It was a confrontation taken right out of the late '60s: a group of students joined in a workers' picket line, confronted a university administration with demands, and vowed to remain where they were until those demands were met.

But the scene at Brown University Wednesday ended with an alarming twist. University administrators, claiming that students blocking a food services delivery truck lost their "immunity" as students by joining an on-campus picket line, called in Providence police and had 11 students arrested.

It was an incident without precedent and one that may have farreaching repercussions for the students involved and for the course that the strikes by nearly 400 Brown workers, now in its fourth month, will take.

Reaction to the arrests from many Brown students was swift and highly critical. A committee of student government representatives released a statement yesterday calling the incident "grossly reprehensible, and a violation of every principle for which this institution is supposed to stand."

"Throughout the three months that Brown University has been plagued by the strike, our administration has repeatedly and emphatically stated its abhorrence to having outside intervention in our `family' dispute. Now they have done this," the statement continued.

Nearly 300 students yesterday staged a lunch-hour demonstration to protest the arrests outside Brown's university hall, as members of the Brown Corporation met inside.

But behind the appearance of student outrage and activism at Brown, there seems to lie a simple feeling of frustration and impatience with an administration that has allowed the strike to stretch on into the school year, thus interfering with food and library services and library maintenance.

"Most people don't know the technical points of the issue," Nathan Bicks, president of the Brown student government, said yesterday. "They're just angry with the administration for not coming to an open forum on this, for doing what they did--there is a feeling of frustration and disgust."

As administration officials point out, however, the strike failed to galvanize support squarely behind the workers.

Instead, the impetus for the student protest came--as it did in Brown's 1975 anti-tuition-hike student walkout--from a small, active group of students. Bicks estimates that of Brown's approximately 4000 students, "only about 1000" actively support the union in the strike.

The response of others has ranged from tacit acceptance to outright hostility.

Brown freshmen have not yet spent a day at the University without experiencing abnormally long dining hall lines, understaffed libraries and poorly maintained rooms. Many seem bewildered by the situation.

Others express a "them-or-us" attitude toward the labor dispute, which centers primarily on union wage demands. "My reasons for opposing the strikers' demands are simple," Jane Spectre, a junior, said this week. "If we give them a pay raise, we'll get a tuition hike."

Michael Curtin, one of the arrested students said he believes "some students would like to have seen us run over by the truck" the protesters tried to block before their arrest.

Bicks, however, remains hopeful that Thursday's incident will spark renewed mainstream student support for the striking workers.

"This campus has a heritage of student activism to fall back on," he said.