As Berkeley's 27,000 students returned from a long Christmas recess last week, administrators, a few faculty members, and student government leaders worked furiously to complete a package of reforms that will, they think, avert any future violence on the campus.

But, even as Chancellor Roger W. Heyns met with student representatives at his home, there were indications that the organizers of last month's five-day strike -- many of them non-students -- will not be satisfied with mere reform.

"There can be a student revolution here," Karen Lieberman, a former graduate student in sociology, told strikers at mass rallies. "What is happening on this campus is happening all over the world: it's student power."

What Mrs. Lieberman (known as the "Madame Nhu" of Berkeley since her suspension last spring) says -- and the way she says it -- tend to arouse genuine rancor among university administrators who have been burned before by brushes with her and other non-students. But even the most bitter administrator acknowledges that, although he would like to ignore her, Mrs. Leibermann knows what she's talking about this time.

The truth of what Mrs. Lieberman says cannot, however, disguise another reality that is emerging slowly from the tangle of McLuhanistic propaganda that emanates from the Berkeley campus. The demands of the students no longer mesh with those of the non-students; there is growing hostility between the two groups, which is likely to make the non-students turn to more destructive forms of protest as the university administration tries to assuage the more moderate student faction.

Students -- even those who refused to go along with the boycott of classes -- are demanding greater participation in the affairs of the university and want to share in at least some of the actual decision-making. The national press may have given more attention to the mass sit-ins, the abortive Filthy Speech Movement, and the famed nude parties in Berkeley, but the real issue on the campus is student (not non-student) power.

Strong faculty and administrative support exists for some of the students' demands, but the students are unlikely to get anywhere until they dissociate themselves from the so-called non-students on campus. The most sympathetic faculty members cannot countenance the presence of these "agitators" in campos organizations; other adult Californians refuse to believe that people like Mrs. Lieberman and Mario Savio, a leader in the 1964 Free Speech Movement, have any right at all to set foot on Sproul Plaza.

The Board of Regents probably exemplify the feelings of most Californians about the non-students. At their emergency meeting on December 5, the Regents announced that they "oppose the participation of outsiders who instigate and direct violations of university rules." They also directed the administration to take immediate action to prevent non-students' "interference with campus activities."

Probably most students, in order to get what they want from the administration, will be willing to junk the demands that have been advanced for giving non-students the same political rights as students. Only a few of the most fervent consider the non-student issue the most important at stake.

Non-Student Purge

The Chancellor, recognizing this division among students, has cagily agreed to talk only with the more moderate faction. Both he and Clark Kerr, the president of the entire University of California, have reassured the Regents that students and faculty, working together, can "purge" the non-student element from the university.

This view is shared to some extent by the leaders of the Associated Students of the University of California -- the student government -- who supported last month's strike and withdrew their endorsement only when the faculty demanded an end to the boycott. Because the ASUC held firm despite repeated overtures from the Chancellor to speak with their representatives alone, the ASUC is more widely respected than in 1964.

Most students, in fact, have forgotten that Savio at that time denounced the student government as "the sandbox" and pointed to the ASUC president as a helpless and forgotten figure on the sidelines. Today, president Dan McIntosh is the chief arbiter between the administration and the strikers.

McIntosh has said publicly that he regards the strikers' demand that off-campus political organizations be given the same kind of treatment accorded government agencies as "irrelevant." What is relevant, McIntosh thinks, is the creation of a student organization -- something more powerful than the ASUC certainly -- that will have the authority to determine policies on political activity.

The faculty, at its emergency meeting, endorsed McIntosh's idea in part and called for the creation of a "joint faculty-student commission to consider new modes of governance and self-regulation appropriate to a modern American university community." This commission, they recommended, should give serious consideration to the "concerns and grievances expressed by so many of our students" during the strike.