The system's the solution

After months of debating, the Class of '80 voted to end a seven-year student boycott of the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR), which disciplines students charged with disrupting the College for political reasons.

The freshmen agree with the boycott-supporters that the CRR does not afford due process to students on trial, but argue that it can best be reformed from within. As a result of their decision, four students will join the committee when it next meets.

Intervention?

Laissez-faire seems a weird justification for quotas, but that's Harvard's reason for filing an amicus curiae ('friend of the court') brief in a Supreme Court appeal by a California state medical school that has been convicted of discriminating against whites by reserving 16 places for minority group members in a class of 100 members.

Harvard will argue that if the government wants universities to correct social inequities, then it can't quibble with the means the schools use to increase the number of minority graduates.

Sad ibis

The Harvard-Radcliffe Black Students Association (HRBSA) charged the Lampoon this spring with featuring "tasteless" characterizations of blacks in recent issues, including a recent cover picture of a black man shining the shoes of the statue of John Harvard in the Yard. The Lampoon editors argued that its use of stereotypes was meant to poke fun at the characterizations rather than to lend credence to them, but HRBSA was not satisfied with the explanation and took the issue to Archie C. Epps III, dean of students.

After a series of meetings with officials of both organizations, Epps reported that the use of stereotypes probably did not improve race relations at the College, and announced he will set up a committee on race relations here next fall.

The most recent issue of the Lampoon parodied technology.

Ceteris paribus

For as long as anyone can remember--or at least ever since the first rumors of economic crisis in the early '70s--Economics 10, "Principles of Economics," has been the most popular course in the College, and this year was no different.

History hassles

Serious conflicts within the History Department emerged this spring, centering on the easy access of tenured American history faculty members to substantial stipends from the income of the well-endowed Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.

The split may have played a role in persuading David S. Landes, Goelet Professor of French History and one of the world's foremost European economic historians, to switch from History to the Economics Department.