A Bread And Butter Takeover

Some Brown University administrators who prided themselves on the way they managed to weather the protest-ridden '60s found themselves locked out of their offices this week.

While students at Harvard and elsewhere reacted against the policies of the government in past years by trashing and sitting in, the administration in Providence succeeded in keeping its protesters content to boycott classes.

The issues that led to the seizure Thursday of Brown's University Hall are closer to home than are the ones that passed Brown by in the '60s. And the same tuition hikes and budget cutbacks that sparked the Brown protest are afflicting every independent university in the country.

It took two months of controversy--orderly negotiations, followed by campus rallies, threats and demands, and finally a student strike two weeks ago--before Brown students were moved to take over a building. And even then the student body was not solidly behind the activists--University Hall was being occupied by what was essentially a black and Latin splinter group from the original coalition of students protesting the budget cutbacks.

However, the bread-and-butter protests at Brown have started to spread to other colleges. Budget-related strikes were being planned this week at Princeton and UMass, and there was a small demonstration in the Yard Wednesday featuring what President Bok believed was his first burning-in-effigy.

But there is still one big difference between Harvard and Brown, and it is not in the perniciousness of the administrations or the radicalness of the student bodies. Harvard is rich and Brown, by Ivy League standards, is poor--it will be some years before the crunch of recession hits hard here.

Brown administrators have spoken of their budget problems with some bitterness in past weeks. But they have taken some consolation in statements to the effect that what is happening at Brown will be a common enough Ivy League problem before long.

The Brown administration dealt successfully with two crises this month, and as far as student protest goes they seem to be out of the woods--at least for new.

But university officials held the line. Whether or not Hornig kept his budget a purely rational affair, and not a political one--as maintained repeatedly during two months of give-and-take--he succeeded in satisfying students without compromising his original budget priorities.