Daily Herald Campus News the Brown
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Students head south to research civil rights U. condemns bill limiting
public research access
By Lauren Pope Contributing Writer
As part of a nearly 50-year-old partnership with Tougaloo College, Brown students will travel to the school in Tougaloo, Miss. this spring break to explore the civil rights movement. Francoise Hamlin, assistant professor of Africana studies, and Maitrayee Bhattacharyya ’91, associate dean for diversity programs, will lead the trip. They will choose approximately four students through an application that was due yesterday. “Mississippi and its history (have) a lot to teach students in the northeast about the nation — through its contrast and similarities,” Hamlin wrote in an email to The Herald. By bringing students to Mississippi “to breathe the air, visit sites of the mass movement and sites of murder, a better understanding of this national history can be grasped.” The students who participate will “benefit enormously” from the trip, Hamlin added. The University formed its partnership with Tougaloo, a liberal arts and historically black college, in 1964, instituting collaborative research and exchange programs, according to the Brown University-Tougaloo College Partnership website. The partnership includes a teaching program, through which Brown graduate students act as faculty at Tougaloo, and a semester exchange program for undergraduate students from both schools. Hamlin said she hopes the trip will be a way to “re-strengthen” ties between the two schools and will generate interest in the semester exchange. “It’s an educational and research trip as much as it is a trip to expand social and cultural connections,” she wrote. While the application was open to all undergraduate students, the majority of students
By Shefali Luthra News Editor
Courtesy of Francoise Hamlin
Brown students will visit Tougaloo College to study the civil rights movement.
Courtesy of Khalila Douze
Students will visit this store which was associated with a brutal 1955 murder.
who applied are enrolled in Hamlin’s AFRI 1090: “Black Freedom Struggle Since 1945,” she wrote. One graduate student in Hamlin’s HIST 2790: “Rethinking the Civil Rights Movement” will also participate. The students in Hamlin’s courses who are selected to
participate in the trip will have background knowledge of the civil rights movement in Mississippi. In preparation for the trip, they will read two additional books and participate in a seminar with Hamlin. Once they arrive in Mississippi, the students will do some archival work, Hamlin wrote.
The University has publicly condemned a bill that would require publishers to approve open access to government-funded research. Currently, if research receives any funding from the National Institutes of Health, it must be made publicly available via an index maintained by the National Library of Medicine. Studies published in subscription-based journals must become public within one year of initial publication. The Research Works Act would require consent from subscription-based journals before studies they have published could be made publicly available. The University condemned the legislation for “a whole variety of reasons,” said Provost Mark Schlissel P’15. He cited the limitations it could impose on community access to student and faculty research as the most troubling part of the proposal. “It’s a bill that would benefit for-profit publishers at the expense of the scholarly community and the public by imposing an increased barrier to access to the product of our research,” Schlissel said. Faculty members are not currently required to publish their research in open journals, Schlissel said. If the bill passed, members of the University community who did not subscribe to particular journals would have difficulty accessing the studies published both at Brown and at
other institutions. Schlissel, whose own research in the biological sciences is funded by NIH grants, said it would be “disappointing” if someone had to subscribe to a journal to read his findings. “It’s a matter of public policy,” he said. “As a country, we’d like to lower the barriers to the access to research.” The bill has also been condemned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California and Oxford University presses, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported last month. But it has received support from the Association of American Publishers. “At a time when job retention, United States exports, scholarly excellence, scientific integrity and digital copyright protection are all priorities, the Research Works Act ensures the sustainability of this industry,” said Tom Allen, president and chief executive officer of the Association of American Publishers, in a release from the organization. Clyde Briant, vice president for research, initially brought the bill to Schlissel’s attention. Schlissel told President Ruth Simmons he recommended condemning the bill, an action Simmons told him she supported. The University is currently considering a policy that would make all research done at Brown freely accessible to the public, The Herald reported last October. Such policies are already in place at MIT and Princeton.
bearing the new year light
Sam Kase / Herald
The bear statue on the Main Green celebrates Chinese New Year with a lantern.