( This is the first of a two-part series on recent changes in the undergraduate curriculum at Brown University. The second part will appear in Friday's CRIMSON.

LAST MARCH, eight Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates published a full page manifesto in the CRIMSON announcing a Conspiracy Against Harvard Education. "That people at Harvard are deeply dissatisfied should be obvious to anybody who has any contact with students," they wrote. "Feelings of unhappiness, discontent, alienation, and unfulfillment are everywhere. We do not know what education is. We do know that what Harvard calls education is failing us."

Harvard education, they said, was making students unhappy, despite the fact that "when a person is happy . . . his capacity for learning is enormous."

The group wasn't sure what should be done, but as first step, they hoped to sponsor a "Festival of Light" during the first week of the classes after spring vacation. In fact, they hoped, everyone would skip classes, and spend the days talking to other people in the community, exploring ideas, and trying to find the happiness that would make learning possible again.

Instead, by Wednesday of that first week after spring break, students had decided to occupy University Hall. That afternoon, the University's highest officials concluded that Harvard could do nothing but loose the police on its own students. The next morning, they did.

In the bitter months that followed, students understandably forgot about their aim of finding out why Harvard's education was failing them, and what they could do about that failure. Another semester of lectures and sections and reading period and papers and exams and final grades is now almost gone, and it is only on Dean May's initiative that some students and instructors in the Houses are trying to come up with ideas for reforming Harvard's undergraduate curriculum.

Last April, while this campus was caught up in the conflict between students and the University's administration, students and administrator at another Ivy League college were working together to effect broad and significant educational reforms, so that Brown University now has, in many respects, what it proudly calls "the most flexible and progressive undergraduate curriculum to be found in any major American university today." Its faculty debated curriculum reform for three consecutive days. Before it adjourned, it decided to take a major first step toward abolishing all grades. It also abolished "distribution" requirements, reduced the number of semester courses required for the A. B. degree, and voted to encourage students to undertake as much independent study-both singly and in groups-as they could manage.

This is how it happened.

Brown is, by Ivy League standards, a relatively small university. It has an undergraduate college for men, and Pembroke for women, which together enrolled 3900 students last year, and a graduate school with another 1000 students. Even these figures reflect a deliberate policy of recruitment begun in 1955. Brown has no professional schools.

Thus, even in the past decades of university expansion and specialization, Brown preserved a tradition of commitment to undergraduate education. The president of the university was regarded as the leading member of the faculty as well as chief administrator and fund-raiser. Most of the initiative for improvements at Brown came from the president's office.

"Brown was know as a strong president' university," one student who was active in the educational reform effort says. "Simultancously, we lost a strong president and acquired Ira Magaziner."

MAGAZINER came to Brown from Lawrence, N.Y. as a freshman in September, 1965. (Harvard turned down his application.) He graduated last June, with a Rhodes scholarship for study at Oxford. Students and faculty alike still speak of him with something approaching awe. "Ira was the most brilliant student we've had around here for a long time," says F. Donald Eckelman, the dean of the college. "I think it'll be a dozen years before we see another like him."

Magaziner was a restless-perhaps a compulsive-activist. As a freshman, he led a campaign to undo the requirement that students buy all their meals in campus dining halls. He was elected president of his class, a post he was to win again each year he was at Brown. In short, as one senior recalls, "Ira was amazing. He never did anything that didn't work out. And when he was done, the class had an enormous surplus."

Morcover, when he was done last spring, the University had committed itself to recruiting more black students, and to phasing out Brown's ROTC units: Magaziner played a key role in the negotiations between Brown's administrator and its blacks, and helped lead a student anti-ROTC sit-in at a meeting of the executive committee of the Brown Corporation. He also led several hundred members of last year's graduating class in turning their backs on Henry A. Kissinger '50, President Nixon's Assistant for National. Security Affairs. Kissinger was receiving an honorary degree; the gesture, Magaziner said, was to show the administration that students wanted an end to the war in Vietnam not because it was expensive or inconvenient or unnecessary, but "because it's wrong." In his commencement address, he called for a "cultural revolution" in society's values.

But Magaziner will be remembered at Brown primarily because he, and a small group of other students, decided that they weren't satisfied with the education they were receiving, and did something about it.