At Brown, A Strike Looms

Unless the Brown administration comes up with a lot of money fast, the lvy League will have its first college-wide student strike since the 60s.

Undergraduates at Brown voted overwhelmingly yesterday to boycott classes and refuse to hand in academic work for one week--action that they hope will, if not bring the administration to its knees, at least force it to reconsider its cutbacks in financial aid, student services and faculty teaching time.

The cutbacks have been the subject of tow months of controversy on the Brown campus, with committees and coalitions forming and reorganizing weekly and students staging the two largest student rallies of the 70s within a month of each other.

Three thousand students--more than half of the Brown student body--turned out this week to show their opposition to the budget the administration is planning to submit to the Brown Corporation next Saturday.

Meanwhile, Harvard is having its problems, too, but they are not of the same order of magnitude as Browns's. Robert E. Kaufmann 62, assistant dean of the Faculty for financial affairs, says that, even though Harvard is "chipping away with earnestness in a great many areas" there will be no cutbacks in the budget to compare with the 15 per cent cut in faculty teaching time or the effective 15 per cent cut in financial aid at Brown. As Kaufmann puts it, "the playing field may just be a bit wider here."