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.

*****

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."

*****

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.