A spate of belt-tightening at northeastern universities set off a spate of strikes and demonstrations of a magnitude unseen since the '60s.

It took a few years for the financial situation in the real world to penetrate the Ivy walls, but it happened. Schools like Brown, Brandeis and UMass all had to make drastic cuts in financial aid, student services and even faculty teaching time, and all those schools saw more strident student protest than they had in a long time--at Brown and Brandeis, students forcibly occupied university buildings.

When the smoke cleared, though, it didn't look as though any belts had been loosened. Brown is planning a 20 per cent cut in the size of its faculty over the nest three years--something unprecedented in recent Ivy League history.

At Harvard things aren't so bad. Dean Rosovsky is being a little less generous with tenure allotments, and according to Robert E. Kaufmann '62, assistant dean of the faculty for financial affairs. Harvard is "chipping away with earnestness in a great many areas." But there is still money to be had--as Kaufmann put it, "the playing field may just be a bit wider here."