But at a meeting held after the rally yesterday Yale administrators rejected demonstrators' request to keep the monument as a permanent structure, demanding that it be taken down each night and rebuilt the next morning and that it be permanently removed at the end of the week.

Holtzblatt said students did not plan to obey this ruling.

In the past, Levin has said he will arrest any students attempting to occupy a university building, but Holtzblatt said he did not expect the sleep-in to result in any arrests.

"We're not interfering with [Yale's] ability to do business," he said. "I don't think he could justify arresting us."

Yale students said they planned the rally to coincide with the founding conference of the WRC, to be held in New York this weekend.

The FLA, organized a year before the WRC, has attracted more than 130 universities and colleges as members, including Harvard, but the WRC has gained almost 20 members in the past month and now has at least 35 member schools.

"It reflects that there is a growing momentum behind the anti-sweatshop movement and the Workers Rights Consortium," said Maria A. Roeper, the WRC's coordinator. "It's obviously a crescendo of involvement."

Three Ivy League schools--Brown, Columbia and Cornell Universities--are members of the WRC.