Daily Herald the Brown
vol. cxliv, no. 27 | Monday, March 2, 2009 | Serving the community daily since 1891
Researchers view funds with optimism, caution By Brigitta Greene Senior Staf f Writer
Hang Nguyen / Herald
The Brown Band skated into its final performance of the year on ice during the Brown-Colgate hockey game.
First band on skates plays last show of year By Dan Alexander Staff Writer
The game ended, and the Brown and Colgate hockey players unlaced their skates in the locker rooms after a 3-3 tie. But the small crowd stayed in its seats and waited. “Ladies and Gentlemen, friends and alumni,” a voice yelled over the loudspeaker. “Presenting an
organization that’s trying not to get cut from this year’s budget, it’s the Brown University — guess we’ll be replacing that drum with a garbage
FEATURE can — Band!” For the last time this season, the Brown Band took the ice carrying flutes and clarinets, trumpets and
Group recalls ’68 walkout, past of student activism By Alicia Chen Contributing Writer
inside
Forty years ago, 65 black students walked off campus and boycotted classes for the better part of a week to protest what they saw as a lack of commitment to minority students at Brown and its then-sister school, Pembroke College. The boycotters represented more than three quarters of the schools’ combined black enrollment, and a major demand of the walkout — which began Dec. 5, 1968 and lasted five days — was for black students to make up 11 percent of Pembroke’s next incoming class. On Friday, students, faculty and alums gathered on Pembroke’s campus, now long since merged with Brown’s, to commemorate the walkout and hear a panel discuss the protest and its lessons in front of an audience that filled most of SmithBuonanno 106. The panel discussion, “Student Activism: Past, Present and Future,” included seven walkout participants,
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tubas. Some of them raced out on hockey skates while others barely stayed balanced on their figure skates. In a performance that could be best described as organized chaos, the band played for over 10 minutes. In between songs, the announcer read a script making fun of movies, the Sharpe Refectory and continued on page 4
Researchers across the countr y are looking with anticipation at the federal stimulus bill, hopeful it will provide a brief respite from years of financial strain. The $787 billion economic stimulus package, signed into law two weeks ago, allocates $10.4 billion to the National Institutes of Health — the major funding agency for biomedical research — and $3 billion to the National Science Foundation. The money comes at a critical time for researchers. In the last decade, grants from the NIH have become dramatically more competitive. The agency’s paylines — the percent of total applications that receive funding— fell from 32 percent in 1999 to 24 percent by 2008. “The last 10 years have been horrible,” said Assistant Professor of Medical Science Richard Freiman. He, along with the research community as a whole, is hoping the stimulus bill is an indication of future federal support for the sciences. Congress has set a deadline of September 2010 for allocating the stimulus funds. Beyond that date, funding may remain elusive,
forcing researchers like Freiman to spend more time chasing after grants than, say, pursuing runaway mice. “We don’t want the faculty and undergraduates to become accountants,” said Robert Tamassia, chair of the Department of Computer Science. Though the stimulus may create relief in the short term, it remains unclear to what degree President Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress will be able to boost research spending in the long term. “It feels like it’s a roller coaster,” Freiman said. “You just have to hold on until you get back to the top.” A funding bottleneck Freiman runs a small lab in the Brown research building at 70 Ship Street, using mice to study transcriptional control mechanisms and organ development in mammals. But recently, teaching a class, managing his lab and writing grant applications have forced him to leave his students to run the majority of the research. “It’s pretty standard to be juggling three balls at once,” he said, continued on page 2
NAACP head speaks on Obama era
two other alums from the period and two current students. The event also featured a documentary about the walkout by Julia Liu ’06 and Alison Klayman ’06. Elmo Terry-Morgan ’74, associate professor of Africana studies, moderated the event. Shut out The protest had its beginnings in a letter sent by a group of black Pembroke women to their dean of admissions requesting changes to Pembroke’s policies regarding black students. But when they weren’t satisfied with the response, they set a deadline for the walkout and were soon joined by a group of Brown students in making the threat. The walkout ultimately lasted five days and earned a number of concessions from the University, drawing national attention. The former students on the panel, especially the former Pembroke women who helped spark the walkout, said that in 1968 it was continued on page 4
By Ellen Cushing Senior Staf f Writer
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is in the process of “retooling” itself, widening its focus from civil rights to more general human rights, including effective law enforcement, quality education and financial security for black Americans, the organization’s president, Benjamin Jealous, told a crowded Salomon 101 Friday afternoon. Jealous, who took of fice in September and is the organization’s youngest president ever, spoke as part of the Department of History’s symposium, “Abraham Lincoln for the Twenty-First Century,” which honored the Lincoln Bicentennial. In an interview with The Herald before the speech, Jealous explained the evolution of his organization — which was founded 100 years ago last month in an effort to stop lynchings — using law enforcement as an example. “We were founded to stop extra-
Federic Lu / Herald
NAACP President Benjamin Jealous spoke as part of the Department of History’s symposium, “Abraham Lincoln for the Twenty-First Century.”
judicial homicides — the killing of black men suspected of crimes without being properly charged,” he said. “Fortunately, that has stopped, but at the same time, the undergirding aspiration (of the NAACP), which is to feel safe and secure in this country, is elusive because of high rates of homicide in the black community.” The organization is mounting a “big national campaign around ef-
fective law enforcement — ending racial profiling, ending police killing of unarmed civilians, dramatically increasing the rate at which murders in the black community are solved,” he said. During the lecture and the interview, he also discussed the organization’s focus on moving past the desegregation battles of continued on page 6
Arts, 5
Sports, 7
Editorial, 10
Opinions, 11
‘Bedazzled’
Working Over Time
A new RISD exhibition features the disruptive camouflage of World War I
Lacrosse, hockey and basketball played past regulation four times over the weekend.
globalize, we must The editorialists urge administrators to stay the international course.
CHANGE OF COURSE Katharine Hermann ’09 reflects on her course selections at Brown.
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