Short answers, pulled from the story.
Brown University was founded in 1764 as Rhode Island College. Its charter was adopted by the Rhode Island General Assembly on the 3rd of March 1764 in East Greenwich. The institution was renamed Brown University in 1804 after Nicholas Brown Jr. donated $5,000 to establish a professorship of oratory and belles letters.
Brown's Open Curriculum, adopted on the 7th of May 1969, eliminated mandatory general education distribution requirements and introduced a Satisfactory/No Credit grading option. It also removed D grades and F grades from external transcripts, replacing them with a "No Credit" designation that does not appear on transcripts sent outside the university.
Released in October 2006 under president Ruth Simmons, the "Slavery and Justice" report documented how Brown had benefited both directly and indirectly from the transatlantic slave trade and the labor of enslaved people. It made seven recommendations, leading Brown to establish a Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, build a Slavery Memorial, and fund a $10 million permanent endowment for Providence Public Schools.
For the undergraduate class of 2026, Brown received 50,649 applications and admitted 2,560 students, for an acceptance rate of 5.0 percent, the lowest in the university's history. The Brown|RISD Dual Degree Program is even more selective, admitting 20 of 725 applicants for the autumn 2020 class, an acceptance rate of 2.7 percent.
Brown holds the oldest applied mathematics program in the United States, established in 1941, and the oldest engineering program in the Ivy League, dating to 1847. It was also the first American college to codify equal admission and instruction regardless of students' religious affiliation. In the 1960s, Andries van Dam, Ted Nelson, and Bob Wallace invented the Hypertext Editing Systems at Brown, and Nelson coined the word "hypertext" there.
Brown alumni include Janet Yellen, class of 1967, former Federal Reserve chair and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury; Ted Turner, class of 1960, founder of CNN; and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights including Lynn Nottage, class of 1986. Horace Mann, class of 1819, credited as the father of American public school education, and John D. Rockefeller Jr., class of 1897, are among the university's most historically prominent alumni.