Brown on Trial: 'We're going to resist them every inch of the way.'

It is getting cold. The small group of picketers huddles together for warmth, pounding their sign-bearing hands together to restore circulation. Students pass by, some exchanging pleasantries with the strikers and moving on, some dashing blindly across the picket line into the library.

"If this goes on any longer," muses one of the workers, "we're going to have to learn Christmas carols."

Inside Brown University's John D. Rockefeller Library, it is considerably warmer, yet not as crowded as one might expect on a day so close to the start of midterms. A "scab" worker--one of 17 hired by the Brown administration to keep the libraries open during the ongoing strike by nearly 60 library workers--is unable to answer a student's question about a reserve book and refers him elsewhere. The student walks into the reference room, where he dejectedly begins to pore through the card catalogue.

"I've only been in here a couple of times all year--I've been honoring the strike," says Ellen Cunningham, a Brown sophomore. Cunningham and, by current estimates, up to two-thirds of her fellow Brown students, have been observing a boycott of the university's libraries, initiated by the 60-member student strike support group, Students in a Vise, at the beginning of this semester.

A student studying nearby explains that she has been using the library all along and has few regrets. "I have no trouble at all using the libraries, although I sympathize with the workers," explains Carla Clark Brooks, a Brown graduate student in English. "I just wonder what the students are doing striking with the workers; they're paying seven or eight thousand dollars to come here and they're walking with the workers who could never afford that--It all seems the superficial product of depthless socialists."

Security has been considerably tightened in the library recently, in the wake of reports that members of the Vise group have started a campaign to remove as many books from the library as possible and that some are even hiding books in various parts of the stacks. When one student last week attempted to remove 50 books at once, the library instantly clamped a ten-book limit on overnight take-outs.

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The library strike, which began in late August, each day seems to move further from a settlement. The workers are demanding pay increases of nearly 10 per cent; Brown's latest wage offer would give them 6. In addition, the final settlement will be further clouded by conditions of return to work; Brown's current insistence that the 17 non-union workers hired to keep the library open may remain on in full-time jobs promises to complicate the next round of negotiations, which have not yet been scheduled.

The library workers are members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which last week ratified a new pact with Brown following a separate strike by nearly 350 service workers lasting over 100 days. That strike, which mustered an unprecedented level of student support, came to an end only after eleven students blocked a truck attempting to leave Brown's main dining hall area.

The eleven were arrested by Providence police shortly afterwards, on the instructions of several Brown deans, notably Thomas Bechtel, dean of undergraduate counseling.

Bechtel, who must now oversee the lengthy process under which the students will be investigated and perhaps punished, can be seen during the late afternoon dashing from one appointment to the next; each involves another discussion of the strike support action by the students. By the end of the day, Bechtel's nerves are frazzled, as he addresses a meeting of the Resource Center, Brown's fledgling equivalent of Phillips Brooks House.

'I feel better that they (Students in a Vise) have talked it through; I think at least we're making some progress in talking about things," he says.

Downstairs, in the lounge of Faunce House, Brown's student union, the talk among the several gathered members of the Vise group is less than conciliatory. "We're going to resist them every inch of the way," says Mike Curtin, one of the arrested students, who has met Bechtel earlier this morning. "They've committed themselves to a quasi-legal setup; now we're going to turn it all loose."

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No one at Brown feels comfortable attempting to trace the chain of causality that led to the arrests of two weeks ago, yet theories abound. Some students--especially those most deeply involved in the pro-strike activities of the past several weeks--feel that the strike has thrown the campus back to a '60s-like milieu; the classic confrontation between Administration and Radical Student is again being played out, but with an internal labor dispute, rather than a war, the principal bone of contention. They point out, perhaps justifiably, that the only movement in the strike--which began, for nearly 350 service workers, in early July-came almost immediately after student actions in support of the walkout. In fact, the service workers' strike was settled the day after the eleven were arrested, and a key bargaining session was scheduled shortly after over 700 students staged a candlelight march calling for an end to the strike a few weeks ago.

Like many once highly politicized schools, Brown retains a small, perhaps diminishing, hard core group of radical-activist students. The vast majority of Brown students, however, seems to share Carla Brooks's belief that the strike, whatever its merits, is a matter best left to the bargaining table for resolution.

Bucky Edgett, a senior and a member of the Vise group, says that the Brown student body "has been drifting away from political involvement in general in the time I've been here."

"The organizers remain about the same in number, and that puts the radical in a very tight position," he continues. "You have to think of tactics that will draw in a great number of people, and unfortunately, those are usually disruptive tactics."

The Vise group, as a result, is using the arrests as its trump card is agitating for the settlement of the dispute. Already, the group has organized a 300-student demonstration cum administration building occupation to push for building general amnesty for those arrested, and further plans to stage demonstrations on behalf of the library workers and the arrested students during Brown's upcoming freshman parents' weekend.

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Compared to Harvard, Brown is relatively weak financially; its $100 million endowment is roughly equal to the interest on Harvard's endowment in one year. Fiscal strain is in evidence all around the campus; one calculus instructor complains of 50-student section meetings and "very poorly maintained classrooms," both during and after the service workers' strike.

The university is wary of a quick settlement with the SEIU on the terms requested by the workers because any pay hike might have to be duplicated for all non-union workers on the campus. "They can't, for obvious reasons, make it look like the union gets better benefits for workers," one union negotiator says.

The Brown administration is also undeniably concerned with the publicity the university is receiving and will often go to inordinate lengths to make sure the strike is placed in "proper perspective" by the press. Following the arrests of the students, for instance, Robert Reichley, vice president for university relations, appeared on local TV news programs and declared that it was not student actions that ended the embarrassing strike; both publicly and privately, the Brown administration has fostered the notion of "community" as a buttress against the bad press generated by student actions on behalf of the workers. Many students--including Nathan Bicks, president of the Brown student council--say they believe the arrests, the first ever on the Brown campus by local police, permanently destroyed that notion.

In Faunce House, the office of the Brown student council adjoins that of the Resource Center; the building is a natural gathering place for students, and the members of Students in a Vise circulate between the two offices all day long.

The Resource Center is staffed by two former Brown students. One, Bullet Brown, is also a member of the Vise group. "We were initially able to get the sympathy of most students for the strike, but after a while, it's hard for bourgeois kids to believe that people who go out on strike know what they're doing."

Brown is an employee of the university; so is Bechtel. But it is difficult to tell the players without a scorecard as Bechtel addresses the Tuesday Resource Center meeting. Following discussions with the arrested students earlier this morning Bechtel speaks freely with the Resource Center people, but about appropriations for new coffee houses and a plan that would clean up the images of fraternities. The strike support is only mentioned obliquely.

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If a large number of Brown's 5000 students--the Vise estimate of non-participation in its pro-strike efforts runs as high as 4000--wish to seek moral cues during the dispute from a source other than the activists, the Brown Daily Herald offers a more middle-of-the-road perspective. The Herald has scrupulously avoided lining up behind either party--the workers or the administration--in the dispute. The strongest editorial on the subject to date has been one calling for binding arbitration in the dispute, a demand which went unheeded by the administration. The editorial that followed the arrests termed the student action a "media event" and asked that the court "deal leniently" with the students. "The students wanted the police to come in," says Noel Rubinton, president of the newspaper. "They were the ones that wanted a confrontation."

Despite the Herald's moderate editorial stand on strike-related issues, Rubinton nonetheless says he believes his paper remains close in its sympathies "to the small active group" that has supported the strike all along.

The Vise group's members and the striking workers do not share Rubinton's characterization of the Herald. Mistaking a Crimson reporter for a Herald reporter, a striking library worker on Tuesday yelled, "How can you treat this thing the way you do--how can you do this?" And Bullet Brown echoes the sentiments of several of the Vise members when he says the Herald has become "completely conservative" over the past years.

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In the Sharpe Refectory, Broan's main dining hall--known to students as the Rattie--students sit eating franks and beans, and everything seems back to normal. Hanging out at the back of the building, the spot where the eleven were arrested for blocking a truck, stands Tony Broccoli, a cook. "I'm a scab," says Broccoli, "but everything in there seems to be pretty friendly to me."

Broccoli's case is one of many that may complicate the return of workers to the dining halls and may keep the library strike going considerably longer. Brown apparently has agreed to give full-time jobs to all non-union personnel hired during the strike.

In the kitchen, it appears likely that all union and non-union personnel will easily be accommodated in jobs; all the service workers are scheduled to return by Monday and none of the non-union workers has been asked to leave. The situation in the libraries is much less cut-and-dried. The university hired 17 non-union workers to fill "essential" library posts and has apparently promised them they will be eligible for full-time jobs after the strike is settled. But the striking workers now view "return to work" conditions as the most important issue in the strike; specifically, they are concerned that the university may see fit to reinstate them in jobs other that those they were originally hired to fill.

On the picket line Tuesday, Beth Coogan, a shop steward and negotiator for the library workers, echoed the prevailing concerns of her fellow workers. "I know for a fact that I have already been replaced," she said. "The big problem here is that people just don't know the facts." The picket line--normally staffed by no more than five people--runs from 8:30 a.m. until midnight, 99 hours a week. For a while, students had been joining in the lines; now, the newest Vise initiative calls for the stepped up use of library facilities in order to force an early settlement. Previously, Vise members had advised fellow students, with a remarkable degree of success, to boycott the libraries entirely, and library use fell, for a time, to one-third normal level. The workers say they are grateful for the student support the Vise members have marshalled.

Rita Warnock, a library worker, says student support "has helped a lot. It has catalyzed university movement on the issues on several occasions, and it is a real moral boost for us."

Helen Kurtz, Brown's associate head librarian, stares down from her office in the Rockefeller library at the strikers, as she downplays the effects the strike has had on the library. "I'm sure they'd like to think we're suffering a lot more than we are," she pauses. "But total use is down, and we are all pinched."

Talks in the library workers walkout broke off at the beginning of the month; no new talks are currently scheduled. The arrested students face up to a year in jail and fines of $500 on the charge of obstructing a public thoroughfare; in addition, they will come up for an internal hearing before the University Committee on Student Affairs, possible sometime next week. The internal proceeding, which some students say they hope to turn into a "circus with as many rings as possible," could result in suspension from Brown.