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.