Students: Peaceful Revolutionary

Ira Charles Magaziner is a former Long Island pizza-eating champion who has prodded Brown University into some of the liveliest academic reforms in the U.S. He did it by sheer intelligence, without manhandling a single dean. Last month Magaziner delivered the senior class valedictory, collected his magna cum laude degree in an interdisciplinary program called Human Studies, twirled his Phi Beta Kappa key and looked ahead to two years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. Brown itself looked ahead to sweeping curriculum changes that might never have occurred without Magaziner.

Persuasive Logic. Unlike many campus radicals, Magaziner is a first-generation collegian, the grandson of Russian immigrants and the son of an office manager in a tomato-processing plant. He had no sooner arrived at Brown from Lawrence (N.Y.) High School than he began shaking up the university. As a freshman, he persuaded the university administration to abolish the unpopular food-contract system, which forced his classmates to pay an annual rate covering all meals. As a sophomore, he organized a seminar to study curriculum reform. It was so successful that he was paid $800 from the dean's special fund to spend a summer writing up the seminar's recommendations. Result: the 415-page "Magaziner Report," which Harvard Sociologist David Riesman has called "a herculean effort, an impressive document."

Magaziner's principal recommendations are that collegians be allowed to choose courses in broad intellectual areas that interest them, rather than follow fixed requirements, and that conventional grades be abolished in favor of "pass" or "no credit." His report also urges professors to focus on concepts rather than narrow facts, and to work far more closely with individual students. These ideas are not especially original; Magaziner's achievement is the persuasive logic of his presentation.

Gab and Clout. Though his report got wide attention, Magaziner felt that Brown was slow in carrying it out. As a result, he staged mass rallies to push his reforms, organized three-student teams to work on every faculty member and turned his gift of gab on the administration. As president of the student body (and class president for all four years), he had the clout to mobilize hundreds of disciples with a single telephone call, which set off a chain of calls across the campus. In May, the university finally approved the new curriculum for a two-year experimental period.

Magaziner, who wrote his senior honors thesis on "The Decline of Metaphysical Religion and Values in the West," is now preparing to joust with the authorities at Oxford's Balliol College. They expect him to follow a traditional doctoral program; he wants a sweeping, cross-disciplinary plan of his own design. Having already shaken up a 200-year-old university, Magaziner is not much intimidated by one that is three times older. Meantime, back at Brown, his impact can be measured by a widely quoted campus graffito: "Ira, please see me—God." "You come to me—Ira."