When three Harvard undergraduates got drunk and went carousing in 1676, then Treasurer of Harvard College Thomas Danforth didn't have to worry about how they should be disciplined. He just put on his other hat as justice of the peace and arrested them.

Since that time, disciplinary procedures have gotten a little more complicated and more controversial.

The majority of discipline cases are currently heard in secret by the Administrative Board, a 25-member committee made up of faculty and administrators.

The Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR), which theoretically has both student and faculty members, rules on those few cases that are judged to be infractions of the 1969 Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR), which calls on the University to protect freedom of speech and movement on campus.

In recent years, students have criticized the Ad Board for its secret meetings and the CRR for appearing to single out political protestors.

The Administrative Board yesterday announced that students will be able to plead their cases before the board and to bring an adviser with them in addition to their Senior Tutor.

In addition, a plan to scrap the CRR entirely and create a new student-faculty body is currently being considered by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' steering committee. A final version of this plan should be released within a few weeks.

The CRR is itself a recent innovation, created in the aftermath of the 1969 takeover of University Hall, but students have been demanding more openness from the Ad Board since its inception in 1891.

In the 1890s, having the entire faculty vote on disciplinary cases was not a particularly successful system. Half of all faculty meetings were spent on disciplinary cases and the growing size of the faculty had threatened to jeopardize the personal nature of the process, according to published histories.

Therefore, the faculty voted to delegate its power to oversee student discipline to a small committee of teaching faculty. The Ad Board's small membership, fewer than a dozen people, was designed to allow the body develop a consistent policy for dealing with academic and behavioral infractions and with petitions for exceptions from regular Harvard rules.

The entire faculty must still vote on expulsion and dismissal charges, and it retains the right to overrule the Ad Board.

During the early years of the Ad Board, students who were caught breaking rules were summoned to University Hall, where one of a bevy of assistant deans would hear their side of the story and then present the case to the entire body. Students frequently complained that they had not previously met the deans who dealt with them.

From the very beginning, the Ad Board process was supposed to be educational rather than adversarial. The person presenting the case to the Board was expected to take a step back and look at the whole case rather than act like a defense attorney at a trial.

The 1952 creation of senior tutors substantially altered the way the disciplinary process worked. The senior tutors sat on the Ad Board, nearly doubling its size, and were supposed to further personalize the discipline process by acting as advocates for students within their house.

Since the senior tutors lived within the houses in theory, they already knew the students whose cases they presented and therefore could provide a more personal angle on the case. In addition, the senior tutors were expected to spend several days dicussing each case with the student before going before the Ad Board in order to further the educational nature of the process.