of the students urging a CRR boycott, agreed to serve on the CRR and attempt to reform the committee after freshmen voted to break a decade-long boycott of the body two years ago.

Besvinick, who is chairman of the Student Assembly's committee on students' rights, and Sellers, who also serves on the assembly committee, said the two-year effort to reform the CRR has not succeeded entirely.

The University last week sent letters to House committees and the Freshman Council asking for nominations of students to the CRR.

Thursday night, the Adams House Committee voted to continue its boycott of the CRR with few student objections, Earle Burris '79, chairman of the House committee, said yesterday.

Other House committees have scheduled consideration of the CRR issue on the agendas for their next meetings.

At the encouragement of its four student members, the CRR voted unanimously with one abstention last fall to ask the Faculty to reform the committee.

The proposed CRR reforms include equalizing the number of students and faculty members serving on the committee, creating a special appeals board, barring hearsay evidence, allowing the release of transcripts of the hearings if both parties agree, and prohibiting the presence of legal counsel at the hearings.

Last spring, the Faculty Council would not endorse the creation of a special appeals board because Faculty Council members thought such a board would be unnecessary, since an appeals mechanism exists in the present Faculty legislation.

However, students say the existing appeals mechanism only provides for a rehearing by the CRR, whereas the appeals board proposed in the reforms would allow students to appeal CRR decisions to a different body composed of two students, two faculty members and a faculty chairman who would vote in case of a tie.

The Faculty Council also did not approve CRR's request to bar hearsay evidence from the hearings because members thought legal difficulties would arise in the definition of hearsay evidence.

Students attempting to reform the CRR, however, say there are no difficulties in defining what hearsay evidence is.

The Faculty Council did agree, however, with CRR requests to prohibit legal counsel from the hearings, to equalize the number of student and faculty members on the committee, and to allow the release of transcripts of the hearings if both parties agree.

Since last spring, efforts to push through new Faculty legislation reforming the CRR have stalled.

Phyllis Keller, associate dean of the Faculty, said yesterday, "To the best of my knowledge, we are waiting for a reply from CRR on whether they wish to devise exact wording on a number of reforms that were mutually agreed upon and whether they wish to send these reforms before the full Faculty for a vote."

The CRR has yet to convene this year because Francis M. Pipkin, associate dean of the Faculty, who is supposed to organize the committee's first meeting, has been ill, Nicolass Bloembergen, last year's CRR chairman and Rumford Professor of Physics, said last week