Brown Invokes Ban on Liquor; Frats May Die

Brown University administrators reached an impasse yesterday as the result of open student opposition to President Wriston's decision to enforce a 20-year-old edict on alcohol and women in dormitories.

The regulation states that there should be no mixed parties in university dormitories except when properly chaperoned in the lounges. Also, no liquor may be served at these parties or at any other time.

In response to the decision, the Cammarian Club--the student government which controls student discipline through a system of student courts--has come out against the new policy and refuses to take responsibility for its enforcement.

As an alternative, the club proposed that ground floor rooms be made into temporary lounges, since there were only two permanent ones in the whole college, and that liquor be served in the lounges at properly chaperoned parties.

Vote Favors Alternative

When the club placed its counterproposal on its annual election ballot last week as a referendum, over 50 per cent of the student body voted 1224 to 78 against the administration.

As a result of the edict, all fraternities will get rid of their bars this week. The fraternity system is not expected to survive if the ruling is enforced. Student opinion holds this expectation one of the main reasons behind Wriston's decision to evoke the long-dormant rule.

Speaking about the small number of dormitory lounges, Dean Robert W. Kenny said that they were "unsatisfactory because students used the lounges as an intermediate station to get girls into their rooms."

Last spring two Brown undergraduates died in fraternity roughhouses allegedly brought about by drunkenness. One fell down a flight of stairs and cracked his head; the other was stabbed with an ice-pick in a Providence bar.