Taking stock
Commencement 2009
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD
Pete Fallon
Editor’s Note Graduation is usually a time for looking ahead. Trying to find answers in the future is a natural response to the current economic state of the world. Taking a step back to consider how far we’ve come, however, also proves instructive — both for individual graduates and the University. “Even the best-laid plans” takes a step back from the economy’s effect on Brown, while “A troubled past,” a story about Brown’s handling of financial problems in four different decades, puts the current crisis in context. Looking back also shows us what we’ve accomplished that can help as we move forward. Stories about students’ efforts in Katrina and involvement with environmental initiatives show that Brown students have the skills, passion and intellect to get them through difficult times. We hope you enjoy this retrospection.
EDITORS Simmi Aujla Ross Frazier Taylor Barnes
Chris Gang Irene Chen Lindsey Meyers
Pomp Commencement Schedule Senior Orators Honorary Degree Recepients
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Circumstance Green-thinking seniors leave their footprints Even the best laid plans... How many ways can the U. say recession? TWTP turns 50 ‘Internationalization’ slowly gets defined A troubled past Year after year, helping New Orleans
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Commentary Corporation controversy Reflecting on 50 years of Brown sports
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Senior Profiles Alison Cohen Rakim Brooks Jonathan Warren, Matthew Reichel and Nicholas Young Editors’ columns Will fortune favor the brave? I was graduated from Brown Fortunate circumstances
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Etc. Looking back: A timeline of 2005-2009 The Herald’s senior survey Senior comics
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WRITERS Jenna Stark Lauren Fedor Hannah Moser Ellen Cushing Sydney Ember
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Brigitta Greene Dan Alexander Emmy Liss Sophia Li Jyotsna Mullur
DESIGN Julien Oullet Katerina Wright Chaz Kelsh Cover photo by Min Wu
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COMMENCEMENT 2009 SCHEDULE OF MAJOR EVENTS Friday, May 22 5:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. Brown Bear Buffet, one of Brown’s oldest traditions. A delicious meal and entertainment by Brown acappella groups. Sharpe Refectory, Main Dining Room 9 p.m. – 1 a.m. Campus Dance, sponsored by the Brown Alumni Association. The College Green
Saturday, May 23 9:30 a.m. – 2 p.m. Commencement Forums, a series of academic colloquia by faculty, alums and distinguished guests. 1:30 p.m. Baccalaureate Procession Formation. Graduating seniors assemble on Waterman Street, facing east toward Thayer Street, with the line beginning at Faunce Arch wearing cap and gown. In case of heavy rain, graduating seniors report directly to the First Baptist Church in America. The College Green
2:30 p.m. Baccalaureate Service. The multi-faith ceremony will be video-broadcast on the College Green and in Salomon Center and Sayles Hall. The First Baptist Church in America 4 p.m. – 6 p.m. Brown Daily Herald Alumni Reunion 195 Angell St.
Sunday, May 24 9:45 a.m. Commencement Procession Steps Off Faunce Arch, the College Green 10:30 a.m. Graduate School Convocation Ceremony awarding of degrees. Lincoln Field 11:15 a.m. The Medical School Convocation Ceremony awarding of degrees. The First Unitarian Church
12:10 p.m. College Ceremony The Grounds of the First Baptist Church in America Live video broadcast on the College Green and in Salomon Center, Sayles Hall and the Pizzitola Center. Live audiocast into Manning Chapel and Meehan Auditorium.
12:45 p.m. University Ceremony. Senior Orations and awarding of honorary degrees. The College Green
Immediately following
Departmental Ceremonies at assigned locations as listed in the Commencement program.
In the event of a severe storm, the storm plan will go into effect and be announced on the Brown University homepage. A yellow pennant will be flown on the College Green flagpole.
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S E N I O R O R ATO R S Photos by John Abromowski / Courtesy of Brown
Noor Najeeb ’09
Juliana Thorstenn ’09
When Noor Najeeb left Mequon, Wisc. for Brown in the fall of 2005, she “wasn’t sure what direction” she wanted to take. But after exploring the open curriculum, she became an international relations concentrator, focusing on politics, culture and identity. Najeeb, whose research interests focus on Middle Eastern conflict, will graduate with honors in the department. Najeeb, who served as president of the Muslim Students’ Association, was a member of the steering committee for the Janus Forum. She sat on the Brown Internationalization Committee and was also an Arabic language tutor. Most recently, she completed a research project at Miriam Hospital, reviewing medical literature written about violence against Middle Eastern women. Her speech will “reflect on insights from President Obama’s campaign,” she said, adding that she hopes to address “the essential role Brown students must play in the greater society.” Najeeb will continue her studies next fall at law school. She hopes to pursue international law and continue her research on the Middle East.
Juli Thorstenn visited 26 colleges before applying early decision to Brown. “It was the first school that I wanted to go to,” she said. Since then, the native of Garden City, N.Y. has spent the last four years pursuing a double concentration in international relations and literary arts. She has been involved in many tutoring programs since coming to Brown, including Operation Happy Birthday. For the last two years, Thorstenn has been a group leader for the Brown Language Arts program, instructing local students in creative writing. She described her speech — a “love letter” to Brown — as “very personal.” Next year, Thorstenn will work at Match Charter Public School in Boston as part of the MATCH Corps, an urban education fellowship program. She will live at the school with other recent college graduates and focus on tutoring.
— By Lauren Fedor
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Activists, scientists and the Queen of Soul: HONORARY DEGREE RECEPIENTS
Mary Elmendorf Anthropologist and peace activist Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.)
Jessie Gruman Author and health advocate Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.)
Mary Elmendorf, a peace activist and an anthropologist, is well known for her studies of Mayan women in Mexico. She has launched projects that help improve the daily quality of life in emerging countries. Elmendorf completed a Ph.D. in anthropology at the Union Graduate School in Antioch — now Union Institute and University — becoming the first staff anthropologist at the World Bank in 1975. She has also worked with agencies including the United States Agency for International Development and the World Health Organization.
Jessie Gruman has devoted her professional life as an author and health advocate to helping Americans make healthier and more informed choices about health care. She is founder and president of the Center for Advancing Health, a D.C.-based nonprofit policy institute focused on improving quality of life for all. Gruman lectures at George Washington University, and serves as a member on several boards of trustees. She is the author of two books that have received a number of academic honors, “Behavior Matters” and “AfterShock: What to Do When the Doctor Gives You — or Someone You Love — A Devastating Diagnosis.”
Jerry Fishman P’99 Engineer and businessman Doctor of Science (Sc.D.) Jerry Fishman began his career focused on product marketing, and held other management positions before being elected president and chief executive officer of Analog Devices. Fishman serves on several boards and has supported teaching and research projects in engineering at Brown. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree from City College of New York, a Master of Science degree from Northeastern University, an M.B.A. from Boston University, and a law degree from Suffolk Law School.
David Saltzman ’84 Public service advocate and humanitarian Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.) David Saltzman started his career as a public service advocate and humanitarian working with homeless families in New York, and ran two AIDS education programs for the Department of Health. He is a founding board member of the Robin Hood Foundation and has served as executive director of the nonprofit, which has raised more than $1 billion to fight poverty in New York City. Saltzman was honored with Columbia University’s Global Leadership Award, Brown’s John Hope award for
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distinguished alumni and was also named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Innovators.
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Fareed Zakaria Author and columnist Doctor of Laws (LL.D.)
Jim Young Kim ’82 Journalist Fareed Zakaria Newly elected president of Dartmouth and global health will deliver the baccalaureate advocate address on Saturday in the Doctor of Medical Science (D.M.S.) Meeting House of the First Baptist Jim Yong Kim ’82 was recently named president of Dartmouth College, becoming the first Asian-American in that position in the Ivy League. Trained as a physician, he has worked for two decades to ameliorate health conditions in the developing world. He was the director from 2004 to 2006 of the HIV/AIDS department of the World Health Organization. In 2003, he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. He has also co-founded a non-profit medical organization that serves the poor in developing countries such as Haiti and Rwanda.
Aretha Franklin Recording artist and musician Doctor of Music (D.Mus.) Aretha Franklin is known as “The Queen of Soul.” She has won 18 Grammy awards and has had several singles on the Billboard R&B Singles chart. In addition, she has won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a Grammy Living Legend Award. Franklin sang at the inauguration of President Barack Obama in January. Rolling Stone magazine has named her first on its list of “The Greatest Singers of All Time.” Franklin plans to launch her own record label, “Aretha Records.”
Church in America. Zakaria is an author, columnist and editor of Newsweek International. He has published two books, “The Future of Freedom” and “The Post-American World,” which is about the rise of the rest of the world. Graduates will hear Zakaria speak in the church, and the address will be simulcast to the College Green for others who are interested. His talk is titled “Living a Global Life.”
Richard Barker ’57 P’03 P’05 Trustee emeritus and financier Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.) Richard Barker ‘57 P’03 P’05 is the former vice chairman of the Capital Group, a mutual fund company. While at the Capital Group, he worked in global institutional portfolio management. A former Corporation trustee, he has also served on the Watson Institute’s Board of Overseers. He currently leads Brown’s campaign for financial aid, a component of the larger capital campaign. Photos courtesy of Brown.edu
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Green-thinking seniors leave their footprints by dan alexander staff writer When Aden Van Noppen ’09 arrived at Brown four years ago, she went to the activities fair and scanned the tables, looking for groups that focused on climate and energy issues. She didn’t find much. “We were shocked. We were all shocked,” Van Noppen said. Van Noppen wasn’t the only frustrated freshman. “There was this group at the time called the Brown Environmental Action Network that was relatively dormant,” said Zindzi McCormick ’09. “They were mostly having potlucks and not doing too much in terms of activism or policy or really engaging at anyone who wasn’t already engaged.” That soon changed. During their freshmen year, McCormick and Van Noppen started the emPOWER campaign — within BEAN’s structure — in an attempt to commit the University to 25 percent
renewable energy. But realizing their goal was too small and thinking BEAN was too limiting, Van Noppen and McCormick headed in a new direction. This new group broke off from BEAN and the latter more or less turned into emPOWER, Van Noppen wrote in an e-mail to the Herald. “We became the biggest, most visible student campaign on campus my sophomore year and now we are the biggest environmental group on campus.” In the four years since its creation, emPOWER has helped Brown set ambitious carbonreduction goals, establish programs to reduce energy use in the surrounding community and create multimillion-dollar projects to increase energy efficiency on campus. It’s been one of many initiatives, stemming from both students and the University, to turn Brown a bit more green. “It was crazy the transformation that had happened in these four years,” Van Noppen said. In addition to emPOWER, other campus groups with environmental aims took root. The Sustainable Food Initiative, which began in spring of 2005, has tried to increase the power of local farmers while decreasing environmental harm caused by agriculture. For example, this past year, the group took on a commitment to Real Food, which helps bring local foods into Brown’s dining halls. But SuFI member and Real Food founder David Schwartz ’09.5 said Real Food isn’t just about a single issue. “It’s actually not just about local food. It’s not just about organic food. It’s not about humanely treated animals. It’s not about, you know, nutritious food. It’s not about, you know, fairly-traded food. It’s not about which one is better than the other,” he said. “It’s about all of those things.” Working with Brown Dining Services and the administration, the Real Food initiative has helped BuDS spend an estimated 10 to 20 percent of their budget on “real” food. EmPOWER and SuFI are just two of the many programs through which students are environmentally involved today. “Now, there’s so much going on that no one can keep track of it,” Van Noppen said. When Van Noppen returned to the activities fair this year, she said she was amazed by how many student groups were tackling climate and energy issues. “That was a moment of like, ‘Wow. Things have really come a long, long way.’” But they didn’t come a long way easily. ‘Institutional inertia’ despite ‘nothing but support’ According to McCormick, national press coverage on environmental issues helped raise public awareness during the summer of 2006 — when Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” came out — which then came back to College Hill. “We were really able to ride that wave when we came back to campus fall of my sophomore year,” McCormick said. “We prepared for sort of a big fight, building up a lot of awareness
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Herald File Photo
and interest, and we just found — we essentially found nothing but support.” With energy prices rising, the University had a great financial incentive to respond to student demands for more efficient energy use at Brown, according to Vice President for Facilities Management Stephen Maiorisi. Although finding support was easy, making a real impact was more difficult. McCormick said the process of changing University policy and starting programs showed her the complex nature of University politics. “There are tons and tons of questions and unknowns and paths to go down that you only see around the first corner, and there are many, many more in the maze down that road. I think that’s sort of what we’re figuring out as we go along,” she said. Schwartz said he has also noticed the difficulty in making real changes, given that Brown is a large institution. “While there is definitely some great leadership, it has got a lot of institutional inertia. People don’t like to change the way they do business.” Tons of Change Nonetheless, environmentally-minded change has developed over the last four years. The Energy and Environmental Advisory Committee — a group of three faculty, four students and five staff — was created in the fall of 2006 to advise Facilities Management on how to save money, energy and the environment. The EEAC, of which Van Noppen is a member, created Community Carbon Use Reduction at Brown — a $350,000 fund for student projects which reduce carbon in the surrounding community. Six of the 25 student groups that applied for funds received them, according to the January 2009 Facilities Management’s Sustainability Progress Report. One of the recipients, Project 20/20, has used its money to replace regular light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs in South Providence, lowering residents’ utility bills and decreasing energy consumption. EmPOWER calls initiatives like Project 20/20 “carbon offsets” — ways Brown can offset its own carbon footprint by decreasing emissions in the community. “This idea of doing community carbon offsets is, as far as we could tell, totally new,” McCormick said. Student ideas were not just important in off-campus green
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projects. With full support of faculty and staff, students have pushed Facilities Management to reduce Brown’s own carbon footprint, Maiorisi said. Last year, the EEAC passed a policy that promised to lower the University’s greenhouse gas emissions by 42 percent of its 2007 levels in 12 years. Facilities Management expected a 4-percent reduction in emissions from 2008 to 2011. In the first year, Facilities Management surpassed its goal and reduced the University’s carbon footprint by 7.7 percent — from over 72,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions to 67,403 tons. Facilities Management enacted many strategies to reach the EEAC’s standards. With help from a $10-million loan approved by the Corporation, the department was able to begin a number of campus projects, according to Maiorisi. Facilities Management spent $2 million making campus light fixtures more efficient. They also replaced 1,400 steam traps in campus buildings to increase the efficiency of heating systems, the Sustainability Progress Report stated. The University’s Central Heating Plant, which mostly uses oil, will burn at least 30 percent natural gas from 2008 through 2020 to decrease carbon emissions. Even in this economy, Facilities Management has decided not to back down from its commitment to reduce emissions. With a $10 million loan already approved, Maiorisi said the department’s green projects will continue. In fact, most of the projects will save
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the University money within five to eight years, according to Maiorisi. For example, he said the $2 million light fixtures project is already saving the University $450,000 per year. The steam trap replacements are saving Brown an additional $300,000 each year, according the Sustainability Progress Report. But Facilities Management is not the only department responding to environmental concerns. Real change Brown Dining Services was a step ahead of most environmental efforts when they started its Community Harvest program in 2002. BuDS has continued to run and expand the program, which aims to bring local farmers’ products to students’ plates. In addition to using products grown locally, the Sharpe Refectory also recycles its leftovers — approximately 600 tons of them, according to the Sustainability Progress Report. During the non-growing season, BuDS sends some of this food to “After the Harvest,” a program that gives leftover food to the Rhode Island Community Food Bank. Other leftovers are used as compost and animal feed at local farms. “We have developed relationships with different local farmers over time that are actually coming to fruition now,” said BuDS Director Gretchen Willis. In addition to serving the farmers’ food in dining halls, BuDS hosts the Farmers’ Market on Wriston Quadrangle, where local
farmers sell their food in front of the Ratty. Community Harvest has “been an incredible thing,” Schwartz said. Schwartz said SuFI wants 20 percent of BuDS’s budget committed to what the group defines as “real” food within five years. The biggest obstacle in the way of that goal is money. According to Willis, “real” food is generally more expensive than most food BuDS buys. She said BuDS will begin an audit this summer that will go into next year to see how much money they would have if they added no new initiatives. But Willis said BuDS’s environmentally-minded programs are an essential part of the department. “I don’t think it’s something we will ever back away from.” ‘Campus climate’ and its future But McCormick said the biggest change in her time at Brown has been far less tangible. The “campus climate around environmental issues, that’s what’s changed most over the last four years,” she said. Van Noppen said students are more educated on environmental issues now. “Often times we would have to explain to people why this was important” in the initial stages of emPOWER’s first campaign, Van Noppen said. “That’s not something we really have to do any more.” Today, environmental groups are all over campus, approaching climate, energy and food concerns from different perspectives. Van Noppen, McCormick and Schwartz all agreed that the next challenge for Brown’s environmental movement is to leave its footprint on the University by uniting and making permanent these different groups. Van Noppen said that if she had four more years on campus, she “would focus on doing things to really institutionalize this stuff at Brown.” Schwartz added, “I’d love to see this ‘real’ food initiative get institutionalized.” In an effort to make environmental work a permanent part of Brown, Van Noppen and McCormick have begun working to create an Institute for Climate and Energy. With so many separate groups and movements at Brown, Van Noppen said it is important to integrate them all under one hub that includes classes, research and student groups. Schwartz said SuFI and its Real Food initiative may someday be a part of ICE, if the institute comes to fruition. According to Schwartz, one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions come from the food and agriculture business, so he said he would expect that emPOWER and SuFI may be under the same umbrella organization some day. Ultimately, McCormick said she hopes this sort of hub could have a physical space, but she recognizes that there are extra difficulties in obtaining one. “Anything that costs Brown money is not attractive, in particular right now,” she said. But, “with the new administration in Washington, there is going to be more and more science and research funding focused on environmental issues,” she added. If ICE does form, it will be after McCormick, Van Noppen and Schwartz have passed through the Van Wickle gates for the second time. Van Noppen said she is looking forward to seeing the progress Brown may make in the coming years. “I hope that the student support continues to grow and that the sophistication of the way students are acting and thinking on these issues continues to grow,” she said. “And I have no doubt — at all — that that’s going to happen. So it’s sort of a shame to be leaving.”
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EVEN THE BEST LAID PLANS...
The University’s ambitious plan for growth faces a turbulent economy by jenna stark news editor Eight years ago, the University began a plan to increase the size of its faculty, build new facilities and strengthen the endowment, all funded by the largest capital campaign in Brown’s history. But as the $1.4 billion Campaign for Academic Enrichment nears its end, new economic challenges have forced administrators to adapt in ways not many would have anticipated just a few years ago. Amid layoffs, cutbacks and a projected $800 million loss in the endowment, it is easy to wonder how Brown will move forward. But University officials said they see this challenging time as an opportunity to improve and raise the University’s caliber. The endowment, which as of last fall stood at $2.8 billion, is expected to hold only $2 billion by the end of the month. The frequency of donations and pledges has also decreased by 15 percent, according to Ronald Vanden Dorpel MA’71, senior vice president for University advancement. “Next year is going to be a tough year,” said Beppie Huidekoper, executive vice president for finance and administration. More budget reductions will be coming, she added. But Brown’s finances are a “bit more stable now,” Huidekoper said, adding that administrators are “cautiously optimistic” that the University will be able to maintain its “most critical priorities” over the next five years, including financial aid, the quality of the faculty and adequate facilities and infrastructure. Administrators are working to find ways to shrink costs given expensive policies — such as the boosted financial aid policy and smaller increases in tuition. The economy has also made more families eligible for aid than in the past. In November, President Ruth Simmons announced a hiring freeze of staff and administrators, a halt in the expansion of the Graduate School and a moratorium on salary increases. Expecting to slash $60 million in planned budget increases by 2014, Simmons also said that University administrators would be assessing capital projects to determine which renovation, technology, infrastructure and construction projects could be deferred or delayed entirely. But a few months later, as the economy continued to falter, Simmons’ plan for budget cuts did not seem to be enough. The Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, met in February to discuss Brown’s financial future. Deepening the cuts Simmons initially predicted, the Corporation decided to reduce the University’s budget by $90
million over the next five years, an additional $30 million more than Simmons’ recommendation, by delaying major capital projects and eliminating salary increases for most faculty and staff. The Corporation also approved a $6 million budget deduction for the 2010 fiscal year. Brown will have to make “sacrifices” to decrease its budget, Huidekoper said. There will be a leaner administration, frozen salaries for faculty and staff and compromises on new facilities. Difficult times While Brown’s endowment has taken a serious hit, the University is well prepared to face the weakened economy, Huidekoper said. “Brown hasn’t had to do what some other universities have had to do — borrowing externally to make payroll,” she said. “That’s both through generally a more conservative approach to our cash management and just generally being ahead of the game.” Administrators worked last spring to add liquidity to the University’s investment portfolio, Huidekoper said, adding that this had helped Brown weather the economic storm. Still, Brown will continue to lose the money that will no longer appreciate in the endowment, said Dick Spies, executive vice president for planning and senior adviser to the president. “Now that the economy looks better, even if it bounced back fairly quickly, we still have this very significant setback that occurred between September and February that we will have to live with,” Spies said. To help reduce the financial burden on the University, officials have deferred, modified and cut several planned capital projects. The Mind Brain Behavior building, slated to hold several science related departments, will now be housed in a renovated building instead of the site of the Urban Environmental Lab on Angell Street. The planned Medical Education building, which was to be funded in part by a $100 million gift that renamed the medical school, will also be placed in an existing building instead of a new construction site. Renovations of Faunce House, a new Creative Arts Center and an upgraded data center will move forward as planned. “We have been very actively looking at what we can do with less,” Huidekoper said. The University will also scale back its plans for the Nelson Fitness Center and a new swimming pool — considering more cost-effective methods such as combining the two projects. The University has so far raised $27 million for the $42 million Mind Brain Behavior building and $13 million against a
The Brown Daily Herald COMMENCEMENT 2009 goal of $42 million for the Medical Education building, according to Vanden Dorpel. After receiving an anonymous gift for the Aquatics Center, the University has raised $22.4 million against its goal of $25 million. Spies said the University’s commitment to continuing capital projects shows the long-term value of the Plan for Academic Enrichment — Simmons’ wide-ranging U. adapting to the economy blueprint for improving the University. The endowment is expected to hold “With an economic $2 billion by the end of the month, crisis — needing to make down from $2.8 billion last fall. heavy cuts — the first instinct is to say we can’t Instead of constructing a new spend money on (capibuilding for Mind Brain Behavior, tal projects),” Spies said. it will be housed in a renovated But “the Plan says even building in the most difficult times we need to find a way to A $6 million budget deduction move forward on those for 2010 fiscal year has been goals.” approved ‘New strategies’ “The worst thing to do in a crisis like this is to hunker down and do nothing,” Spies said. “If you do it for two or three D e s p i t e t h e b a d n ew s , or four years, opportuniadministrators say the capital ties don’t come back. campaign has raised $1.347 billion You just have to move so far forward.” Dean of the Faculty $22.4 million out of a goal of Rajiv Vohra P’07 said he $25 million has been raised for expects to continue the Aquatic Center, which will growing the faculty, replace the problematic Smith even if at a slower pace. Swim Center “I am expecting faculty searches will be going on,” he said. “I’m pretty confident we will be doing searches, I just don’t know how many.” Brown added nearly 100 faculty positions to the faculty A new building was to be constructed for Medical Education, now it will be placed in an existing building
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over the last six years. The University was naturally reaching “the end of the bigger expansion” and consequently planned for modest growth for this academic year, Vohra said. The University kept open its planned 45 searches to fill faculty positions, Vohra said, adding that Brown is ahead of many of its peer universities who suspended faculty searches following the economic downturn. “When other institutions are not hiring it stands to reason that it’s a particularly good time to hire,” he said. Decisions regarding the number of faculty searches made for the next academic year will be made in the summer, Vohra said. The University’s capital campaign will reach its goal of raising $1.4 billion by December 2010, Vanden Dorpel said. The capital campaign has raised $1.347 billion so far, he added. But University fundraisers have had to learn to adapt to the poor economic climate. “We’re using some new strategies,” Vanden Dorpel said. “We’re adding more challenge gifts — matching programs.” As fundraisers receive more “negative” responses during a period of economic downturn, the capital campaign has increased its activity level by adding extra mailings, phone calls and visits, Vanden Dorpel said. “When we pull out of this recession, people who are prospects will be mindful of our efforts and they will remember us and stick with us.”
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How many ways can the U. say by emmy liss features editor
Recession?
In October of 1975, amid cuts to the faculty and financial aid, then-President Donald Hornig sat down with the Herald for an hour, his typical method for releasing information to the community. Discussing the administration’s plans for managing the fiscal crisis, Hornig said administrators were trying to improve communication with students but admitted he had not improved the trickling flow of information. “We probably could have explained a little better as we were going along,” he said. “It is easy to say that communication was a problem.” His comments highlight the importance of communication at a university dealing with financial problems, as Brown is today. In October 2008, as the global economic crisis began to take its toll on the University, President Ruth Simmons sent an e-mail containing remarks she had made at a faculty meeting with the “intention of making that statement available to the entire community.” As economic conditions worsened, Simmons sent similar campus-wide messages with updates on the status of the endowment, faculty hiring and financial aid packages. Simmons and other administrators want “to be upfront without a lot of editorializing, without a lot of flowery language,” Vice President of Public Affairs and University Relations Marisa Quinn said. Challenges, struggles and uncertainty Experts of linguistic anthropology divide the meaning of language into two categories — the referential and the indexical. The referential meaning is the dictionary definition, while the indexical links a word to its social effects. Press releases and official statements are “cast as an act by which referential information is being conveyed,” said Paja Faudree ’92, an assistant professor of anthropology who specializes in linguistic anthropology. But by saying certain words, administrators are able to accomplish both goals. They simultaneously inform and reassure the community. Though she has not heard much “identifiably euphemistic language,” Faudree said she has noticed another trend. Communications have been filled with words like “challenging,” “downturn” and “economic difficulty” — vague terms that avoid more technical language, she said. In her e-mails, Simmons repeatedly refers to the “uncertainty” the University is facing, and the “apparent” and “anticipated” effects of the economy on Brown. Calling a situation “uncertain” or “challenging” decenters the blame, Faudree said. Naming the University’s struggles a “challenge” implies that Brown is actively fighting a poor external climate. The word “neutralizes the negative,” she said. “It puts a positive spin on the endeavor we’re in,” Faudree said. “Uncertainty” also implies that the University had some foresight of the disaster and had prepared for its possibility, Faudree added. “It attempts to purchase them the license to do what they need to
do.” But it is hard to know what “uncertainty” means concretely. Specific information like endowment figures is presented in certain instances, but without being placed in a broader context, it is not necessarily “meaningful in the form they’re giving it,” Faudree said. A constant theme in University-wide communications has been to “protect” and “preserve,” words that allow the University to justify actions taken in the name of Brown’s mission, Faudree said. “For a while, there was a delicate dance around ‘recession,’ an awareness that you couldn’t say it,” she said. Comparing Brown to its peer institutions As the stock market plummeted record amounts in one day in 1987, University officials addressed concerns about Brown’s endowment with similar comments about difficulties and challenges, asserting that the exact impact “wouldn’t be known for some time.” University officials made clear at the time that Brown “weathered the storm well” in comparison to its peer institutions. Communications from the University today contain a similar sentiment, saying that Brown’s finances are relatively secure within the “landscape of higher education.” Though the phrase lacks specificity, it is a rhetorical yardstick, Faudree said. All schools work to assert that their downfall is less severe than others. “Positioning for superiority and relative excellence holds even for how you weather a crisis,” she said. Despite his closed-lip nature, Hornig assured The Herald in November of 1975 that “information is more available here than at comparable institutions.” Still, he precluded nearly all student involvement in decisionmaking. Though he held open forums — attended by over 500 members of the community — he informed students at the forums he had no intention of engaging in a public debate. Engaging the community Throughout her messages, Simmons employs words like “community” and uses third-person pronouns to construct a sense of collaboration. Her usage of “I” is reserved for very pointed reasons, emphasizing that “it’s not about her as an individual,” Faudree said. Messages are intended to inform members of the community as to how the University is doing, when they can expect more information and how they can weigh in, Quinn said. Though Quinn acknowledged that there could always be a debate about what information is sent out and what isn’t, “if there are implications generally for the community, it’s important to share those.” In this year of upheaval, Quinn said it was crucial to show that the University was aware of the crisis, and had formulated a “plan for the uncertainties it presents.” Officials are trying to reassure without being too forthcoming, Faudree said — “a difficult rhetorical task.”
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by anne simons senior staff writer
graduated as part of the Class of 1974, showing the class lost 45 of its minority students over the four years. While she said she did not know if those minority students who left the University before graduation were those who chose not to attend TSP, she said she felt the program was an important factor in her success. But changes came in 1974, when budget cuts prompted another look at TSP. It was said that a correlation could not be seen between attending TSP and succeeding at Brown, McLaurin-Chesson said. The program was cut to one week and renamed the Third World Transition Program, encompassing more minority groups, she said. TWTP stayed relatively similar through the 1970s and 1980s, and contained many aspects today’s students would recognize, including the welcome dinner with the Dean of the College and discussions about issues minority students may encounter at Brown, McLaurin-Chesson said. A sample program from 1980 lists discussion about discrimination, predictable crises, student support programs, workshops for academic success including note-taking, test-taking, study skills and time management and smaller workshops led by Minority Peer Counselors about campus organizations and human sexuality. A number of changes have occurred in the 2000s. For the first time, students attending TWTP lived in the rooms to which they had been assigned for the academic year, McLaurin-Chesson said. Prior to that, they had all been housed together in a few dorms during the program and later had to move to their room for the year, she said. In 2005, President Ruth Simmons requested an external review of TWTP. At the same time, she said that the fact that white students were not invited made the program exclusive, which she did not feel was right, McLaurinChesson said. The program was subsequently opened to white students for the first time in 2006. So far, not many white students have taken advantage of this, she said, estimating that Meara Sharma / Herald
The Third World Transition Program, approaching its 40th anniversary this summer, is the product of years of changes from its inception as the Transitional Summer Program. The summer of 1969 saw Brown’s first Transitional Summer Program, a result of the attention brought to minority issues by the 1968 Walkout, Associate Dean and Director of the Third World Center Dean McLaurin-Chesson ’74 said, crafted by University administrators, staff and students. The original program differed greatly from what students have experienced in recent years. The focus of the program was academic — students had six weeks of classes, including computer science, math and English, according to McLaurin-Chesson, who attended the second TSP as an incoming freshman. The students who had been selected for showing strong promise through community service or extracurricular activities rather than a stellar academic record were encouraged to participate, she said. The program was meant to bring them up to speed and to prepare them for an Ivy League education, she said. The program also included a week of community building to help minority students find a home at Brown, McLaurin-Chesson said. At the time, all students attending the program were housed together in Hope College, she said. Professor of Mathematics Thomas Banchoff taught a precalculus course in the first ever TSP. “For most of the people, it really was very, very helpful, and in a sense, necessary,” he said. Many of the students arrived to campus concerned about attending a university like Brown, either for academic or social reasons, he said. The program gave them “a base of operation,” helping them feel more comfortable at a predominantly white college, he said. Of her freshman class, who entered the University in 1970, McLaurin-Chesson said that there were 135 minority students, about forty of whom participated in TSP. According to her alumni records, only 90 minorities
TWTP
turns
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there are about half a dozen each year. “We need to build more of those bridges of communication,” McLaurin-Chesson said. “There are more members of this community than are at the table.” While some TWTP participants had been calling for the inclusion of white students since the 1990s, according to McLaurin-Chesson, there is still some opposition to the idea. Robert Smith III ’09, who is an Minority Peer Counselor Friend, said he thinks “it’s important for any kind of community to have a space to address their own issues.” He added that he thinks it is appropriate for white students to have that space also. The groups can then come together and have a dialogue with each other, he said. Another significant change has been an increase in the extent to which students control the program. This past year, students worked with a faculty adviser to prepare workshop material on an issue, McLaurin-Chesson said. This is a departure from the past, when a primary facilitator organized the activities. They still keep a primary facilitator on staff to oversee the process for expertise, she said. As for the future, McLaurin-Chesson said she would like to “do better at bridging the racial divide that does exist.” She would also like the program to focus more on how issues of racism play out at Brown, she said. Every year brings criticisms of the program, calling for radical changes or its dismantling, but this has been
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happening since the 1970s, McLaurin-Chesson said, saying the program has been “routinely attacked.” Critiques have included the idea that inviting minority students to campus early actually further isolates them from the student body and that the program engenders a hostile attitude toward white people, she said. But in the end, she said, the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Smith said the program had “a really amazing impact” on him. It “grounded (him) in a really great place at Brown.” He would want as many students of color to have that experience as possible, he said. McLaurin-Chesson said she thinks more white students will decide to attend TWTP in the coming years, adding that she thinks they’ll enjoy the program like others have. Andrew Migneault ’11, a white student who attended TWTP, gave it a less-than-stellar review. “Overall, I feel the program completely missed its mark,” he said. He described the experience as being “awkward” and “racially charged,” calling the program’s methods “counteractive.” While he does not oppose the program’s existence, he said he did think the way it was handled was not particularly helpful. The survival of the program is not in question. As long as there are issues of race, class, gender and sexual preference, the program will continue, McLaurin-Chesson said. “Once we reach utopia, we won’t need that program.”
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‘Internationalization’ slowly gets defined by hannah moser senior staff writer With three years down, one to go in her Brown education, Samira Thomas ’10 has a specific goal set for next year: a thesis on the redevelopment of post-conflict cities with an emphasis on Kabul, Afghanistan. But until this year, Thomas said she had few opportunities to pursue her concentration, Urban Studies, in any perspective other than a Western one. “It has been really challenging to find classes at Brown on urban topics outside of American cities, and particularly on cities in the Middle East,” Thomas wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. Enter Ipek Tureli, a post-doctoral fellow from Turkey in the History of Art and Architecture department, and her new class HIAA 0490: “Urban Modernity in the Middle East.” The class surveyed 10 cities – including Kabul – and discussed how different disciplines frame the study of the Middle East. Tureli was able to bring in three guest speakers by utilizing funds made available by the University’s recent and growing focus on “internationalization.” The term has become a ubiquitous representation of a University initiative – piloted in 2006 –to increase Brown’s recognition and role on the international stage. Yet the concrete impacts of the initiative are difficult to pin down for the average student. The University-wide changes are nowhere near complete, but students like Thomas have embraced the opportunities to internationalize their education. “Some of the theorists we studied had come up in other classes and I had studied them from a Western perspective,” Thomas wrote. “Studying them from an international perspec-
tive was surprising as the interpretations of their work is quite different outside of America, and without the international perspective, my education would have been incomplete and I wouldn’t have even known it.” An agenda takes shape In September of 2006, President Ruth Simmons, along with Provost David Kertzer ’69 P’95 P’98, listed improving Brown’s international presence among the three primary initiatives for that year. “One of my concerns is that we don’t necessarily have the profile of a global university,” Simmons told The Herald in 2006. During the following months, Simmons met with her cabinet and University administrators, including the Corporation, to discuss ways that the University could become more internationally prominent and thereby attract talented students from across the globe. That October the Corporation authorized a 30 percent increase in financial aid available for international students, whose applications – then being read for the class 2011 – are not considered on a need-blind basis. But nonetheless, in attracting applicants from abroad, Vice President for International Affairs David Kennedy ’76 now says the University has progressed. “We’ve gotten more and more applications from foreign students,” he said. “I think we’re doing quite well there. That’s one where we can declare victory.” As the agenda began to take shape in the fall of 2006, The Herald reported that after a “strategic discussion session,” the Corporation produced several recommendations for the University’s efforts toward what Kertzer then termed “internationalization.” These recommendations included appointing an official to oversee the effort who would report directly to the provost, reviewing class offerings, developing regional councils to recruit students and expanding international internship and research program opportunities. Kertzer appointed an advisory committee of students and faculty, which released a September 2007 report calling for support for internationalization in many different aspects of the University life, including “seed funding” to develop new “internationally focused” programs. This seed funding is starting to bring forth results. One of these programs will allow Patrick Martin-Tuite ’10 to spend this summer in Capetown, South Africa, as he conducts research with the Treatment Action Campaign, the country’s largest HIV advocacy group. Martin-Tuite is one of the 14 students
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selected — from 55 applicants — to the new International Scholars Program to undertake their own research projects abroad. Through the program, students design coursework at Brown that will enhance their proposed summer research. Upon returning to Brown, these students can further synthesize what they have learned in a thesis or capstone project. Martin-Tuite, a Development Studies concentrator, described his project looking at contemporary HIV policy as “poli sci meets history meets anthropology.” He said he will integrate his interviews with official and other local actors in policy-making into his senior thesis. “This gives me the opportunity to look beyond the Rock. It’s a completely immersive experience,” he said. Starting out on goals In October 2007, David Kennedy ’76, then a professor of law and the director of the European Law Institute at Harvard Law School, was appointed to the newly created position of vice president of international affairs. “Brown made the transition from strong regional college to national university-college over a whole generation. And it did so largely by having its own vision: the New Curriculum, its own approach to education,” he said. “I think the most important thing
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is that Brown make the transition to a global university in its own way.” After over two years as Brown’s administrative leader in pushing forward internationalization, Kennedy spoke to The Herald about the current state of the initiative. He outlined the goals, which relate to curricular offerings, research and Brown’s role as a place for global dialogue, that are directing the University’s planning for shaping Brown’s global image. The first of these is to “make the Brown curriculum a model for global undergraduate education.” Kennedy said this goal is designed to multiply the number and range of international experiences students have by appointing internationally recognized faculty and encouraging existing faculty to incorporate more international-related material into their curriculum. Within College Hill, Kennedy said the University also aims to play off and improve Brown’s already existing strengths, such as the Watson Institute for International Affairs, to encourage the best scholars to come to and utilize such centers. Another is to support advanced academic research related to international questions by providing money for students
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to travel and to bring academic peers to campus, and this initiative has already led to partnerships for teaching and learning with several foreign universities. In line with this “open-door policy,” for example, Brown and the Parisian university Sciences Po created a summer program about issues of identity related to European Union expansion. Participating students from both schools will spend four weeks of the program, which begins this June, in Paris and four weeks in Providence, according to Vasuki Nesiah, director of international affairs. Additionally, Kennedy said Brown will support a small number of initiatives to develop a special role for the University in teaching and researching global issues. For example, this June, Brown will host the first of its Brown International Advanced Research Institutes, where scholars and experts will convene for one to two weeks at a time for forums entitled “Law, Social Thought and Global Governance” and “Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Management.” Kennedy said that around ten pilot programs have been started and may attract more funding depending on how they progress in their first years. The final goal, he said, for the internationalization effort is to use the University’s rising influence “to make Brown the place for sustained dialogue among the world’s leading thinkers.” These goals are not just enacted from the top-down. Faculty have played a role in integrating international perspectives directly into the Brown curriculum. Tureli, who teaches the course on Middle Eastern cities, said that Urban Studies is usually reserved for Western nations and the Middle East tends to be discussed in a “third world sense.” The class looked at the way these regions have been represented, the framework through which they have been studied, and the experience of Middle Eastern people through artwork and film. The three guest speakers brought in with funding from the internationalization initiative contributed to these perspectives. Hasan Uddin Kahn, an architectural historian at Roger Williams University, addressed the class about in the impact of architecture on the Muslim world. Salim Tamar, a Palestinian research fellow with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke about the divided city of Jerusalem, while Ahmed Mahsud, a modern urbanism historian, discussed the planned city of Islamabad. “The feedback I’ve gotten has been really positive,” Tureli said. She added Brown does not offer many classes from a non-western perspective, and students want to be able to study international topics from avenues other than a political standpoint. In finding ways to internationalize their own education, “the students who take this are already very committed,” Tureli said.
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The Brown Daily Herald COMMENCEMENT 2009
A troubled
Past
A look at the University’s past economic crises
by sydney ember
senior staff writer In a campus-wide e-mail to the Brown community on Jan. 27, President Simmons announced the University stood to lose $800 million from its endowment, reducing its safety net by 30 percent to $2 billion. The e-mail marked the first mass University communication since September 2008 when the economy took an unprecedented plunge, forcing administrators to grapple with the pressing concerns. There would be deep cuts in the annual budget totaling $60 million, Simmons wrote in the January e-mail. The payout to the University from the endowment was projected to be more than $40 million less than previously expected, and fundraising would be hit especially hard. Simmons also announced there would be freezes on salaries and faculty hiring in addition to staff layoffs — 31 Brown employees have since been informed of their dismissal. Capital projects would be suspended until all funds were raised to complete the projects. For example, instead of a new Mind Brain Behavior building, Brown is looking instead to renovate an already existing building to save funds. These changes mirror decisions made during previous times of economic crisis at Brown. A main difference between the administration’s approaches then and now, however, is a stronger commitment to keeping tuition costs reasonable and maintaining financial aid. Simmons wrote in her e-mail that tuition would increase, but not as much as previously projected. The amount of money allotted to financial aid would exceed previous projections by nearly $1 million through increased expenditures from scholarship funds. During previous economic crises, tuition increased dramatically and financial aid was not prioritized. “I think our approach has simply been to stick to priorities,” Simmons said about the proposed solutions to the situation. She stressed the need to maintain faculty strength and a favorable faculty-student ratio to continue the availability of first-year seminars and advising and mentoring programs. “The point is that if you don’t do this, you come out on the other side of this crisis trying to recover,” Simmons said. “It’s most important that the University remains strong.” Simmons herself requested a reduction in her compensation for the current and previous fiscal years. Brown has experienced economic crises in the past — from the depression in the mid 1890s to the energy crisis in the 1970s to rampant inflation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. According to Luther Spoehr, lecturer in education
and history, Brown faced administrative upheaval when President Elisha Benjamin Andrews supported William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 presidential election. Bryan advocated free silver, which benefitted the nation’s rural farmers. The farmers owed money to the Northeast’s wealthy tycoons — men from whom Brown sought to raise funds. The Corporation expressed concern that continuing to have Andrews as president would jeopardize fundraising efforts in difficult financial times. Despite the president’s numerous educational improvements, including professionalizing the faculty and increasing student enrollment, the Corporation fired Andrews. Firing a president for political reasons wouldn’t happen today, Spoehr said. In the 1890s, Brown only had about 800 students, largely upper-class men from New England, he said. The Corporation was more concerned with maintaining access to the “deep pockets” of business men than supporting students, he said. Simmons said the current situation has no bearing on her tenure as president of the University despite the difficult atmosphere. “My being at Brown is completely unrelated to the current issues. I’m at Brown because it’s a good place to be,” she said. There is little mention in The Herald’s coverage of the University’s financial situation during the Great Depression, perhaps because news from the nation’s economic centers was slow to reach Rhode Island. Yet communication between the administration and the community also held less importance than it does today. In fact, there is no mention of the previous day’s stock market crash on Oct. 30, 1929 in The Herald. Not until Nov. 19 of that year did Brown’s President Clarence Barbour announce that a report would be given to the Corporation that would “consist of the outstanding events and changes that have taken place during the past year in the University by the recommendation of the President.” During the energy crisis of the 1970s, skyrocketing gas prices and runaway inflation forced the University to take drastic measures. In October 1974, President Donald Hornig called for retrenchment and a program to cut Brown’s budget by 15 percent in the following three years. To accomplish this reduction in expenditures, Hornig initially proposed replacement and firing of faculty — eliminating 75 positions. He also recommended cuts to student service, financial aid and minority-related issues. “To get the budget in balance by ’77 will call for the cutting of $6 million from expenditures, no withdrawals
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of endowment capital, substantial increases in giving, major addition to the endowment and maintaining tuition at competitive rates but still so any qualified person can attend,” Richard Seaman, associate vice president and director of development told The Herald in the spring of 1974. Many of the proposed faculty cuts targeted untenured professors, whom Spoehr called “the stars of the future.” Faculty members also feared that women would be targeted, Spoehr said, especially because women held many junior faculty positions. Brown’s financial history Money allotted 1897 — President Elisha Benjamin Anto financial aid drews is asked to resign by the Corporaonly increased 3 tion for supporting coinage of free silver. percent despite the pressures October 1974 — President Donald on families. The Hornig calls for a program to cut average freshman Brown’s budget by 15 percent, proposes financial aid loan cutting 75 faculty positions. did rise to $1600 in 1975 from February 1975 — Tuition increases 9.1 $1100 in 1974, The percent to $6,275 for the year 1976-77. Herald reported in September October 1987 — Stock market plum1975. Additionally, mets; Brown’s endowment loses 15 financial aid percent. The University raises tuition 7 included a ceiling percent, to over $18,000, and proposes of $3.234 million, limiting financial aid. which was $21,400 over that year’s January 27, 2009 — President Simbudget but was mons sends e-mail announcing the Uni$200,000 less than versity stood to lose $800 million from what some groups its endowment. proposed. Paul Maeder, Spring 2009 —Simmons and Corporathen vice president tion announce reductions in annual for finance and budget will total $60 million. $1 million operations, told increase in financial aid expenditures The Herald in announced. 31 staff members notified of February 1975 that their dismissal. he expected a tuition hike of 9.1 percent — reaching a total including room and board of $6275 for the 1976-77 year from a previous sum of $5750. At the time, competitor schools charged tuition ranging from $6050 at Cornell to $6500 at Yale. Maeder told The Herald that these decisions regarding tuition called into question two factors — the amount of money the university need to operate, and “what we can competitively charge ... in relation to other private colleges.” Though Hornig did stress the need to maintain the University as an institution for research and learning, his suggestions sparked outrage amongst the faculty and the student body. A four-day strike and a building takeover by a coalition of minority students played a role in Hornig’s resignation in 1976. But in his resignation letter, Hornig steadfastly promoted his policies to solve the financial crisis. “I believe that when the present retrenchment, and particularly the faculty cuts, have been completed, fresh
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energy and a new outlook will be in order,” he wrote. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, rampant inflation and a plummeting stock market forced the University to scramble for funding. In October 1987, Senior Vice President for Administration and Finance Frederick Bohen announced that Brown’s endowment had lost 15 percent of its value, falling to $325 million from a previous high of $375 million. Officials said they thought the university might have to raise tuition, cut programs or limit financial aid to compensate for this loss. Ultimately, Brown raised tuition by 7 percent, pushing tuition over the $18,000 mark for the following year. “We’re in a recession now,” Donald Reaves, Brown’s budget director and chief financial officer from 19882002 and currently the chancellor at Winston-Salem State University told The Herald. “The problems I faced were nowhere near what they are today.” Reaves said Brown resorted to “short-term stopgap measures” during previous crises, such as freezes on hiring and limiting expenditures and traveling. But he stressed the severity of the current situation — the combined effects of crises in the auto industry, banking industry, unemployment and consumer confidence — has led to a shift in the philosophies of many colleges and universities. Institutions of higher education must consider the long-term effects of their decisions in the current crisis.
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The Brown Daily Herald COMMENCEMENT 2009
by ellen cushing senior staff writer
Year after year, helping New Orleans
Four Januarys ago, Josh Morrison ’09 flew from Seattle, Wash. to Louisiana. He had never been to New Orleans before, and the city was still reeling from Hurricane Katrina that devastated the city six months earlier, while Morrison and his classmates were heading to College Hill for freshmen orientation. For ten days, Morrison, along with a group of about ten other Brown students, slept on cots in a church basement and woke at dawn to gut homes, removing appliances and furniture that had been destroyed in the flood. Morrison has since returned three more times to do relief work. “It was one of the greatest times of my life,” he said. “It was so much fun — working so hard during the day, going out at night and seeing the city, enjoying life.” He’s been one of many to make the southward journey. “I’m just one piece of what Brown has done in New Orleans. There’s been a lot of effort on so many different fronts from Brown students,” he said. After the storm Over the last four years, Brown has sent dozens of trips and hundreds of students down to the gulf. Many of these trips have been organized by campus institutions like the Swearer Center for Public Service, Habitat for Humanity, Brown/RISD Hillel, the Brown Christian Fellowship and College Hill for Christ though others, like Morrison’s, were simply informal groups of friends and friends-of-friends, brought together by a desire to do good for the New Orleans’ community. Though there has been no campus-wide coordinated relief effort and the Swearer Center does not keep records on the number of students who have been to New Orleans since 2005, the patterns of Brown’s involvement seem to mirror larger responses to the situation, both in its fragmentation and in its eventual flagging. Ian Sims ’10.5, who graduated high school the summer the storm hit and traveled to New Orleans in his year before starting Brown, describes
the efforts on the ground as “really disorganized,” and says that the Brown “mishmash” is reflective of the larger situation. “Right after the hurricane, tons of people went, and it’s still kind of fractured and disorganized,” says Sims, who, along with Morrison, has organized two unofficial trips over the winter break of his freshman and sophomore years. Sarah Raifman ’09, who has been to the city twice and is on the executive board for Brown’s chapter of Habitat for Humanity, says there has been a huge drop in volunteers traveling to the Gulf since Katrina. “In the Brown community and among our level of university peers, it’s been less, though — for Habitat at least, for our break trips, there’s definitely always way more interest in the Gulf region and New Orleans specifically” in comparison to other locations, she says. ‘A hugely shaping experience’ For members of the class of 2009 — most of whom arrived at Brown as the storm hit — Katrina and its aftermath have informed and exemplified their relationship with the University, both allowing them to go beyond the campus bubble and enriching their academic, social and spiritual life on campus. “Our class was certainly very aware of it,” Raifman says. Morrison says the storm offered many in his class an opportunity for service. “It was a hugely shaping experience for me at Brown,” he says. Jon Mitchell ’09, who participated in Hillel’s alternative break the spring of his junior year, says his experiences in New Orleans strengthened his ties back to the College Hill community. “It was a great thing for my relationship to Brown,” he says. “I was terribly impressed with everyone that came down — I wasn’t used to seeing Brown students bending their backs in this way. I was inspired by that.” Sims, an Africana Studies concentrator, says his experiences in New Orleans have also profoundly influenced his academic work. He said seeing the disparity in which neighborhoods were most assisted in recovery efforts made visible topics that he’s studied. “ It’s this tangible, real-world connection to what I’m studying and intellectualizing.” For many like Sims, New Orleans has brought into sharp focus issues of poverty, privilege and power that can seem abstract and distant in the campus bubble. “A lot of this was stuff I had never encountered growing up in a fairly wealthy part of the country and going to an Ivy League school,” says Taylor Stearns ’09, who went to New Orleans with the Brown Christian Fellowship over the spring of his junior and senior years. For those who went to the city later or have been back multiple times, this awareness of inequity has only deepened. “This year, it was really interesting to see how much had changed in the wealthy areas and how, in the poor areas, nothing had changed and everything was still abandoned,”
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Beyond graduation Since his experiences in New Orleans made a permanent impact on his life, Sims encourages others to help the relief efforts.
“The work is more complicated than us just going down when we have a vacation. It needs to be more sustained. For me, it’s completely shaped how I am going to live my life.” Morrison says he will not look at free time the same way since his time in the Gulf. “It taught me that I never want to take a vacation for vacation’s sake. I always want to do something useful with my vacation and my time,” Morrison says. Sims says he hopes the city will stay on people’s minds. “Oftentimes, our historical perspective is to iconify things. I worry that Katrina is already fading into a past moment.” However, he says, leaning close, eyes wide, “We’re still in Katrina.” But if the next generation of activists and relief workers is any indication, Brown is in no immediate danger of losing sight of Katrina after the class that came in along with it leaves College Hill. Sarah Grimm ’12 went this year with Brown Christian Fellowship. “I would really love to keep to keep going,” she says. “It’s definitely not over.” Courtesy of Josh Morrison
Stearns says. Mitchell recalls researching the city before deciding to go on his trip. “I looked into the state of New Orleans in 2008, and quickly realized that it was really no better than it was in 2006. Many of the parts of the city that had been totally devastated hadn’t even been touched by the relief work. I quickly realized that it was a lot deeper and more entrenched of a problem than I thought.” Sims acknowledges the depth of the problem but says he has some reservations about what he sees as the isolated, narrow nature of many Brown students’ involvement. “I don’t want to diminish the fact that it can be an incredibly rewarding and valuable experience, but if it means that people can drive through the poor neighborhood next to their town and not think twice, then it means they’re working backwards. It can’t just be a feel-good vacation.”
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The Brown Daily Herald COMMENCEMENT 2009
Corporation controversy
by ben bernstein opinions editor
You would have been forgiven last semester for thinking you had wandered into a never-aired, college-specific episode of Law and Order. Grainy surveillance footage, confrontations with police officers and a 19-hour trial — these were just a few of the scandalous details surrounding a yearlong focus on the doings of Brown’s most powerful body, the Corporation. The semester began with a bang, literally, when around 50 students, many of whom were members of the Brown chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, marched with drums and musical instruments around campus to raise awareness about their COMMENTARY gripes with the Corporation. At the time, SDS spokesperson and former Herald Staff Writer Sophia Lambertsen ’11 told The Herald that Corporation was “a bunch of old white men,” and ought to be “democratically student run.” SDS presented four central reforms: open meetings, a community-set agenda, published minutes of all meetings and community referenda on all major decisions. In posters, letters to Corporation members and guest columns and letters to The Herald, SDS articulated these aims with limited response from the Corporation itself. Not yet gaining much traction, SDS members then attempted to enter the Corporation’s fall meeting in University Hall. Armed campus police and senior University officials pushed back. In the ensuing brouhaha, University officials were allegedly injured, and ultimately, eight students were charged with various offenses and faced with the possibility of expulsion. The accusations against the students were based on surveillance footage stills taken from University Hall cameras. During a disciplinary trial, it became clear that, in fact, one of the eight accused had never entered the building during the incident. In the end, seven of the SDS members were put on probation. At the time, Mike Da Cruz ’09, one of the eight students charged, told The Herald that the punishment was “a slap on the wrist.” Though SDS had not achieved any of its stated aims by the end of the first semester, its action brought Corporation politics and University governance into the student consciousness. To understand today’s Corporation controversy, it is instructive to examine Brown at the turn of the 20th century. Elisha Benjamin Andrews, class of 1870, was named president of the University in 1889 and was soon a student and faculty favorite. He would go on to transform Brown from a small undergraduate college into a doctoral research university. Despite an impressive agenda and significant support, his relationship with the Corporation doomed his presidency and led the hugely popular leader to resign — twice. The controversy with the Corporation began when a prominent member, Rep. Joseph Walker, R-Mass., learned
of Andrews’ views on the gold standard, the most controversial political issue of the day. Andrews was a bimetallist, which meant he was in favor of an economic initiative which supported the free coinage of silver, a view that flew in the face of the Republican Party. As head of the Committee on Banking and Currency, Walker felt personally and professionally threatened by the issue. Another person opposed to bimetallism was John D. Rockefeller, whose son John Jr. was a Brown undergraduate at the time. Rockefeller allegedly threatened to withhold $1 million unless Andrews was made to be quiet. The Corporation met in the early summer of 1897, without Andrews, who was traveling through Europe in order to recover from an illness. At that end of that meeting, Walker expressed concern that Andrews’ views on the issue of the free coinage of silver were a threat not only to Brown’s financial stability, but that these views were comparable to supporting the Confederacy in the Civil War. After expressing high gratitude for Andrews’ excellent service
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to Brown, the Corporation wrote, “the change hoped for is ... not a renunciation of these views but forbearance out of the interest of the university to promulgate them.” Andrews felt he was being asked to shut up or ship out and immediately sent in a letter of resignation. When he heard about the resignation, a student named Professor Jameson (yes, his first name is Professor) wrote angrily to his father about his frustration that the people who “get put on boards of trustees simply because they are rich can dictate to us what we shall say both inside and outside the classroom.” Indeed, the faculty was the first to take action. Soon after Andrews’ resignation, 24 out of 37 professors wrote an open letter to the Corporation urging them to reconsider. The letter condemned “the theory that the national growth of a university is more important than independence of thought and expression on the part of its president and professors and that boards of trustees have, as such, the right to suggest limitations on independence.” New England Magazine called it “the most important document of the century.” The letter had a mobilizing effect. Soon more letters came in, generally supportive of Andrews, including an endorsement from Senator George Hoar and a letter from alumnus Rathbone Gardner 1877 MA’1880, declaring that alums supported the president for “not concealing his views,” even though they ran contrary to Gardner’s own. Walker responded with a letter of his own, which only further demonized his position. The congressman accused Andrews of “eagerly ... seeking the crown of martyrdom and called Andrews’ position, “more disastrous than … the right of a state to secede.” Ultimately, the Corporation decided to refuse Andrews’ resignation. On the front page of The Herald from September 15, 1897, there are two headlines: “Andrews Resigns” and then next to it, “…He Will Stay.” An article about Andrews’ first public speech describes students as “jubilant he will stay,” and declares that “the applause was deafening.” At the end of the academic year, Andrews, still feeling persecuted by the Corporation, resigned again, this time for good. Ultimately, it was not that Andrews held bimetallist views; it was when he held them. In the economic downturn of the 1890s, Brown was strapped for cash, laying off members of its library staff in 1894, and curbing plans for expansion. With financial necessities at the forefront of the Corporation’s agenda, Andrews’ economic views suddenly became far more important. That Andrews presided over Brown during an economic crisis, when people across the country and at Brown were struggling to define the role of the university, makes his case especially fascinating in today’s environment. This semester, Chancellor Thomas Tisch announced that the Corporation would be voting on adding a recent alumni position or positions to the Corporation. The young alum will be selected by appointment, said Tisch, not election, and would serve a three-year term. In order to be eligible, alums must have graduated within the last seven years. In addition, Tisch announced that minutes would be unsealed after 25 years, instead of the current 50-year wait. After the announcement, Da Cruz called the two announcements “tokenization” to The Herald, while former UCS President Brian Becker ’09 said it was “incredibly exciting news.” Another former UCS president, Michael Glassman ’09, is in many ways the father of the recent alumni position. While UCS
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president during his junior year, Glassman sat in on meetings with the Corporation’s Committee on Campus Life, which is “not where most Corporation stuff happens,” according to Glassman. During one meeting, members were discussing Vartan Gregorian Quad and Glassman remembers, “one of the youngest Corporation members, about 20 years out (of Brown), turns to me and whispers, ‘What’s that?’ I was shocked.” From there, Glassman started a campaign to try to get students or recent alumni to be members of the body. He talked to President Ruth Simmons, who made it clear that trying to get current students on the Corporation would be a losing battle. Glassman responded by taking his mission first to the alumni association and then eventually to the chancellor. According to Glassman, “Tisch took the idea and understood it in a really fundamental way.” While the position will start out as an appointed one, Tisch told Glassman that he hoped the alumni association, which is responsible for the election of a certain number of trustees, will see the Corporation’s actions as a compelling reason to work towards having more young alumni trustees. Whether any of the Corporation’s actions will have a significant effect on the University’s governance remains to be seen. What does seem likely, if the Andrews controversy is any indication, is that the Corporation will not leave the spotlight any time soon. Indeed, Andrews himself was so fascinated with the Corporation that he joined it three years after his second resignation.
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Reflecting on by peter mackie ’59
be based on demonstrated need rather than on athletic prowess. Despite its eagerness to join a league with its most timehonored rivals, Brown found itself seriously overmatched in Ivy play, especially in the signature sports of football and basketball (Brown would not win its first football title until 1976, 1986 for basketball). Like Sisyphus, Brown was destined to roll the boulder up the hill toward the Ivy summit, where the “Big Three” (Harvard, Yale and Princeton), Penn and Dartmouth were securely positioned, eager to push it back down. As Bruno sank to the bottom, assuming the role of doormat in the 1960s, considerable heated debate emerged among alums as to whether Brown really belonged in the Ivy League. The problem was, of course, systemic: Brown had too few full-time coaches and a shoestring budget. We were competing against schools with larger enrollments, deeper pockets, vastly superior facilities, more storied athletic traditions and a stronger commitment to winning. Only through the herculean efforts of coaches like the irrepressible Cliff Stevenson (soccer) and genial Jim Fullerton (hockey) did Brown feel some sense of belonging during the 1960s. Stevenson, who coached until 1990, dominated the Ivies for an extended period, winning most of Brown’s eight team titles from 1956 to 1970. He later did the same in lacrosse, which he helped elevate to varsity status in 1963. Brown was simply muddling through in that period, with just enough individual and team success to quell the calls for us to bow out of the Ivy League and move to a less competitive athletic stage. For women, the 1971 Brown-Pembroke merger, coupled with the passage of Title IX legislation in 1972 ushered in a new chapter in Ivy League history. Championship play for women began in 1974. Brown was an early leader, especially in ice hockey and soccer, where Phil Pincince mirrored the early success on the men’s side. With Brown’s enrollment growing and a stronger level of support for athletics in the 1970s, our athletic posture began to improve, but our forays to the top were episodic, often followed by deep valleys of mediocrity. The past three decades have seen an increasing Brown Courtesy of the University Archives
When the Brown and Pembroke classes of 1959 graduated, we left having experienced the beginnings of a half century of profound transformation for Brown athletics. Two major events had occurred during our time on College Hill: the formal beginning of Ivy League competition in 1956 and the University’s purchase of the Dexter COMMENTARY Asylum in 1957. The next half century would revolve around these two axes and expand on the strong foundation of Brown’s first century of competition, which began with a crew race in 1859. The Brown of our day had a small, compact campus and a homogenous enrollment of 2,200 men, mainly drawn from New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. Tuition averaged $1,000 per year, and the endowment was miniscule. Brown’s 800 women lived on their lovely Pembroke campus on Meeting Street and attended class on the Brown campus. Brown’s major sports area was the Elmgrove Avenue complex (the Stadium, Aldrich Field and Marvel Gym), which was a bus ride away for athletes of all levels, including students taking mandatory physical education classes. Thayer Street Field (site of the current Grad Center) hosted intramurals. Pembroke played in Sayles Gym (now Smith-Buonanno Hall) and at nearby Pembroke Field. At Brown there were the usual sports — football, soccer, basketball, hockey, wrestling, baseball and track — but squash, crew and lacrosse functioned on a club sport basis. Intercollegiate competition at Pembroke was also on a club level. Attending athletic events, especially football games, was a large part of the rather monolithic Brown experience. Homecoming, with Bruno the live bear mascot, and Spring Weekend, featuring crew races on the Seekonk, were highlights of the social calendar. The 1954 Ivy Group Agreement reflected the position of the eight Ivy presidents — that big-time athletics, mostly football, were out of control and that academics were paramount. The agreement stipulated that “players be truly representative of the student body and not comprised of a group of specially recruited athletes.” Financial aid would
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years of Brown sports presence in the Ivy League, thanks in large measure to the efforts of the Brown University Sports Foundation, which was founded in 1983 to provide adequate financial underpinnings for all Brown sports. From a nettlesome irritant to the traditional powers, who seem to view Ivy titles as a kind of birthright, to being a feared rival, is a long jump. Of late, Brown has made that leap in several sports, notably football, baseball, men’s soccer and lacrosse, as well as men’s and women’s crew and tennis. The challenge is for us to become consistent contenders. Brown has won multiple yearly championships since the 1990s, but overall in the fifty-plus years of league competition, we have captured only 114 titles (13.6 percent), compared to Princeton’s 366 and Harvard’s 331. Brown’s overall poor showing is partly related to inadequate facilities. Unlike the dramatic development of the Elmgrove Avenue complex in the 1920s, the pace of building at the Erickson Athletic Complex (originally AldrichDexter Field) has been glacial. Major buildings have appeared every decade, tied to capital campaigns of the period. Each has suffered from compromises related to funding. The best example of these compromises is what was not built in the 1970s: a magnificent cluster of buildings that would have completed the job and created an underground parking garage for 850 cars. Instead, we got the Smith Swimming Center, which is now history. Brown has consistently been a day late and a dollar short and settled for a piecemeal approach, which has resulted in a set of buildings devoid of character and charm. Ironically, Brown now finds itself in familiar territory in attempting to build a first-rate fitness center for the entire community. After years of planning and two architects, the planned $50 million project is on hold, probably destined to be
scaled down to a shadow of the 80,000 square foot plan presented last year. Fortunately the playing fields have not suffered the same fate, and Erickson now has outstanding outdoor facilities. As daunting as the Ivy League facilities arms race is, it pales in comparison to the challenge Brown now faces in enrolling top athletes to play in them. The emerging disparities in financial aid awards threaten the very underpinnings of a competitive Ivy League. With a yearly price tag of nearly $50,000, Brown is struggling to compete with Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Whether the league becomes more lopsided or even ceases to exist will be directly related to the financial aid conundrum that Brown and a few others face. We have come so far and yet have so far to go. Brown has indeed been the little engine that could. As a result, the Brown of today bears little outward resemblance to that of the 1950s. With a diverse student body of nearly 6,000 undergraduates, over 900 student-athletes, 39 varsity sports, several club sports, a robust intramural and recreational program and an athletic budget of $13 million, athletic competition is alive and well on campus. Whether or not current athletes are truly representative of the student body, they are consistently at the top of the class when compared to athletic cohorts nationally. Whether the idealism and good will that resulted in the creation of the Ivy League will be perpetuated remains to be seen. What is certain is that the old Bears of ’59 will carry forward what Theodore Francis Green of the class of 1887 called “The Great Brown Spirit” as we watch the next 50 years unfold. The writer, celebrating his 50th reunion this year, is the sports archivist for the University Archives’ Edward North 1896 Collection of Brown Athletics.
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by sophia li features editor
Alison Cohen
Courtesy of Chloe Le Marchand
Education, environmental justice, women’s health, chemistry — at first glance, the different passions that Alison Cohen ’09 pursues seem loosely connected. But in her academic work and outside activities, the San Francisco native has brought together her diverse array of interests, earning recognition for the path she has charted in the last four years. Cohen, who concentrated in community health and education, will study an innovative chemicals regulation in the European Union on a Fulbright grant next year. She said she defines environmental justice as “the right of all people to live, work and play in a clean, safe and healthy environment.” Last year, Cohen was awarded the Morris K. Udall Scholarship, a federally funded award that recognizes student leadership in fields related to the environment. Cohen was first drawn to environmental health in high school when she was teaching middle school students in San Francisco with Summerbridge, a national non-profit that serves low-income populations around the country. “One of my mentees from Summerbridge is asthmatic and would miss school because of her asthma,” Cohen said. Cohen saw the connections, she said — from the environment to her mentee’s health, and from her asthma to its effect on her education. Since, Cohen has developed an environmental justice curriculum for Summerbridge in San Francisco and worked on environmental policy with the National Resources Defense Council through a Royce Fellowship in 2007. Cohen also began working with the Superfund Basic Research Program her sophomore year. “She’s the only
undergraduate in the group, and she’s acting as if she were a graduate student, out in the front, expressing a strong opinion, suggesting things,” Professor of Sociology Phil Brown said. For her senior thesis, Cohen worked with the Bay Area organization Communities for a Better Environment to develop and administer an environmental health survey to a community in Richmond, Calif., located by the largest oil refinery west of the Mississippi River. The survey aimed to document and quantify “anecdotal” health concerns in the community, Cohen said, making the leap from saying that “a lot of people are sick” to establishing that 18 percent of children in Richmond have asthma. After graduation, Cohen will travel to Europe to study REACH, the European Union’s new chemicals regulation, which stands for the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical substances. REACH is “the most innovative chemicals regulation in the world,” said Cohen, who will be based in Brussels but traveling throughout the European Union for her research. She will be examining REACH as a model that could potentially be implemented in the United States, she said. Though Cohen will be packing her bags for Europe this fall, in her work so far she has focused on building connections with local communities instead of approaching environmental health on the person-to-person, national or international levels. Working on the community level, Cohen said keeps her “rooted,” instead of “in the 30th floor of some building looking down,” she said. “Even though she’s worked on that breadth of issues, she brings all those pieces together in some pretty cohesive ways that really help her understand her issues on a much deeper level,” Director of the Swearer Center Roger Nozaki MAT’89 said. “I came into college thinking that I wanted to be a science teacher,” Cohen said. “Some of the same principles remain.” Brigitta Greene / Herald
Jonathan Warren, Matthew Reichel and Nicholas Young by brigitta greene senior staff writer
The Brown Daily Herald Min Wu / Herald
Rakim Brooks
After learning in November that he had won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, Rakim Brooks ’09 decided to go back to his home in the Bronx to avoid the cascade of congratulations he faced on campus. “Looking back, I probably should have stayed to enjoy the moment a bit more,” he said with a laugh. But just months before he got the good news, the scholarship was only one of many post-grad options on the Africana Studies concentrator’s mind. “Why shouldn’t I apply?” was Brooks’ reasoning. He was in the process of finding jobs, he said, and applying for other scholarships as well. Created in 1902, the Rhodes Scholarship is one of the oldest international scholarship programs. It funds advanced studies at the University of Oxford in Great Britain. Although he tends to describe himself as a “recluse,” Brooks’ involvement on campus would indicate anything but. Over his four years here, Brooks has been involved with the Undergraduate Council of Students, serving as the Academic and Administrative Affairs Chair and as a member of the Elections Board. He also served as a student representative on the Task Force for Undergraduate Education. “I usually did things because I felt compelled to do so,” said Brooks of his campus leadership, adding that he evaluates his career at Brown not by particular hallmarks or accomplishments but rather sees it as a holistic experience. Brooks says he found a niche for himself in the Africana Studies department. He had the opportunity to take part in three of the department’s faculty searches even by his sophomore year. Brooks said he appreciated the privilege of being able to chose the professors that would shape his educational experience. One of these searches would bring a great mentor. Brooks cites Africana Studies Professor Tricia Rose as a “profound intellectual and Jonathan Warren ’09, Matthew Reichel ’09 and Nicholas Young ’09 sit on a sofa in their yellow living room discussing everything from North Korean propaganda to Loui’s corn beef hash. On their right hangs a dry erase “inkling board” full of a year’s worth of scribbled ideas for entrepreneurial schemes. The three seniors — all double-majors in East Asian studies — received permission three weeks ago from the North Korean government to bring Americans there this summer. They had applied for permission in January, but hadn’t expected to receive it since it is not easily granted, Reichel said. Immediately after hearing the news, the three moved forward with their business plan: an educational program for students and professors in China and North Korea this summer. Warren, Reichel and Young will lead two groups of up to 23 students. Each trip will consist of six days in China, and will then move on to North Korea, at which point a native guide will take over and two North Korean “government minders” will join the group. In North Korea, trip-members will see the Mass Games, a nationalistic, highly regimented form of
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by jyotsna mullur staff writer
emotional” influence on his time at Brown. Her class, AFRI 0057 “20th Century Black Feminist Thought in Theory and Practice,” was probably the most “intellectually important class” Brooks says he has taken here, remarking that it exposed him to the intricate intermingling of race, gender and sexuality — a topic that became one of the focuses of his concentration work. Brooks is in the process of getting a passport — his only time abroad has been at a Jamaican resort. He begins Oxford in October, starting graduate work in political theory. True to the interdisciplinary tastes he picked up at Brown, he hopes to dabble in economics, philosophy, neuroscience and, he says, perhaps even French and German. Despite his broad academic ambitions, Brooks says he remains grounded. He reads unemployment reports regularly and hopes to use his studies to affect policy changes in the United States. Specifically, he seeks to make the connections between his concentration in Africana Studies and the labor and the workforce issues that are currently the news. He says he sees himself as a member of a generation of progressives with a unique chance to make a lasting impact in the world. While he says he can’t imagine becoming a politician due to his “unwillingness to compromise on values,” Brooks expresses interest in being an “advocate for policy reform,” pushing policy makers by engaging communities on grassroots levels. His greatest desire is to be what he calls a “public educator,” a role he says has diminished in the United States today, which involves taking an active role in communities to educate and empower its members through intellectual development in and outside of the schoolhouse. As he is in the first generation of his family to attend college, Brooks said his family did not know much about the scholarship. But they were simply proud of him for “doing great for himself,” he said. performing arts. The price of the trip will run about $1499 for students. They’ve named their program “5 passes,” after the region in the far west of China where it will be based. Kashgar — where they hope to establish their first office — sits at the center of five major mountain passes to neighboring countries. The three founders have lived in China and spent significant time in North Korea and surrounding areas, establishing personal contacts as well as cultural and business knowledge of the region. Within three weeks, around 25 people have expressed their interest in the trip, including professors from University of California at Berkeley and Brown. Come September, they hope to move out west to Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan to start community-based tourism projects using the capital they’ll have earned over the summer. When asked if they are nervous, all three founding members said, “not at all.” “My parents are,” Warren said. “Does that count?”
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Will
FORTUNE
favor the brave? by lindsey meyers senior editor
While I do not normally hobnob with famous journalists, last summer I had the special opportunity to meet Bob Herbert — the New York Times columnist — when I was an intern on the “Morning Joe” Show at MSNBC news. After I discussed his commentary on the show that day, he amicably fished out the facts of my personal narrative and then asked me the “dreaded question.” “What do you want to do for a living?” With no clear answer in mind, I smiled at him and said, “Well, I’d love to have your job one day.” Now that I stand on the threshold of graduating from college, that conversation exercises a gravitational pull on my thoughts. Though I plan to attend graduate school in the fall, the question of what I ought to be doing with my life remains a pressing one. I would like to answer that question with the kind of thought-provoking, inspiring and world-view challenging column that Bob Herbert would write. Instead, I can pose only topical questions, rather than propose timely answers, in my last column for The Herald. Given our natural human predilection for certainty, I understand why we may have a bias in favor of answers over questions. Nevertheless, if we hope to get the right answer, we must first ask the correct question. Take Gertrude Stein as an example. When she was on her deathbed, someone asked her, “What is the answer?” Instead of responding with sage advice, Stein reportedly uttered her last words by querying instead, “What is the question?” While this story may be apocryphal, it nonetheless has a telling message for us as graduating seniors. In a world where the traditional answers may no longer apply, what questions should we be asking as we stand at the threshold of leaving college life? Where previous generations of Brown students might have looked to canonical texts for guidance, I have decided to turn to Hollywood instead. What I have in mind is director Greg Mottola’s recent comedy “Adventureland,” which asks a question that preoccupies many of us, namely, what does a non
pre-professional college degree qualify us to do? In the movie, the lead character, James, has just graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college with a degree in comparative literature and Renaissance studies. Because he wants to attend Journalism School at Columbia in the fall, he tries to land a summer job to finance his education. James discovers, however, that many of the skill sets that allowed him to succeed in college are irrelevant in the real world. His SAT scores do not impress the owner of a local pizza parlor. And when he fails to obtain one job after another, he exasperatedly tells his mother that he is apparently not qualified for even manual labor. When he does ultimately land a job running a carnival game at an amusement park, he finds another intellectual refugee there — a meek Russian literature major who reads Gogol and ironically quotes Virgil’s dictum that fortune favors the brave (“audentes fortuna iuvat”). Like James, many of us experience angst about finding our own way in the world. We might have high SAT scores and even the ability to translate Virgil ourselves. While those academic skills immeasurably enrich our lives, they do not necessarily translate into meaningful jobs. And so, we wonder who fortune can favor when post-modern life may be a carnival game where the rules are skewed against us. After all, we live in a post-Bush world where the rules changed even as we were playing the game. When we were first-year students, a degree from a top university was almost a surety of success for those willing to work hard. Then, Wall Street beckoned to some, and there were good jobs in a growing economy. Now just three years later one domino after another has fallen or is unsteadily teetering. Wall Street is in shambles, many newspapers are on life support and the publishing industry is shrinking. Even academia is feeling the pinch, as graduate students are finding it increasingly difficult to get a teaching position at a university. As a result, the answers that formerly existed for graduating seniors at Brown no longer apply because we live in a time of diminished opportunity and heightened anxiety. That is why Bob Herbert was correct: We do need to ask the transformative question of what we can do for a living. To be sure, each of us will answer this question in different ways. Some will work. Others will attend graduate school. And still others will continue their search for something meaningful to do. In doing so, each of us will enter our own ‘Adventureland,’ where we will have to survive in a brave new world before we can thrive outside the cocoon of our college years. The question now is whether Virgil was correct. Will fortune favor the brave among us? While I do not know, I resolutely hope the answer will come in the fullness of time and in the fruition of our lives. Lindsey Meyers ‘09 will measure her fortune in British pounds when she pursues graduate studies at Oxford University next year.
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I was graduated from Brown by irene chen senior editor Before I started writing this column, I looked up quotations about saying goodbye. They were all cheesy one-liners about not really leaving, just sort of saying goodbye before paths would cross again. I asked friends for their thoughts on graduating from Brown. But I have to give credit here to my Comp Lit roommate who responded to my question with a seemingly simple question about grammar, one that stuck out in a sea of similar sentiments. Her question was this: Is it grammatically correct to say that we graduated Brown, or we graduated from Brown? Colloquially, the former sounded right to my ears, but after doing some research — Google proved helpful — the latter would be Webster’s preference. It would actually more correct in passive voice: “I was graduated from Brown,” though that one passed out of fashion years ago. The verb to graduate can be both transitive and intransitive. A transitive verb (bear with me here for an overly simplistic explanation) has an object that receives the action while an intransitive verb doesn’t. “To graduate from” a university is intransitive, since the subject — the graduate — is not acting on the object, Brown University. By dropping the word “from,” I, as the subject of the sentence, would suggest I had transferred the action onto Brown — I graduated Brown, rather than the other way around. To use this structure changes it to a transitive verb, suggesting that we as graduates have done something that has changed Brown. This may be grammatically incorrect, but I’d like to think that it’s true in spirit. I entered Brown four years ago with a vague interest in books; I’m graduating with a degree in English literature and education studies. Along the way I’ve taken classes in a variety of departments. I studied abroad. I volunteered. I wrote for a campus daily. I completed a thesis. I’ve met professors that have shaped my academics. I’ve met people that have surprised me with the depth and breadth of their studies, passions and talents. Brown provided me with the space to learn, but it also gave me the respon-
sibility to shape my own curriculum. I shaped my four years here with the gift of independence from a university that recognizes the value in giving its students the responsibility of defining their own Brown education. So in the years to follow, I may say that I graduated from Brown, to give credit to the institution that has shaped my intellectual and personal development, but I’d like to give Brown students a bit of credit as well. It may not be grammatically correct, but to say we graduated Brown suggests that it will hopefully continue to change as the coming generations of Brown students continue to lead this University in previously unexplored directions. I look forward to keeping up with what my fellow graduates will do next year, but also seeing how the incoming students will continue to graduate the University I graduated this year. Irene Chen ’09 is heading west in a conestoga wagon to teach elementary school in New Mexico next year.
The Brown Daily Herald
Fortunate circumstances by taylor barnes executive editor “I feel like we’re at a standstill.” That’s what a friend said to me over a mid-semester coffee break. Since freshman year we had shared our Brown lives over weekly dinners and e-mail chains, four years of new classes, semesters abroad and summer jobs up and down the East coast. Then here we were, just a few months before graduation, and we weren’t talking about the new but the dead ends — the wait lists, looming loans and evaporated job offers. We asked what we were supposed to do now. Hers were plainer words for how Edward Quillan ’33 began his graduation speech this weekend over half a century ago. “As we gather here this morning ... we look upon a nation, indeed a whole world, whose industrial structure seems paralyzed.” Change “industrial” to “financial,” and his words strike a familiar tone. His class left this hill like we do, into the thick of one of the most painful economic crises seen in this country — times like now when unprecedented challenges opened unanticipated opportunities. Like many of us graduating, I came to Brown four years ago and had no idea what I was getting into. I’m from a small suburb of Atlanta that rises and falls with the airlines’ fortunes, and in ’05, we were in a bit of a free fall. It wasn’t a good time for my family to run a risk and send me to out-of-state college. But I came here to open doors, and no one was more ecstatic than my dad. He had stars in his eyes and dreams of having a banker or a diplomat for a daughter. He described education as a formula: We invest X in a degree so that we can emerge with a salary some positive multiple of X, or the equivalent amount of prestige. I was ready for it. I promised him a flawless GPA (only to learn that Brown doesn’t calculate one) and began mapping out the internships and awards I could attain. Then times started to turn — transition. I’ve seen many a Brown student deviate from their plans when circumstances changed opportunities. A friend who graduated a year ago tried many routes popular among students — consulting, marketing, international governance — only to run into dead ends. She moved home after graduation day last year. But her story is not one of frustration. She’s exuberant, putting her talents to use with a group she previously hadn’t considered, an NGO in her hometown. Circumstance changed her direction, and I see no better place for her to be now. Like her, we all have so much possibility when we are open to new callings and changing direction. That time is now for so many of us. To draw on my basic economics education: The opportunity cost has rarely been lower to pursue something radically different than what we think we’ve prepared ourselves for. I found support for this in
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an unexpected source — the “Smart Money” investment column of the Wall Street Journal. In the December piece, “Finding the Best Times out of the Worst,” James Stewart recounts the risks he took in several past recessions, and comes to a surprising conclusion: “Recessions have coincided with some of the best times of my life.” He recognizes that a bad economy causes real and deep suffering, but adds, “to the extent recessions shake up the status quo and force us to examine our goals and priorities, they also offer us enormous opportunities.” And I came to Brown for opportunity. Now I had been languishing this year, imagining myself in this senior “standstill,” when a classmate did me the favor of reminding me of this. She asked if I had five minutes to check out her lab. She was tripping over words and squeaking giggles as she explained that she had been working with other students to design rainwater pots for areas where clean water is scarce. They would divert water from rooftops, she said, filtering it through burnt coconut shells, making the whole process less labor-intensive than carrying pots from a well and healthier, too. We hope it will be a dignified way for people to meet a basic need, she said. Then it hit me: This is why I came here. This is what’s special about Brown, where great minds and great hearts can run wild. I realized the great privilege we students have now, that we can respond not to the incentives offered us but the needs and wants we see. We are in very promising times. I admit, I came here four years ago measuring my achievement by shrinking spaces on my resume. But I’ve changed my attitude and taken a new look at the opportunities in these times called tough. And of all people to agree with me, my dad’s on board. I haven’t been home much for four years. Then when he was driving to the airport after my last abbreviated Thanksgiving jaunt home, he turned down the radio, read my mind and said, “You know, don’t worry about getting some big-shot job for now. The market’s tough. I’ve missed you.” If my dad can ask me to leave Brown and come back to Fayetteville, Ga, then we can all reexamine our values and decide where we are most needed now, whether that takes us home or across the world. I hope that we can all use these times to pursue exactly what it is we feel compelled to do when no other pressure bends our wills. Edward Quillan would agree. The old ways of doing things cannot be sure to rescue us, he said in closing his ’33 address. “Our industries have changed, our country has changed, the whole world has changed. ... Is it not probable, therefore, that as we look forward we must be willing and able to devise new methods for meeting new conditions?” We must. The task seems made for the famously footloose and free-thinking Brunonians. Classmates, congratulations. We graduate into a world in special need of our energies. How fortunate that we are at liberty to offer them. Taylor Barnes ’09 will not be earning some positive multiple of her Brown tuition as a journalist in Boston.
Herald Haiku Thank you for reading. Please continue to do so . Paper comes from trees.
The Brown Daily Herald COMMENCEMENT 2009
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In testimony whereof we subscribe our names to this diploma, fortified with the seal of the
The Brown diploma is printed in Latin. Above is a translation into English.
Read Reread Recycle!
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033/-2+&%'/ XLI GPEWW SJ ©W JSYV ]IEVW EX FVS[R March 11, 2006
On trial for war crimes he committed during the war in Bosnia, the former president of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic is found dead in his jail cell.
Aug. 29, 2005
Hurricane Katrina sweeps through the southeast United States, killing more than 1,800, costing over $80 billion in damages and displacing over half a million people.
world july
august
Oct. 26, 2006
U.S. death toll in Iraq reaches 2,000.
John Roberts Jr. is confirmed and sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States.
september
Hamas takes power by winning a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council.
october november december
january
Oct. 22, 2005
2005
Sept. 2, 2005
february
may
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brown
33 campus police officers begin carrying firearms.
Nov. 12, 2005
May 3, 2006
After push from anti-outsourcing coalition, Brown Bookstore remains independent.
October 2005
Sen. John Kerry P’97 speaks in Salomon 101, criticizing the “incompetent and negligent response to Katrina.”
May 8, 2006 Nov. 19, 2005 Football team wins first ever outright Ivy League Championship by blowing out Columbia 52-21.
March 14, 2006
David Kertzer ’69 P’95 P’98 named provost.
After heated debate and campuswide forums, the College Curriculum Council votes against adding pluses and minuses to the grading system.
Weekend of April 20, 2006 Nov. 14, 2006
Fox News’ “O’Reilly Factor” airs footage of Sex Power God, dubbing the event “pure debauchery.” Criticism of SPG continues the following day on the radio as O’Reilly calls President Simmons “a pinhead” and tells a caller, “You would have been safer in Baghdad than on the campus of Brown University.”
— Compiled and written by Chaz Kelsh
april
Shots fired during oncampus melee.
The Herald reports that congressional candidate and Assistant Professor of Political Science Jennifer Lawless received thousands in contributions from advisees and their families. Lawless eventually returns student donations but keeps family donations.
Sept. 19, 2005
march
Jan. 11, 2006
Simmons publicly kicks off $1.4 billion Boldly Brown campaign.
President Simmons announces that the University will take in 100 students displaced by Katrina.
2006
Jan. 25, 2006
Sept. 29, 2005
June 9, 2006
The World Cup kicks off in Germany with the hosts defeating Costa Rica, 4-2. Italy downed Germany in the final a month later to claim the country’s fourth title.
Common and Wilco rock Spring Weekend concerts. MCAT-takers hit the books indoors.
April 8, 2006
Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., calls for more women “at the table” in a lecture as anti-war groups protest outside and hecklers disrupt her talk.
July 1, 2006
Katherine Bergeron steps in as new dean of the College.
The Brown Daily Herald COMMENCEMENT 2009
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March 6, 2007
Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, Scooter Libby is convicted of lying to a grand jury investigating the 2003 leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Libby’s sentence is later commuted by President George Bush.
2006 Nov. 7, 2006
Aug. 26, 2006
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is elected president of Iran, allegedly calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”
august
Nancy Pelosi becomes the first female speaker of the House of Representatives.
June 29, 2007
Apple’s iPhone is released in the U.S. to much media acclaim.
Dec. 30, 2006
Just before dawn in Iraq, former dictator Saddam Hussein is executed by the new Iraqi government.
world july
Jan. 4, 2007
Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse ousts Lincoln Chafee ’75 from his U.S. Senate seat with 53 percent of the vote.
september
october november december
january
April 16, 2007
32 people are killed at Virginia Tech by a student gunman.
february
march
april
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2007
Oct. 6, 2006
The Sidney Frank Hall for Life Sciences is dedicated after a decade of planning.
Sept. 10, 2006
Chipalo Street ’06 GS alleges police brutality by Brown and Providence police. The next week, hundreds of students stage a protest, marching across campus in solidarity with Street.
Sept. 25, 2006
Gender-queer student calls for genderneutral bathrooms after claiming to have been harassed while wearing a skirt in a men’s bathroom.
Jan. 25, 2007
Friedman Study Center makes its grand opening.
Oct. 12, 2006
Then Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., enthralls a Salomon 101 audience, calling cynicism “the lazy way out.”
Jan. 29, 2007
University accepts $100 million from entrepreneur Warren Alpert, renaming the Med School in his honor.
April 27, 2007
Brown announces that the Smith Swim Center will remain closed for good after rotting wood threatened its structural integrity. A temporary aquatic bubble is eventually erected.
Oct. 18, 2006
Brown releases its 106-page slavery and justice report, which calls for public acknowledgement of the University’s ties to slavery, the construction of a commemorative “slave trade memorial” and the creation of a center for research on slavery and justice.
April 21, 2007
The Flaming Lips headline the first outdoor Spring Weekend concert since the class of 2008’s arrival.
April 24, 2007
Oct. 18, 2006
Dining Services workers and the University reach a contract agreement after unionized workers threatened to strike.
Online registration under Banner begins for rising seniors.
May 5, 2007
The baseball team sweeps Penn to capture the Ivy League Championship. Brown wins the first game 1-0 thanks to a stellar pitching performance by Jeff Dietz ’08 and crushes the Quakers 20-6 in game two. It is Brown’s first league crown in 55 years.
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The Brown Daily Herald COMMENCEMENT 2009 Oct. 20, 2007
Republican Bobby Jindal ’91.5 elected as governor of Louisiana with 54 percent of the vote in a four-way race.
Dec. 27, 2007
In the midst of her campaign to become the Prime Minister of Pakistan for a third time, Benazir Bhutto is killed in a suicide attack at a political rally.
March 17, 2008
Jan. 2, 2008
Oil prices rise to $100 per barrel in the wake of a weak U.S. dollar and violence in oil-producing countries.
Oct. 12, 2007
Former Vice President Al Gore shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about manmade climate change.”
august
september
Feb. 3, 2008
The New England Patriots lose Super Bowl XLII to the New York Giants (with Zak DeOssie ’07) after starting the season 18-0.
2007
world july
In a stunning deal, JPMorgan Chase agrees to buy rival investment bank Bear Stearns for $2 a share. Only a year before, Bear’s shares had sold for $170.
Feb. 24, 2008
81-year-old Fidel Castro is replaced by brother Raul as president of Cuba.
october november december
january
february
march
2008
December 2007
President Ruth Simmons named Glamour Woman of the Year.
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March 15, 2008
Two Molotov cocktails were thrown at the off-campus apartment of Brown/RISD Hillel employee and Israeli emissary Yossi Knafo.
Weekend of April 12, 2008
Lupe Fiasco, Vampire Weekend, Umphrey’s McGee, Girl Talk and M.I.A. play Spring Weekend shows in Meehan.
Oct. 13, 2007
Sept. 18, 2007
Soapbox cars race down College Hill in Red Bull-sponsored competition.
Suffering from pancreatic cancer, Carnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch ’82 gives his “Last Lecture” to a crowd of 400. The text of his speech subsequently draws attention and inspires people around the globe.
April 22, 2008
A pair of students throw pies at New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman during a lecture in Salomon 101.
Dec. 5, 2007
Dean of Medicine Eli Adashi announces resignation, surprising colleagues.
April 7, 2008
After leading the men’s basketball team to a schoolrecord 19 wins in his second year at the helm, Head Coach Craig Robinson resigns to become the head coach at Oregon State. No word on whether Robinson’s brother-in-law, presidential candidate Barack Obama, plans to switch allegiances from the Bears to the Beavers as well.
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The Brown Daily Herald COMMENCEMENT 2009 Oct. 3, 2008
Feb. 5, 2009
Amid widespread panic in financial markets and in response to swiftly declining stock prices, President Bush enacts a $700 billion bailout package for unstable financial institutions.
Cell phone pictures of Michael Phelps inhaling from a marijuana pipe surface and the Olympic gold medalist swimmer is suspended from the sport for three months.
Nov. 4, 2008
Over 131 million Americans go to the polls. Barack Obama is elected president in a landslide, besting John McCain by ten million votes.
Aug. 27, 2008
Then Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) officially receives the nomination to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate at the Democratic National Convention in Denver,
Jan. 20, 2009
Barack Obama is inaugurated as president. AlApril 2009 most two million people travel to the National Mexican officials confirm cases of H1N1 Mall to watch, overwhelming Washington. influenza, commonly referred to as swine flu. Several thousand cases are soon confirmed worldwide as the disease spreads.
world july
august
Feb. 17, 2009
President Obama signs the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, commonly known as the stimulus package, alloting $787 billion to states to revive the economy.
september
2008
october november december
Oct. 18, 2008
february
2009
Oct. 30, 2008
Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee tells a full Salomon 101 that the presidential race lacked substantial policy debate.
january
Jan. 27, 2009
President Ruth Simmons announces that the University is assuming that the endowment will lose nearly 30 percent by the end of June. Administrators later say the loss occurred by the end of 2008.
Members of Students for a Democratic Society attempt to enter the Corporation’s meeting in University Hall. Seven are eventually given probation after a disciplinary hearing.
Sept. 9, 2008
The Task Force on Undergraduate Education releases its final report, calling for a review of concentrations, improvements to advising, a new science resource center, and further internationalization.
march
april
may
june
brown April 1, 2009
Administrators announce that two students did not return to campus from their spring break trip to Trinidad. The students are later found and a parent says no foul play was involved.
Weekend of April 18, 2009
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Nas, Santigold, and Of Montreal play Spring Weekend concerts on the Main Green.
Nov. 24, 2008
Brown football ties Harvard for the Ivy League championship.
Nov. 4, 2008
Students storm the Main Green after Barack Obama is elected president.
March 2, 2009
Jim Yong Kim ’82 is elected the 17th president of Dartmouth College.
March 10, 2009
Former Senator John Edwards emphasizes the nation’s responsibility to end poverty during a lecture in Salomon 101.
May 24, 2009
The class of 2009 walks out the Van Wickle Gates as part of Brown’s 241st commencement.
April 7, 2009
The faculty vote to rename the Columbus Day holiday to Fall Weekend on the academic calendar. Providence mayor David Cicilline ’83 and radio personality Rush Limbaugh are among those who decry the change.
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The Brown Daily Herald COMMENCEMENT 2009
the herald senior survey
the herald’s highly unscientific senior survey was conducted online through google, from may 13 to may 15. 107 seniors completed the survey, which was advertised through email and facebook.
Do you feel $180,000 smarter than you were four years ago? Smarter, but not $180,000 smarter. I still don't know any math. — Well, I learned a lot and I've never been to public school to know what free learning is like. — Certainly smarter; but not sure that anything could justify the $180,000 we just spent. — That's less than the price of one Lamborghini Lambardo! Come on! — Thank you Sidney Frank!! — "Smarter" is not the right word. I do, however, feel like I have $180,000 more socio-intellectual capital than four years ago. — I am graduating with a 3.8 and I will probably be working at McDonalds next year — $180,000 is a social construct. — I'd say $40,000 smarter and $140,000 more insane (i.e. stressed, depressed, frustrated, confused...), not to mention in debt. — I feel about $60,000 smarter.
If you could do it all over again, would you still choose Brown?
Would never change the people I’ve met. — Brown = awesome. — Too expensive and hasn’t given me any job. — It’s the first place I’ve really felt at home! — spicy with...mmm.
If you could do it all over again, would you still choose the same concentration? Economics isn’t the best idea right now — At this point, I’m pretty tired of my concentration. The idea of taking four more years of the same classes makes me really tired!! — As an English major, I’m certain to have a job as long as people still speak English —Linguistics born and linguistics bred, and when I die, I’ll be linguistics dead. — Of course! They never give B’s. — I’ve changed concentrations more times than anyone I know, and I still made the wrong choice. This shit is bogus.
If our class were ranked by GPA, where do you think you would be ranked?
Average ... what can I say? — My GPA, though it may drop after this semester, is excellent — 2 Bs, 6 S/NCs, and a semester abroad. — I’m a goddamn genius. — Lots of Bs. — I don’t get enough As ... but I’ve never gotten a C. — PBK — My grades are average, but with grade inflation what it is, I’m probably screwed.
The Brown Daily Herald COMMENCEMENT 2009 You’re doing what after college? Do you feel like you’re selling out?
I’m singing on a cruise in a barbershop quartet for a few months before buckling down for med school apps. — Not yet, at least. — I HAVE a job. I am NOT moving back home. Aww yeah. — I’m unemployed. Or is that the new selling out? — I was going to sell out and then the job offer was rescinded. So now I’m not going to sell out ... yay?! —Nobody’s buyin’!
And you’re going where?
Brown’s culture? Some people are really weird — I. Love. Brown. — Too many stupid arrogant millionaire hippies — Stupid hippies — Too many hippies — People are academically adventurous, but socially stagnant. Too many people stop making friends after freshman year.
New Curriculum? My concentration? “Musical Dimensions of Contemplative Study.” Nuff said. — Didn’t realize how important it was until I got here; having the opportunity to handcraft my own education was invaluable. — Nothing could have made me lazier — Now, I know absolutely no science
U. housing? You did what?
My wall caved in twice one semester. — Keeney and Hegeman are great, but Harkness sucks. — Keeney and Hegeman were great, but Harkness was not as satisfying. — I lived in a frat, and I’m a woman. — The cinderblock of EmWool is totally cancelled out by Pembroke, the V-Dub and the gym. — SLATER!!! but also Wriston — I’ve lived in the closet to my room for the past semester. — I had a roommate spray me with lysol.
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The Brown Daily Herald COMMENCEMENT 2009
Senior Survey continued from p. 43 How many sexual partners have you had while at Brown? zero - 14% one - 23% two to five - 30% six to eight - 10% nine to ten - 3% more than ten - 10%
Other thoughts?
The most important thing I learned at Brown was how to be happy. I was mediocre at it before, but now I have some real skills. That is incredible. — College was cool, but I wish they’d taught us how to cook, clean, lease housing, find employment, and just generally take care of business. I had to figure that out myself whilst wailing away on assignments that seemed more or less irrelevant in comparison. — The Ratty is my eternal love. — Walking through the Green on sunny days: blue sky, red brick, green leaves. Contentment. — Sliding down Moses Brown’s hills during a snowstorm — First and last days of classes — I’m gonna miss this place.
The strangest place you had sex is where?
Daniel Perez | Deo
Adam Robbins | Nightmarishly Elastic
Dustin Foley | Enigma Twist