A CRR Reconsideration

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Immediately upon reading that the Freshman Council had decided to send delegates to the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities rather than to continue the boycott, I dropped the paper and went to the telephone to discuss the matter with the Council moderator. Saddled with a dismaying sense of deja vu, I was prepared to deliver yet again the true story of this infamous would be institution to the eats of someone who had not like myself had the dubious privilege of being here at the time of its formation in the hope, of course, of winning a new convert for the boycott, and thus perhaps helping to avert a tragic repudiation of student activism in the sixties such as acceptance of the CRR would represent. I was quite surprised at the turn the conversation took, for the freshman, rather than being simply a naive tool of the wool-pulling administration, was repeatedly asking an extremely valid question. Why, she asked, is this thing still going on? The boycott, she pointed out, has not resolved the situation. The students, administrators, and even truth-preaching alumni have not solved anything, and the problem lumbers on from year to year unchanged.

It has been easy enough in the past to hold Dean Epps responsible for this continuation, but it now seems that he is as bored with the matter as anyone else. The CRR never meets, he says, but "it was established by Faculty legislation and it has never been abolished, so I don't think we have any choice." Provided with a hint like this, that Dean Epps is just doing his job and might indeed have had it otherwise if the choice were up to him, I believe the time has come to discuss seriously with the Faculty the solution which Dean Epps himself suggests--abolishing the committee. And I believe that some of the people who are in the best position to carry this out are the House Committee members who have prior to now, as the freshman pointed out, simply voted to boycott and then dropped the matter. There is, after all, a clearly established consensus that students do not wish to be divided against themselves, that they do not wish to be put in the position of sitting in judgment of their peers on controversial political matters This consensus has been firmly established over a period of ten years, and it seems very plausible that the Faculty, when prevailed upon, will respect its existence and relieve Dean Epps of the onerous, embarrassing, boring and pointless task of making an offer which the student body has repeatedly and emphatically refused. Bob McCoy '70