Also, this rejection of the postponement request is a slap in the face to student confidence in the College. It remains ironic that such a student request has been denied in a semester in which the College has made student-Faculty contact a focal point of discussion in its top committees
And as Spence noted in Wednesday's Faculty meeting, Harvard is to blame for the unfortunate timing of student nominations. In 1980, after 10 years of student boycott, the College discontinued its annual invitation for Houses to nominate student delegates to the CRR.
Because the College last invited students to participate on the CRR when even this year's seniors were still in high school, no undergraduate has any reason to know that the CRR even existed, much less that it was boycotted. The College cannot expect undergraduates to take time out of exam period to plow through 16 years of history to decide whether they want to continue the boycott.
Harvard should not be usurping reading period and exam time of House committee chairmen, anti-apartheid protesters, members of the press who have to report on the committee's committee's and other interested students when the College bears the blame for the lack of student nominations to the committee.
Nor would Harvard be asking students to take time out from their summer jobs and plans to come back to Cambridge to defend themselves at their hearings
Had students been asked for nomination in December, when time permitted them to "consider serious questions of the CRR's legitimacy," the committee could have met within a week of the time it was reactivated, and it would have had time to pursue justice, rather than speed.
At the Faculty's weekly meeting Tuesday, Spence acknowledged that the CRR was called upon at a time of year that made it difficult for House committees to nominate student delegates. "It would be better if the students were there. The fact that they're not is partly my responsibility"
Actually, it is entirely his responsibility, in that the decision to call on the CRR rested in his hands Spence should stop apologizing for the unfortunate decision and own up to his mistake. He must not continue to apologize for the decisions of a committee that he has rebuilt for speed.