Brown University

• 1. Introduction

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  Brown University sits on a hill above Providence, Rhode Island, behind a set of wrought-iron gates built in 1901 that carry a peculiar superstition: walk through the central gate a second time before graduation, and you will never graduate at all. Walking backward, students claim, cancels the hex. That detail says something true about Brown. It is simultaneously one of the oldest, most august universities in America and a place that has always relished questioning the rules everyone else follows.

  Founded in 1764 as Rhode Island College, Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Its founding charter was, by the standards of colonial America, a genuinely unusual document. It was the first American college to put in writing that students would be admitted and taught regardless of their religious affiliation. That early appetite for difference would resurface again and again, from a student rebellion in 1969 that abolished mandatory course requirements to a faculty vote that simply got rid of D grades and F grades that appear on transcripts.

  What does it mean to be educated on your own terms? What happens when a university lets students design their own curriculum? And how does a place founded with idealistic principles reckon with the messy historical reality of how it actually got built? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Charter and Founding Bargain

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  In 1761, three men from Newport sat down and drafted a petition to Rhode Island's General Assembly. They wanted to open a school to teach young men languages, mathematics, geography, and history. The three petitioners were Ezra Stiles, a pastor who would later become president of Yale; William Ellery Jr., who would sign the Declaration of Independence; and Josias Lyndon, who would become governor of the colony.

  The petition eventually drew in a second force: the Philadelphia Baptist Association. At the time, every colonial college was anchored to a denomination. The Congregationalists had Harvard and Yale. The Presbyterians had what would become Princeton. The Episcopalians had William and Mary and what would become Columbia. The Baptists had nothing. Rhode Island, however, had been founded as a Baptist colony and was home to the First Baptist Church in America, the mother church of all American Baptists. The association saw an opening.

  James Manning, who had taken his degree from the College of New Jersey in September 1762, was chosen as the man to make it happen. He arrived in Newport in July 1763 and met Stiles, who agreed to draft the charter. The first draft was rejected by Baptist members who feared their denomination would be underrepresented. A revised charter, co-authored by Stiles and Ellery, was adopted by the Rhode Island General Assembly on the 3rd of March 1764, in East Greenwich.

  The charter's key passage was unlike anything in colonial higher education. It declared that "sectarian differences of opinions, shall not make any Part of the Public and Classical Instruction." The board of trustees was to be composed of members from multiple denominations, and the document recognized, as contemporaries put it, "more broadly and fundamentally than any other" university charter the principle of denominational cooperation. Manning was sworn in as the college's first president in 1765 and held that post until 1791.

• 3. The Brown Family's Imprint

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  In 1770, the college moved from Warren to Providence. Brothers John and Moses Brown purchased a four-acre lot on the crest of College Hill on behalf of the school, on land that had originally been part of the home lot of Chad Brown, an ancestor of their family and one of the original proprietors of Providence Plantations. The college's first building, later called University Hall, may have been modeled on Nassau Hall at the College of New Jersey, built fourteen years earlier. Manning, who had been educated at Princeton, likely suggested the resemblance.

  The family's ties deepened over the following decades. Four Brown men, Nicholas, John, Joseph, and Moses, were central to moving the college, constructing its buildings, and securing its endowment. Joseph became a professor of natural philosophy at the college. John served as treasurer from 1775 to 1796. His nephew Nicholas Brown Jr. succeeded him and held the role until 1825.

  On the 8th of September 1803, the university's governing body made an offer: donate $5,000 within one year of commencement, and the donor could name the college. Nicholas Brown Jr. answered the following year. In a letter dated the 6th of September 1804, he committed five thousand dollars to establish a professorship of oratory and belles letters. That same day, the corporation voted to call the institution Brown University. His total benefactions to the institution over his lifetime reached nearly $160,000, including funds for Hope College in 1821-22 and Manning Hall in 1834-35.

  The family's wealth, however, was not untouched by history. The Browns had accrued money both directly and indirectly from the transatlantic slave trade. The family itself was divided: John Brown had defended slavery, while Moses and Nicholas Brown Jr. were fervent abolitionists. That tension would wait nearly two centuries before the university formally confronted it.

• 4. Revolution in the Curriculum

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  In 1966, eighty students and fifteen professors at Brown formed the first Group Independent Study Project, or GISP. It was inspired by student-initiated experimental schools, particularly San Francisco State College, and its animating idea was to put students at the center of their education. Two GISP members, Ira Magaziner and Elliot Maxwell, wrote up their findings in a paper titled "Draft of a Working Paper for Education at Brown University." Among other things, it proposed eliminating letter grades and introducing interdisciplinary freshman-year courses built around modes of thought rather than subject matter.

  Magaziner spent the following year organizing student protests and discussions to push for the reforms. In 1968, university president Ray Heffner established a Special Committee on Curricular Philosophy to develop specific proposals. The faculty voted the New Curriculum into existence on the 7th of May 1969.

  The changes were substantial. Mandatory general education distribution requirements were abolished. A Satisfactory/No Credit grading option was introduced. The grading system eliminated pluses, minuses, and D grades entirely, and a grade of No Credit, the equivalent of a failing grade elsewhere, would not appear on students' external transcripts. The effect was that students could attempt courses in unfamiliar territory without the transcript cost of failure.

  In 2006, a proposal to bring back plus and minus grading was put forward in response to concerns about grade inflation. The College Curriculum Council canvassed alumni, faculty, students, and even the original authors of the Magaziner-Maxwell Report before rejecting it. The other main elements of the 1969 curriculum remain in place to this day. It is now called the Open Curriculum, and the acceptance rate for the class of 2026 was 5 percent, the lowest in the university's history.

• 5. Reckoning With Slavery

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  In 2003, Ruth Simmons, who had become the first African American president of an Ivy League institution, launched a steering committee to investigate Brown's eighteenth-century ties to slavery. The inquiry was not a peripheral exercise. The Brown family, whose $5,000 gift had given the university its name, had built much of their wealth through involvement with the transatlantic slave trade.

  In October 2006, the committee released its report, titled "Slavery and Justice." The document laid out in detail how the university had benefited both directly and indirectly from the slave trade and from the labor of enslaved people. It also made seven specific recommendations for how Brown should respond to that history.

  The university has since completed a number of those recommendations. It established the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. It built a Slavery Memorial on campus. It funded a $10 million permanent endowment for Providence Public Schools.

  The report was described as the first major effort by an American university to address its ties to slavery. It prompted other institutions to begin similar processes of their own. John Carter Brown, son of Nicholas Brown Jr. and the man whose collection forms the basis of one of the world's great research libraries on the Americas, had inherited a family fortune built partly on that history. The John Carter Brown Library, established on campus in 1904, holds the best preserved of the eleven surviving copies of the Bay Psalm Book, the earliest book printed in British North America.

• 6. An Unusual Architecture of Learning

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  Brown began offering computer science courses in 1956, when it acquired an IBM machine, running them through the departments of Economics and Applied Mathematics. In January 1958, it added an IBM 650, the only one of its type between Hartford and Boston. In 1960, the university opened its first dedicated computer building, designed by Philip Johnson, who would later also contribute to the broader campus. In the 1960s, Andries van Dam, along with Ted Nelson and Bob Wallace, invented the Hypertext Editing Systems HES and FRESS while at Brown. Nelson coined the word "hypertext" there. Van Dam's students helped originate XML, XSLT, and related web standards. Computer science was granted full departmental status in 1979.

  Brown's applied mathematics program was established in 1941, making it the oldest in the United States. Its engineering program dates to 1847, the oldest in the Ivy League and the third oldest civilian engineering program in the country. The medical school was established in 1811, fourth oldest in the Ivy League, though it was suspended in 1827 when medical faculty refused to comply with a policy requiring students to live on campus. The program was reorganized in 1972, and the first M.D. degrees from the new Program in Medicine were awarded to a class of 58 students in 1975.

  In January 2007, entrepreneur and philanthropist Warren Alpert donated $100 million to the medical school, which was renamed in his honor. The school is particularly known for its eight-year Program in Liberal Medical Education, inaugurated in 1984, which offers combined undergraduate and medical degrees and admits only 2 percent of applicants. The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs was initially endowed by Thomas Watson Jr., class of 1937 and former Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and counts among its faculty former heads of state including Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Chilean president Ricardo Lagos Escobar.

  The Brown|RISD Dual Degree Program, formalized in 2007, accepted 20 of 725 applicants for the autumn 2020 class, an acceptance rate of 2.7 percent. Students complete five years of study and earn degrees from both institutions, combining possibilities like industrial design with engineering, or philosophy with sculpture.

• 7. Lives Launched From College Hill

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  Six Brown graduates have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. They include Alfred Uhry, class of 1958; Lynn Nottage, class of 1986, who won twice, in 2009 and 2017; Ayad Akhtar, class of 1993; Nilo Cruz, class of 1994; Quiara Alegria Hudes, class of 2004; and Jackie Sibblies Drury, MFA class of 2004. In 2009, American Theater magazine's ranking of the most-produced American plays found Brown graduates in four of the top five spots.

  The university's Spring Weekend, a music festival for students established in 1950, has over the decades drawn Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, and U2. More recently it has featured Kendrick Lamar and Mitski. Since 1960 the festival has been organized by the student-run Brown Concert Agency.

  From business and technology, alumni include Janet Yellen, class of 1967, former chair of the Federal Reserve and current U.S. Secretary of the Treasury; Ted Turner, class of 1960, who founded CNN; Thomas Watson Jr., class of 1937, who served as IBM chairman and CEO and later as Ambassador to the Soviet Union; and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, class of 1991. Companies founded by Brown alumni include CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Figma, Workday, Warby Parker, and Cards Against Humanity.

  The first intercollegiate ice hockey game in America was played between Brown and Harvard on the 19th of January 1898. The first university rowing regatta larger than a dual-meet was held between Brown, Harvard, and Yale at Lake Quinsigamond in Massachusetts on the 26th of July 1859. Fritz Pollard, a high-profile alumnus of the football program, is the namesake of the Pollard Award; John W. Heisman, another alumnus, gives his name to college football's most famous trophy. The Carney Institute for Brain Science, renamed in 2018 following a $100 million gift, stands as one of the best-endowed university neuroscience programs in the country, with a founding focus on brain-computer interfaces that traces its origins to John Donoghue's work when he established it in 2009.