THE CRR which is active today took office in June when its eight faculty members were seated. According to the legislation of the faculty meeting of May 12th:

The Committee on Rights and Responsibilities shall be deemed duly constituted, regardless of any vacancies that may exist, when the Faculty members of the Committee have been elected and when either all student members have been scated or 14 days shall have elapsed since the election of the Feculty members, whichever is sooner.

Not surprisingly for the month of June, the 14 days elapsed before six student members could be scared up and the eight present faculty members quietly took their seats and constituted the Committee. Actually, several students had already been elected by various cryptic procedures, but due to a technicality-they had not yet been "appointed" by their deans-the Committee did not seat them in June, nor in fact early this year.

The faculty members of the CRR wrote and approved its operating procedures before the students were seated. These are mostly an elaboration of last year's procedures: closed hearings, no external appeal, and no mechanisms for bringing charges against the University Administration. After the structures were set, which is to say after the ball-game was over, the students who had been elected were graced with their dean's anointment and seated. In the course of the year, should any student resign for any reason, he will be replaced by a student appointed by the Faculty Council and the Dean of the Faculty. These are some of the "technicalities" which make the CRR a working part of the Administration's bureaucracy.

No understanding of the actual nature of the CRR is possible without examining its "constitution," the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities. The CRR exists to enforce "by due process of law" this Resolution. The Resolution attempts to lay the ground-rules of conduct for all members of the University. ALL members. That is the theory. In practice, however, the radical chant, "You're right, we're responsible," is not far from the truth. The Resolution essentially boils down to two points: First, students should not touch or obstruct administrators; second, administrators should be alert to what students are saying, and give "full and fair hearing" to "reasoned expressions of grievances." Further, administrators should also "respond promptly and in good faith to such expressions and to widely-expressed needs for change" (italics mine). That is the theory, which, if you are of a theoretical, metaphorical, transcendental cast of mind sounds fair enough. The CRR enforces the first part, and God enforces the second.

But lately God has been replaced by something even less substantial. The Committee of Inquiry, another "student-faculty" Committee, was set up this Fall to hear complaints against the Administration and to channel these complaints to the proper administrators. In the words of its chairman, Roger Rosenblatt, Acting Master of Dunster House and one of the original members of the Committee of Fifteen, it is meant "to take the jargon out of communication." Mr. Rosenblatt has not yet indicated with what the committee plans to replace the jargon. At any rate, this jargonless Committee is also powerless. It is intended only as a clearing house and channeling agency.

It took the powers-that-be about a year and a half to set up the Committee of Inquiry. In that time, the other side of the coin, the CRR and its predecessors, had punished in various ways over 220 students. Fifty-six students were required to leave Harvard. The Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities is in theory a two-way street, but in fact the traffic only flows one way: "We're right, you're responsible."

THE INEVITABLY one-sided and unfair enforcement of the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities was the basis of an appeal to the CRR last Spring. I should like to present in some detail the history of this appeal.

Bob Cox was a senior scheduled to graduate last June. In 1969, the Committee of Fifteen had given him a suspended requirement to withdraw for one year because he had remained in University Hall. On last May 11th, he was identified by his senior tutor as a member of a picket line set up in front of University Hall. Some 400 students joined the picket line to protest the invasion of Cambodia and Harvard's refusal to act on President Pusey's declaration that striking campus workers would be paid.

Bob Cox was never charged with obstructing a Harvard official. Rather the catch-all charge of "actively participating in an obstructive demonstration" was brought against him. This was in accord with one of the CRR's ground-rules for dealing with the massive picket lines last May; it declared that everyone who could be identified as present on the day of an obstructive demonstration was guilty of "actively participating" in the obstruction even though the obstruction may, in fact, have taken place later or earlier. (One student was punished for briefly standing on the picket line as he talked to a friend; he left immediately after Dean May's announcement that such action violated the Resolution; his appeal of the CRR's punishment was denied without hearing or explanation.)

On June 2nd, nine days before he was to graduate, the CRR "regretted" to inform Bob Cox that he could not graduate and must withdraw from Harvard for one year.

Cox's appeal argued that he had been denied a "full and fair" hearing before the CRR both times it punished him (in May 1970 and the year before). Sine Cox could not bring before the CRR charges against the Corporation for its intransigence inregard to student and faculty resolutions on ROTC, and since he could not bring charges against, or even force to testify at his hearing, any of the men who were denying Harvard workers the right to strike, he argued that he was getting less than a full and fair hearing. Evidence which might have demonstrated extenuating circumstances, and therefore the need for mitigation of the punishment-if not a total dismissal of the charges-was being systematically excluded from consideration. Cox argued further that, in both cases in which he was punished, the Administration had in fact been the first party to violate the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities by not creating, as it was theoretically pledged to do, "an atmosphere in which violations of rights and responsibilities were unlikely to occur" and by not having "developed processes by which these rights [were] fully assured." In view of this, Cox asked only for the suspension of "withdrawal" as a possible punishment for students until such time as procedures had been developed to make possible full enforcement of the Resolution-that is, to hear and investigate student complaints of negligence, duplicity, and intransigence on the part of the Administration.

The CRR justified its outright denial of all parts of this appeal with a paradigmatic example of that Jeremy Bentham, in a different context, called "nonsense on stilts." As for Cox's assertion that the CRR's procedures denied a full hearing, the Committee readily agreed-but instead of finding this grounds for sustaining his appeal, the Committee used it as an excuse to apologize. I quote from the CRR's reply to Cox:

The Committee is aware of the lack of such machinery. Many of its members have endeavored in their other capacities to devise such machinery. And the Committee is aware that there are many serious and legitimate grievances that require a careful and attentive response.

The denial continues and CRR spells out its own limited function-just in case anyone still had the notion that it was anything more than a faculty committee constituted to throw students out of school: