Brown University is eliminating tuition for students whose parents earn less than $60,000, after decisions by fellow Ivy League universities to bolster financial aid as their endowments grow.

The university, in Providence, R.I., said on Saturday that it also planned to substitute grants for student loans in the financial aid packages of students whose families earned less than $100,000 a year. The new program cuts reliance on loans for all students regardless of family income, the university said in a statement posted on its Web site.

Brown also announced plans to increase tuition by 3.9 percent for the 2008-9 academic year to $36,928. With room and board, the costs are $47,740 for one year.

"Since 2001, Brown has made financial aid for our students one of our highest priorities," Brown's president, Ruth J. Simmons, said in the statement. "Today, we take another major step forward to ensure that our nation's best students from lower- and middle-income families can attend Brown and graduate without the enormous burden of college debt."

Brown's action follows similar moves by Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and Stanford.

The speaker had hardly finished his first sentence when about 25 Yale Law School students in the audience stood up and sheathed their heads in black trash bags, in imitation of hooded military prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The students were protesting an appearance at the Law School on Thursday evening by Jay Bybee, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit who, when he was head of the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel, signed off on a controversial policy for interrogation and detention of "military combatants" — what critics have labeled the "torture memo."

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But as he began to speak, the protesters, clustered in the center seats, stood and pulled the bags over their heads. A few other audience members clapped, several of the protesters said afterward. Bybee, visibly annoyed, stopped speaking.

Yale students dressed as ninjas staged a mock attack on Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman last week, reenacting a great installment from xkcd, a fantastic webcomic. Stallman came to Yale to give a talk on DRM at the debating society, and confronted the ninjas "with good humor and grace."