B.U. Students Block The Marines

Two hundred demonstrators, unimpressed by reports that the student movement is dead, stopped Marine Corps recruiting at Boston University Thursday.

Massing in the entrances to the Castle, a medieval-looking building on Bay State Road, the protesters spent eight hours keeping prospective Marines--and everyone else--out of the building.

Captain Michael H. Collier left the Castle--which he had entered early in the morning while protesters guarded the nearby University Placement building -- at 5 p.m. exactly, with a forceful police escort and B.U. vice-president Daniel Finn for added safety.

The police earlier had linked arms to stop student surges into the Castle courtyard and beaten back one attempt to scale its walls.

But compared to a similar demonstration at B.U. last year, which ended in a battle with Boston police and 33 arrests. Thursday's demonstration was relatively peaceful.

The University made no attempt to clear a path to the building, and protesters joked with police and with a Northeastern University student who tried unsuccessfully for two hours to push through the picket line.

Photographers, for want of more exciting moments, snapped frantic shots of physicist Murray B. Levin '48, into whose face an enterprising demonstrator affectionately tossed a pie.

Several B.U. professors besides Levin also joined the demonstration. When the crowd briefly considered more militant action, historian Howard Zinn joined Ira D. Helfand '71, a former Harvard student required to withdraw in 1971, in speaking against it.

A B.U. spokesman said Thursday that the university had not decided whether to discipline demonstrators, but Daniel Del Vecchio, B.U.'s head of program resources, reportedly threatened to proscribe B.U. SDS, which helped organize the demonstration, if the organization participated in illegal activity such as preventing people from entering a building.