Behind the Iron Stockade

"What is President Wriston trying to do?" cried one Brown University alumnus. "Go back to the Middle Ages?" What had excited the alumnus was the plan for a new two-block, $10 million quadrangle, announced last week by Henry M. Wriston, as part of a long-term project to centralize student housing.

The nine new Georgian-style buildings would be modern enough, with ample room to house a giant refectory and 750 students, including Brown's 17 fraternities. But a 10-ft. dry moat would surround them all, and a bristling 6-ft. iron stockade would surround that. There would be three entrances to the quad, each with a guardhouse manned by campus police. Underground, a network of passageways would allow students to go to dinner without getting drenched in wet weather.

For such an unusual design, President Wriston had his reason and it had nothing to do with medievalism. For some time the Brown campus, with university-owned houses scattered over several Providence blocks, had been easy prey for sneak thieves. In one year they had made 'off with more than $8,000 worth of student property. President Wriston thought that the stockade would put a stop to that.

Bruins figured that the new layout would put a stop to something else: the traditional rambunctiousness of the fraternities. During pledge week last winter, fraternity high jinks ended in one student death, several hundred dollars worth of property damage, and a finger-shaking from President Wriston, who called the fraternities "discriminatory, nondemocratic, and anti-intellectual."

From now on, each fraternity would have its own wing in one of the new buildings, a separate entrance and a private dining hall. But it would now be squarely under the eyes and thumbs of the university. Moaned one stalwart Greek-letter man: "The moat is just a grave--Wriston dug it for the frats."

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