After a year and a half of intensive preparation, student reformers at Brown, led by BMOC Ira Magaziner, issued a 450- page report recommending extensive changes in the school's undergraduate curriculum. Their report was released in January, 1968; yet by June, it remained virtually unread.

This is the concluding portion of a two-part report on how educational reform was achieved at Brown, and what Brown's experience suggests about curriculum changes at Harvard.

MAGAZINER returned to school in the fall of 1968 determined not to allow his Report to lie about unread. Now a senior and "the head of everything at Brown," as one student put it, he and his followers organized themselves into what they called the Central Committee. They educated other students about the purposes of educational reform. They spoke in dorms, published a newsletter, and drew on their contacts to organize rallies of a thousand students in behalf of their curriculum proposals. They sought to see every professor in the University in his office to discuss the specifics of the Report.

The Report had no summary. "You knew they were really going to press you," one faculty member recalls, "and you had to read the whole damn thing."

Finally, in December, President Heffner appointed an extraordinary nine-member committee- headed by associate provost Paul F. Maeder- with a mandate to propose changes in educational philosophy and practice to the Faculty. Magaziner, Miss Friedman, and Friedel were named to the group, as was Eckelmann, an associate dean of Pembroke, and three professors.

The Maeder Committee published its Interim Report last April 10, and the faculty set May 5 for debate on its recommendations. The Report endorsed the Modes of Thought program, and the dropping of the old distribution system; but as a concession to anticipated faculty opposition, it included a requirement that all freshmen take at least a year's worth of MOT courses in each of the three areas of Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences, as well as a semester of math.

The Committee also endorsed the abolition of letter grading in favor of a complete satisfactory/no credit plan. In recognition of what the subsequent faculty legislation called the "considerable risks involved for the student who wants to enter graduate or professional school, were grades to be eliminated entirely at this time," the Report recommended the compilation of "dossiers" of student papers and essay exams.

The Maeder Report did not meet with universal approval. One faction of the faculty opposed the emphasis put on the student's "self-realization" in the statement of educational principles, which followed closely the Magaziner formulation. Another faction thought the MOT proposal too ambiguous. The managing editor of the Brown Daily Herald warned that "without a strict grading system, very little academic work would be accomplished." The reformers, he wrote, "have greatly overrated the real concern of the undergraduate at Brown."

THE politicking during this last stage of reform was intense. Student leaders (who participated in the final faculty debates) met in midnight strategy sessions, and got together another successful rally in support of their proposals. The faculty stayed in session three consecutive days (classes were canceled the second day), and, on May 8, voted to:

Endorse, in principle, a statement on undergraduate education which stressed equally the individual student's "intellectual" and "personal" growth;

Adopt the idea of ungraded Modes of Thought courses (for freshmen and sophomores) but discard the requirement that students take a certain number of them;

Allow students to take all their other courses on a satisfactory/no credit basis, but permit professors to give grades (A, B, C, NC) if students want to receive them;

Reduce the number of satisfactory semesters of work required for the A.B. degree from 30 to 28, and not record in students' files courses for which (for one reason or another) they receive no credit;

Retain the concept of concentration as "the focal point for a student's ... educational experience," but allow students to devise (in consultation with an appropriate member of the faculty) their own concentration programs centered on either a discipline or a "problem ... or broad question";

Omit all distribution requirements;