The Squatters of Miffland

The student ghetto has become a familiar part of the university city, an often dilapidated, cloistered seedbed for experiments in living. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the ghetto is Miffland--a six-block area of shabby frame homes standing precariously in the orbit of the University, the state capitol and downtown Madison. Three months ago, a small group of Mifflanders occupied four homes, paid no rent and refused to get out; later they declared the houses community property. They are still there, amid mounting controversy. TIME Correspondent Rich Rein toured the rhetorical barricades last week and reported:

THE revolution came to Miffland disguised as an ordinary rent dispute. William Bandy, 38, a gregarious former high school teacher turned full-time real estate speculator, bought four Miffland homes in July for $200,000 and came to a tentative agreement with the young men and women who were living in them: they would pay an additional $250-a-month rent and sign a lease. But the tenants--some students, some "street people" who come and go but normally number around 30--soon changed their minds about both items. From there, it was only a hop, skip and a "people's tribunal" to their decision to pay no rent at all and proclaim that, for Bandy and his property at least, the revolution was here. Bandy is poorly cast as Miffland's capitalist pig. He publicly criticized Mayor William Dyke in May 1969, when police broke up an unauthorized block party, touching off a three-day riot. Nevertheless, confronted by squatters, he dutifully took the law-and-order route --with unhappy results. When he sought a court order to evict them, he was turned down because he lacked an adequate description of his tenants or their names so that police could carry out the order.

Bandy then took matters into his own hands. Because the tenants had changed house locks, he kicked in one of his own doors in an effort to identify them; he was chased off. He enlisted a local motorcycle gang for a show of force; the occupants displayed a shotgun and would not be moved.

The closest Bandy came to success was early one morning in September, when he sneaked into one house while its five occupants slept and flushed them outdoors by spreading a pungent fumigant as a sort of psy-war comment on their personal hygiene. They regained the building. The nearest he came to disaster was the day he charged up in a panel truck and had to retreat under a hail of rocks, bricks and, he claims, a bullet through the side of the truck.

For the normally good-humored Bandy, the situation is no laughing matter. "These kids are dreaming," he says. "They don't care about property. This is a phony ghetto. These kids confuse filth with poverty. Filth is a habit, not an economic condition. . . We have gone from minority rights to minority rule. When 20 kids can decide where police can or cannot go, that's sick," he says.

The closest thing to a spokesman for the occupants is Jerry Weisgrau, 23, a bearded, long-haired nonstudent who came to Madison six months ago from New York City. Says Weisgrau: "What we are doing is creating new institutions, new ways for people to deal with one another . . . We don't believe in private property."

Ever since Miffland established a clear identity as a student quarter, the 2,000 to 3,000 young people living there have made it a showcase for far-out student thought and action. But not everyone buys what he sees in a showcase, and most of the university community does not buy the squatters' turn toward guns or their limited revolution. So far, Weisgrau leads a lonely band.

Bandy also stands forlornly on the philosophical battlefield. Mayor Dyke, a Republican law-and-order man whose police are in a standstill cease-fire with Miffland, bemoans the permissiveness of the courts and the behavior of the Mifflanders, but he also expresses concern about the rights of Bandy's antagonists. His caution about a police move that might provoke a new riot is clearly justified by Miffland's history of police-student confrontations. Still, he would be neither human nor political if he did not have a smarting memory of Bandy's 1969 denunciation of him.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.