(The author is a fourth-year graduate student in English. Last Spring he defended twenty people before the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities and attended many other hearings as an observer. He is presently writing his doctoral thesis on the theme of justice and its absurd procedures in Shakespeare, Brecht, Camus and Kafka.)

(This is the first of a two-part feature on the CRR. Part two will appear tomorrow.)

JAMES Q. WILSON, chairman of the CRR, was looking me in the eye. He had never done this before in the two months and countless hours we had been sitting opposite each other. This was the last hearing, positively the last hearing, of the year. Tomorrow was Commencement. Wilson had checked off all the boxes in his mimeographed schedule of cases. I was not pleading this case, I was one of three observers the accused girl was allowed to bring in addition to one advisor. The facts of her case were exactly like 18 others which had already been decided, which is perhaps why Wilson found the time to look at me.

This was not really a hearing, it was a processing. The prosecution's only evidence, a photograph, showed the girl standing on the steps of University Hall with approximately 100 others while Samuel Williamson, Assistant to Dean May, had tried to get into his office. The girl's boyfriend, who was also her advisor, was arguing the case. He was standing next to her in the photograph the prosecution had presented but no one mentioned this. She was on trial, not him. She had been identified in the photo by her dean, he had not. These unusual circumstances were no problem for the CRR; after all this time the Committee was jaded and bored.

At that moment, while the defense advisor went through the arguments which the CRR and I had heard a countless number of times before, I was concerned with Wilson's eyes.

They seemed to say one of two very different things. Either they were saying to the girl, "Yes, yes, I know. I know what compelled you to do this. I know how serious you are, I know what moral stress you were under." Or they were saying to me, "Krcisberg, you've been here before, you know what the story is, we've heard all this before. Let's get the hell out of here and get this case over with."

Whichever it was, it did not make a difference, nor was it going to. The procedures had already been decided. The girl would receive a suspended requirement to withdraw (SRTW in CRR talk) and the case would be closed. The CRR, by last June, had already worked out all the minor kinks which developed in the long course of Harvard's attempts to discipline and suppress political activists.

In the begining there had been no Committees. The first political cases in recent history-the Dow-Napalm recruiter and the sit-in at the Paine Hall faculty meeting to discuss ROTC in the fall of 1968-were decided by the Ad Board, a body previously concerned with shoplifting and panty-raids. When the Ad Board, in 1968, voted 8 to 7 to require 5 students who had been in Paine Hall to leave Harvard, the faculty overturned this ruling. The Paine Hall 5, the faculty decided, would receive a "suspended" requirement to withdraw. They could stay in school as long as they behaved.

Most people were happy. "Faculty Saves Everyone-Overruling Ad Board" was the banner CRIMSON headline. "The faculty's action was just," reasoned most people. It was justice tempered with mercy and reason. It was a moral decision. The students' actions had been weighed in light of the issues, in light of Vietnam.

But such weighing in political cases could prove explosive to the faculty. It had already split 192-99 in this case, and the debates, both on and off the record, had been hotter than anyone could remember. Moreover, the executive branch of Harvard was displeased. President Pusey called the faculty's action, "very disturbing."

The faculty would prefer, with good reason, to have no part as a body in student discipline and student politics. Yes, the faculty had indirectly in this case taken a moral stand; but few members of the faculty would wish to repeat it. The next time there would have to be a Committee. The next time was the occupation of University Hall in April and there was the Committee of Fifteen.

Committees, like Thoreau's notion of the lawyer's truth, are more concerned with consistency and expediency than they are concerned with substantive issues. The ideal committee, as absurdist dramatists have pointed out, would concern itself solely with its own procedures and forms. When a committee is forced to consider a matter outside of itself, the best it can hope for is consistency and symmetry. The Committee of Fifteen had to settle for a baroque symmetry-they ruled that everyone in April was guilty, the Administration as well as the students. Issues like ROTC were consigned to unofficial memos and other committees. The administration, the Committee reported, had violated "the spirit, if not the letter" of the faculty's resolution. The students-138 were punished, 16 were required to leave Harvard. Baroque, but still symmetry.

The faculty had created the Committee of Fifteen, and that Committee had created the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, which now handles discipline in political cases. It is important to realize several essential facts about the CRR. The great debates I have heard about its fairness and its existence only rarely takes these into account.

First and foremost: The CRR, although technically the grandchild of the faculty, is in practice an organ of the administration. It is merely a processing and channeling agency. In many ways it is a draft board in reverse. In almost every single case of the more than 250 which the CRR has heard, the complainant has been an administrator. (The only exceptions to this are the charges growing out of attacks on the CFIA. There, Robert Bowie, director of the Center, pressed charges.) The CRR does not decide ultimate guilt or innocence, nor does it examine the issues. It punishes radical students. It is not empowered, as Wilson was fond of saying, to hear complaints against the administration. The CRR is an instrument of the Harvard administration designed to punish students. It is only programmed one way. There will never be a CRIMSON headline reading "CRR OVERRULES DEAN MAY-SAVES EVERYONE."

Second, student participation on the CRR is public relations for the administration. Students have little or no part in determining CRR policy. Most important, of course, is the policy which had already been decided by the legislation empowering the CRR to punish only students. But even the CRR policy about its procedures is the handiwork of its faculty members.