Muscle and Mercy

CAMPUS COMMUNIQUE

While most student protesters focused on Moratorium demonstrations last week, some found energy for other causes. Officials responded with muscle, tempered with mercy. Items:

-- At Fordham University in The Bronx, 36 students barricaded themselves inside the administration building for seven hours to protest the school's failure to abolish ROTC. The students used lead pipes and buckets of hot water to repulse unarmed campus guards but fled when city police arrived. They left behind ransacked offices and a white bed sheet with the word revolution scrawled across it in red. Six students were arrested, and at least six campus guards were injured, one seriously.

-- At Michigan State University and the University of Notre Dame, students tried to mount demonstrations against General Electric recruiters to show solidarity with striking electrical workers. Both protests fizzled when only a handful of students (15 at Notre Dame, 13 at M.S.U.) turned out for the picket lines.

-- At the University of Texas, police used clubs and Mace to disperse a crowd of 1,000 students and nonstudents who had gathered at the campus Union to protest a new decision that makes the Chuck Wagon snack bar off-limits for nonstudents. The decision was made by the student-dominated Union board following charges by the Austin district attorney that the snack bar was a hotbed of dope pushing and prostitution. This time the police were called by a student: Steve Van, 21, president of the

Union board. Eight demonstrators were arrested.

-- At Yale University, 47 students suspended for occupying the personnel office were reinstated on disciplinary probation for the rest of the year. The building seizure was the first in Yale's recent history; intended to make officials retract the firing of a black woman cafeteria employee, it worked. Said Dean John Wilkinson, head of the undergraduate discipline committee, explaining the students' reinstatement: "This time, and this time only, we decided to show mercy."

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