Daniel Pipkin ’14 gives back & pays it forward
A long-time Brown volunteer, Daniel has served on both the President’s Leadership Council and the Brown Annual Fund Young Leadership Council. In addition to donating each year since he graduated, he’s also earmarked money for Brown in his retirement plan.
“A Brown education is transformational. Exposure to that which is beyond you—things you didn’t know, experiences you hadn’t lived, people you hadn’t met—changes you for the better. rough the Brown experience, thousands of students on College Hill learn and share knowledge that expands their world. Brunonia slowly opens their apertures, and what is le is the bedrock upon which they build lives of ‘usefulness and reputation.’ Financial support of Brown, for me, is a sound investment in that change.”
–Daniel J. Pipkin ’14You can follow in Daniel’s footsteps and support future Brown students with an estate gift—no matter what stage of life you’re in.
Contact the Office of Philanthropic Strategies and Planned Giving at 401-863-9119 or Planned_Giving@brown.edu to discuss your options.
We are so very proud of you! Go Bruno!
Editors’ Note Page 5 Senior Orators Page 6 Honorary Degrees Page 7 Online Community Page 8
Isolated Introduction Page 10 Brown, Activism and Coalitions Page 12 Panhellenic Resurgence Page 14 Crossword Page 15
Four Years in Headlines Page 16
Mapping Change on College Hill Page 18
From COVID to Champs Page 22 Make Room for Bilk Bonic Page 24
Unions at New Heights Page 26
No Harm, No Monica, No Regrets Page 28 Senior Voices Page 30
Editors
Will Kubzansky
Katy Pickens
Alex Nadirashvili
Augustus Bayard
Caleb Lazar
Peter Swope
Kaitlyn Torres
Cover Art
Kaitlyn Stanton
Illustrators
Avery Guo
Kaitlyn Stanton
Stella Tsogtjargal
Reporters
Dennis Carey
Ryan Doherty
Avani Ghosh
Tom Li
Ciara Meyer
Jaanu Ramesh
Sanai Rashid
Rhea Rasquinha
Ethan Schenker
Jack Tajmajer
Rya Vallabhaneni
Photographers
Claire Diepenbrock
Kaiolena Tacazon
Design
Alex Nadirashvili
Katy Pickens
Will Kubzansky
Julia Vaz
Crossword
Nathaniel Scott
Katy Pickens
Business
Benjamin Moshes
Alex Zhou
Cary Warner
Joe Belfeld
Andrew Willwerth
There is no standard college experience. Everyone, no matter when or where they went to school, can say that their time on campus had its challenges and oddities.
But it’s hard to imagine a stranger way to start college than how Brown’s class of 2024 did — a semester late and taking classes online from our dorm rooms.
The frst time we walked through the Van Wickle Gates in February 2021, we wore masks and walked in small groups. Our frst months on campus shaped our experience of college — our interests, our friends, our relationship with Providence. That time made us resilient. With only three proper years on College Hill, it made us more willing to dive in to clubs, activism and in-person classes. And when those frst months fnally ended, they gave way to a memorable (and hot) summer semester.
This weekend, we’ll fnally walk through the gates as a full class. Our commencement magazine attempts to capture some of what happened in between those trips through the gates. The high points, the lows and the complex moments in between. The ways in which our campus changed. How our class grew as artists and athletes. The moments where we found community. And the activism that has taken place throughout — and crescendoed as we get ready to leave.
Most of us will not recall our time in college as perfect. But we are also not entering a perfect world. For better and for worse, our years here have felt like appropriate preparation that we will take into the next stage of our lives. We will also take a deep sense of gratitude into that stage — for our friends, families, professors and communities.
This editors’ note was written by The Herald’s 133rd Editorial Board: Will Kubzansky ’24, Katy Pickens ’24, Alex Nadirashvili ’24, Augustus Bayard ’24, Caleb Lazar ’24, Peter Swope ’24 and Kaitlyn Torres ’24.
Marielle Buxbaum ’24: Being ambitious about friendship
Marielle Buxbaum ’24 did not write her Commencement speech locked away in the library. Instead, she was with friends watching “Riverdale.”
On a tight deadline to submit a speech for consideration, Buxbaum hoped that watching the show would inspire her.
Caziah Mayers ’24: ‘Keep moving forward’
Caziah Mayers ’24 will tell a story about “overcoming and having gratitude through the process of overcoming,” they said.
“It’s very hard to remember the things that you have and what you still have potential to do …. when you’re in the midst of real chaos and strife,” they said.
In the spring of 2021, instead of starting their second semes-
While the series takes endless dramatic turns, Riverdale at its heart is a show about friends.
Buxbaum’s speech — one of two student speeches chosen by the University for Commencement — centers around being ambitious in friendships.
Brown does not traditionally bring an outside speaker to Commencement ceremonies, giving the role to students. Guest speakers typically deliver speeches at the Baccalaureate Service. .
Buxbaum hopes that her speech is celebratory, inspiring and actionable. The class of 2024, she said, had to work intentionally to make friends when it entered Brown at the heights of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’ve seen what it’s like to be deprived of socialization,” she said.
But the experience helped forge special bonds, Buxbaum explained. In her speech, she will urge the class of 2024 to bring that spirit of intentionality beyond College Hill.
“Friendship becomes less central in your life after college,” she said, noting that the United States is in a loneliness epidemic.
Brown students enter the world with a wide breadth of ambitions, Buxbaum said. But she argues they shouldn’t forget to be ambitious about friendship.
“Let’s change what friendship means by fnding unique and special ways to be a part of each other’s lives,” Buxbaum said.
ter at Brown, Mayers found themselves in Brooklyn, working three jobs and taking care of their family.
“It was really hard to be excited and to have this mentality of ‘I’m still lucky,’” they said.
In their sophomore year, Mayers found “people to lean on” — and learned how to lean on them. They delved into poetry and joined Word!, a poetry space for queer students as well as BIPOC students.
“I was surrounded by this community of people who were way ahead in their understanding of gender and sexuality and what it means to be otherwise, especially as a Black person at a place like Brown and how they’ve incorporated their art into their lives,” they recalled.
Mayers said that one of their proudest moments at Brown was reviving the group Students of Caribbean Ancestry. “I missed the connection to home that I’d had being in New York,” they said.
In embracing diferent elements of their identity, Mayers said they aimed to create a space for others to do the same.
“Hypermasculinity and homophobia are mobilized in various Caribbean cultures,” they said. As president of SOCA, Mayers wanted to build a space “where people could be themselves and be Carribean in whatever capacity that meant for them.”
Mayers experienced tragedy their junior year, as their mother passed away following a battle with cancer. They learned the news in a seminar, where they had two friends who are Black and masculine-presenting.
In her junior spring, Buxbaum studied abroad in Ecuador, a country known for its collectivist culture. The experience gave her a newfound appreciation for the community at Brown.
“At a place like Brown, it’s so collaborative,” she said.
The class of 2024’s unique introduction to college life makes them particularly committed to fostering community, Buxbaum said. She recalled a play put on by students from across the frst-year class. That play was an aberration from typical years when students split of into diferent theater groups.
But the pandemic created unique circumstances, Buxbaum said, remembering sweltering summer rehearsals fondly. “Everything felt so unusual and special.”
When the Class of 2024 leaves Brown, Buxbaum hopes they “keep that outside-the-box spirit.”
“We’re used to the idea that social structures are fxed,” Buxbaum said. She believes the class of 2024 has gotten the chance to upend them, though. “I see a lot of upstart spirit in our grade.”
As her class’s time on campus comes to a close, Buxbaum hopes that Brunonians can imagine a life centered around friendships and overcoming “harmful social structures.”
“I’m inspired to see the ways that people will be the architects of their own lives, out of a true intention of their desires,” she said. She hopes her peers opt “to connect no matter what.”
“There’s a certain sort of playbook of how you’re supposed to behave as a black man,” they said.
But their friends did not pull from that playbook, Mayers said. “It was really beautiful … to be in this space where we’re all holding each other and I can cry.”
Mayers described the moment as “another testament” to the importance of building community and “leaning into your strengths.”
Following their mother’s passing, Mayers reconnected with art and took a step back from other commitments. They wrote poetry and music, including an album. “That time actually gave me the space to feel what I needed to feel and handle what I need to handle but also space to pour into art again.”
During this time, Mayers wrote and performed poems around campus and Providence, where some attendees would donate to a GoFundMe to help Mayers fund logistical support for their family.
The Commencement speech, Mayers said, ofers an opportunity for them to express gratitude for what they’ve done at Brown — and what the Brown community has in turn given back to them.
“I’ve become the person that I was dreaming about when I was frst thinking about what it would mean to be at Brown,” they said. Mayers gave three words to summarize their speech: “Keep moving forward.”
Brown confers nine honorary degrees at Commencement to artists, academics, University ‘champions’
Tby Will Kubzansky
he University will award nine honorary doctorates at Commencement to a Nobel Prize winner, renowned artists and University donors among others, according to a University press release.
President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 will confer the degrees, which are awarded by the Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, to Tom Geismar ’53, Claudia Goldin, Perry Kasper Granoff P’93, Joy Harjo, William Kentridge, Pedro Noguera ’81 MA’84, Sarah Ruhl ’97 MA’01, Jerome Vascellaro ’74 P’07 and Mary Vascellaro ’74 P’07.
Geismar, who has degrees from Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design, has designed over 100 corporate logos — including those of PBS, Chase Bank and Mobil Oil, according to his design firm’s website.
A New Jersey native, Geismar won a Presidential Design Award in 1985 for leading American efforts to create a “national system of standardized transportation symbols.”
Geismar also contributed to a 1960s design revamp for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, helping establish the iconic “T” symbol.
Goldin, a Harvard professor, won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her research on women in the workforce. Her work has tracked the gender wage gap — and the ways in which women’s role in the workforce has evolved over the last 50 years, according to the New York Times.
Currently, Goldin co-directs the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Gender in the Economy group. She previously led the American Economic Association and the Economic History Association and was the first tenured woman in Harvard’s economics department.
Granoff has served on the boards of the American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet, the School of American Ballet at Lincoln Center and the Roundabout Theatre in New York, according to the press release.
The Granoffs are longtime donors to Brown. Perry’s husband, Marty, received an honorary doctorate in 2006. Their names adorn the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts.
Harjo, the U.S. poet laureate from 2019 to 2022, has written 10 books of poetry, three children’s books, two memoirs and seven music albums, according to the press release. Much of her work centers around themes of social justice.
The first Native American to serve as the poet laureate, Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation. She is also a chancellor of the Academy of American poets and currently serves as the artist-in-residence at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Kentridge is an acclaimed South African artist currently in residence at the Brown Arts Institute. In films, works for the stage, drawings, sculptures and other mediums, Kentridge often engages with the political and social realities of post-apartheid South Africa.
Kentridge’s work has appeared at the Louvre in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate in London, according to the press release.
Noguera, distinguished professor of education and dean at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, has written extensively on the impact of “social and economic conditions” on schools, according to his website. He has also authored multiple books about educational equity and serves on the board of the Economic Policy Institute.
At Brown, Noguera “played rugby, held student leadership roles and was an activist,” according to the press release.
Ruhl, a winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship, has authored 19 plays. Her plays “The Clean House” and “In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play” were both Pulitzer Prize finalists. She has also authored multiple books, including a memoir about living with facial palsy.
Currently, she lives in Brooklyn and is working on a musical with Elvis Costello. She additionally works as a professor in the practice of playwriting at Yale.
Jerome Vascellaro, the former vice chancellor of the Corporation, served on presidential search committees for both Paxson and former Brown president Ruth J. Simmons, according to the press release. Vascellaro was on the Corporation for 20 years, nine of which he spent as vice chancellor. He previously worked at the consultancy McKinsey and Company and the investment firm TPG Capital.
Mary Vascellaro previously chaired the Teach for America Bay Area advisory board. She additionally is a founding member of the University’s Women’s Leadership Council, according to the press release. She previously worked in “retail merchandising and management.”
In 2021, Jerome and Mary Vascellaro gave $1 million to support the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. They have also funded the Vascellaro Family Social Impact Fellowship at the Swearer Center.
Coming to Brown during lockdown was “honestly a nightmare” for Meghan Spangenberg ’24.
As graduating seniors, Spangenberg and fellow members of the class of 2024 began their time at Brown with extensive pandemic restrictions in place. But despite the difculties they faced adjusting to college life in isolation, the class found a non-traditional way to connect: forging online communities that continue to infuence their college experiences today.
For Chas Steinbrugge ’24, connecting with fellow classmates was a major concern when he started at Brown. Due to the University’s unique trimester system at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of the class of 2024 spent the fall 2020 semester taking a single class remotely, thus solely relegated to virtual communications as they tried to meet one another.
“It was defnitely difcult to connect with classmates in the same way I would have hoped,” Steinbrugge said, noting that he was mostly exposed to fellow students from his hometown of Richmond, Virginia.
Brayson Freeman ’24 said he “felt behind” during his frst year at college because all of his friends had already gone of and “started (college)” while he was still trying to fgure out a way to meet his peers. “It was just hard to meet people, to connect,” he said.
In this complicated social context, digital communities emerged to fll the gap. Mina Sarmas ’24 found that social media ofered a way for people to “come together.”
“I applied to Brown because of its (values of) community collaboration,” she said. “Even through COVID-19, and all of the challenges that came with that, people … were able to still hold those values.”
Sarmas was at the front lines of the class of 2024’s eforts to build community. She was accepted to Brown under early decision, right before the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and created a community-wide chat on the messaging app GroupMe.
When the University released regular decision notifcations in March, around two weeks after nationwide shelter-in-place orders began, the GroupMe chat exploded.
“A bunch of people joined it,” Sarmas said. “The online community was … vibrant. There were so many people in the group chat.” Membership in the chat swelled to over 1,600.
Isabella Lloyd ’24 suggested that the trimester system strengthened the class’s online community.
“We kind of had that weird deferred semester and then when we came onto campus there was basically no way to connect except virtually,” she said.
During that deferred semester, students used GroupeMe to
organize game nights, hosting Zooms to play games like Skribbl. io or Among Us, according to both Sarmas and Steinbrugge.
Olivia Booth ’24 joined the class GroupMe “after they told us we wouldn’t be coming on campus in the fall,” she said. “I panic-joined an obscene amount of hyper-specifc” chats.
Sarmas mentioned several smaller ofshoots from the main GroupMe, including afnity-, geographic- and interest-based groups.
One such chat, formed by Lloyd, brought together fans of the popular Broadway show “Hamilton” to perform a virtual cover of the song “Alexander Hamilton. “Everyone had parts and they were welcome to do what they like(d),” Lloyd said.
“It’s funny to look back on it now and see people I’ve met in person since and see how dramatically we’ve all changed.”
“We split the lyrics individually so each person had equal time and … everyone sent videos of their parts and audios of the whole song” that Lloyd then cut together.
These projects gave incoming frst-years “a sense of community” and “wouldn’t have been possible without technology,” Lloyd added.
While Booth doesn’t remember how she came about the “Hamilton” project, she looks back at her participation in the video fondly. “It was like a ten-minute commitment,” she said, “and it’s funny to look back on it now and see people I’ve met in person since and see how dramatically we’ve all changed.”
As a result of connections made through GroupMe, Booth also “ended up writing a 7-episode sitcom, joining a virtual Bible study and sending a Hail Mary message to the GroupMe asking if anybody wanted to WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) in San Diego with me for the fall,” she said.
Another student responded and, a week later, the two of them moved to a San Diego commune for a month. Booth shared that she is still close friends with her WWOOFing
partner, which she can “almost exclusively thank the Class of ’24 GroupMe” for.
Beyond forming important community spaces, GroupMe also provided an opportunity for students to discuss more serious topics related to the unprecedented global events the world witnessed in 2020. But the virtual nature of these discussions sometimes led to tensions within the GroupMe.
“2020 was just a really crazy year,” Sarmas explained. “A lot of the outside events kind of came in (to the GroupMe). … Not being face-to-face, you couldn’t really see who you were talking to or know exactly what they were trying to say. Some people don’t convey things well over text.”
Despite the frst impressions made by some prolifc GroupMe personalities, coming to campus in January 2021 felt like a “blank slate” to many, Steinbrugge said.
But arriving on campus didn’t end the class of 2024’s sense of isolation. Sarmas said that the frst-year class was “pretty isolated in terms of on-campus social life because we were in pods — you weren’t supposed to be with more than four other people including yourself.”
The GroupMe remained a way to counteract this separation, according to Sarmas. During the spring semester, she also hosted virtual frst-year socials and online trivia nights over Zoom in her role as the Undergraduate Council of Students’ frst-year representative.
Others turned to more comedic forums to build community. Steinbrugge had created the popular Instagram page BrownUMemes the summer before the class of 2024’s arrival on campus. During the college application process, Steinbrugge recalled looking at colleges’ meme pages and Barstool accounts “to see what students were posting and what campus life looks like,” he said.
“I noticed that there wasn’t an account for Brown,” he said, and thus decided to create BrownUMemes to poke fun at students’ shared experiences navigating college during the pandemic.
Steinbrugge originally geared BrownUMemes toward the class of 2024. But upon his arrival on campus, he found that much of his content applied to other class years.
“When people are here in person, all experiencing the same dining halls, (restrictions to) only takeaway food (and) diferent policies that were afecting everyone simultaneously, it just led to a lot more content that I was able to make jokes about,” Steinbrugge said.
While ofering students entertainment, BrownUMemes also became a forum for campus discourse regarding the University’s
Kaitlyn Stanton / Herald
shifting COVID-19 policies. “Whenever I would make a meme that had to do with some sort of COVID-19 policy, (it) would obviously have strong feedback from either side,” Steinbrugge said, noting that there was “a good balance of agreement and occasional criticism in the comments.”
Sarmas also worked to address University policies that may have been confusing to newcomers through an Instagram account called “First Years at Brown,” where she would post resource guides for other freshmen about campus and administrative information.
Steinbrugge stopped posting to the BrownUMemes account in April 2023, citing the “limited possibilities for growth of the account, as well as the amount of time it took to run it.”
Dear Blueno, an anonymous Facebook page board for University community members that was popular during the class of 2024’s initial arrival on campus, similarly saw a decline in engagement and was eventually unpublished by Facebook.
While Steinbrugge felt that his meme page once flled a “comedy void on campus,” he believes that other organizations now occupy that role. “It seems like people like getting comedy content from Sidechat and the Noser,” he said.
While Dear Blueno felt safer than Sidechat for Sarmas because moderators would review each submission before posting it online, she said that “more people engage with Sidechat (now) … because it’s anonymous” and lacks similarly rigorous regulations.
Steinbrugge said that Sidechat’s anonymous nature is a “neg-
ative” because it encourages students to post more aggressive opinions, making the platform a “polarizing factor on campus.”
Today, Freeman said that Brown feels more like “how college is supposed to be,” and he doesn’t fnd himself relying on technology to connect with peers as much as he did during COVID-19. Still, he and many other members of the class of 2024 continue to view their lockdown experiences as opportunities for bonding.
“We experienced one of the most unique starts to college, and we will always be bonded because of that,” Spangenberg said. “We can all relate and sympathize with each other.”
Mathilda Silbiger ’24, who met many of her frst friends at Brown through online classes, Instagram and an international WhatsApp group, said that “the ways we met one another were unconventional, for sure, but this also fostered an openness unlike that of any other class I’ve seen here.”
“I know my friends at Brown will be my friends for life,” she added.
Lloyd noted, however, that there’s currently “no generation of students left (on campus) that knew what it was like before the pandemic, so there’s probably bits of culture that were lost.”
Freeman similarly regretted that there are “some rituals” and “traditions” he missed out on due to COVID-19.
Spangenberg echoed the sentiment. “In all honesty, I think every university class of 2024 deserves an extra special senior spring and commencement this year,” he said. “It makes me sad that people in administration have forgotten what our
class went through.”
Silbiger, who was a Bruno Leader this year, said her experience with “real, in-person ‘orientation’ for the frst time” made her wonder “what it would have been like for our year to experience a real ice cream social, frst-year dance and so on.”
“We experienced one of the most unique starts to college, and we will always be bonded because of that.”
Still, she emphasized that she would “never wish for a diferent dynamic within our class.”
While Booth said that “it’s hard to gauge the impact of COVID internet culture on our college experience because we have no basis of comparison,” she is confdent that she “wouldn’t have worked on these funky projects” otherwise.
“I am super grateful for a ton of people I met through these niche-themed online groups that I’m still good friends with,” she said.
It was July 7, 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic was still creeping across the world when Brown’s class of 2024 received the news that their frst semester at Brown would be virtual.
According to Executive Vice President for Policy and Planning Russell Carey, admissions decisions hadn’t even been fnalized when the pandemic frst hit. “The solution to the rapidly unfolding situation didn’t have a template,” he said.
The trimester system that the administration designed was based on the best science and public health data available, with a focus on de-densifying the campus, according to University communications. For incoming frst-years to have as much of a residential experience as possible, it soon became clear that “students would have to be spread out on campus over at least 12 months,” Carey told The Herald.
Under the trimester system, frst-year students would not come to campus in the fall and have the option to take one course remotely for no cost. After a January move-in, frst-years would spend the spring and summer semesters on campus.
“The delay, while it was weird and strange, made me hopeful that I could get more of my college experience (after being) vaccinated.”
The students responded with dual emotions of intense disappointment and futtering hope. Ifenna Amaefuna ’24 admitted that he asked himself “why I’m going to the one quirky school” with a delayed frst semester. But accep-
tance of an extended break replaced his initial concern, and he signed up for his very frst class at Brown: NEUR 0010: The Brain: Intro to Neuroscience.
For Ethan Zucker ’24, sharp initial disappointment gave way to excitement about spring and summer fully on campus. “The delay, while it was weird and strange, made me hopeful that I could get more of my college experience (after being) vaccinated,” he said.
A ‘melancholy, solitary’ season of frsts
Cecile Schreidah ’24 spent the fall engaging with her virtual class about the history of medicine, working her job as a barista and forging her frst connections at Brown through a 1500-person GroupMe for the incoming class. “Everyone was ranting (about the situation) in our class GroupMe,” Schreidah told the Herald with a laugh. “It honestly helped us all get through it.”
The large class group chat broke into a number of smaller chats, according to Schreidah. One of the frst things she did when she frst arrived on campus was meet her friends from a pre-med GroupMe chat in person.
Marina Benson ’24 spent that fall hiking in the Pacifc Northwest and preparing to study music with an introductory music theory class. She worked and took classes at the local community college as she prepared for a spring semester in Providence.
Moving to college was her frst visit to Brown, Benson said. While the initial quarantine period was difcult — leaving her feeling “melancholy and solitary” about her frst semester at college — she did enjoy the activities fair. “The theater Zoom was popping!”
A universal shudder passed through interviewees at the mention of the imposed “quiet period.” Zucker’s “Hispanophone” Zoom and group chat friends remained in touch when they all arrived on campus, but in-person interactions while following the rules were “severely limited,” he said.
According to Zucker, it was very difcult to feel integrated in the community because Zoom connections were not “socially nourishing.” He lived alone in Perkins Hall and found his frst January at Brown trapped in his dorm.
As a vegetarian, Benson found herself “sick of soy curls’’ with the grab-and-go format of the dining halls. Other
options, however, were scarce. Schreidah found it nearly impossible to explore the vibrant Providence restaurant scene with the stringent social requirements. “I got reported for walking to Thayer by myself with a mask on” while purchasing boba, she said.
The new freshmen were confned to “pods” of four to fve other frst-years with whom social interactions were permitted. Winter found the class of 2024 in an “uncomfortable” heavily restricted environment where anyone could report those who broke the rules and health was still a concern, Schreidah remembered. She remained buoyed by the thrill of fnally being on campus and the hope that “this would all be temporary.”
“One thing the pandemic taught everyone is that we’re not meant to be isolated.”
First-years turned to eccentric activities to pass the winter and spring. “I had a trampoline in my room,” Zucker said. “My mom recommended it for exercise, so I would be trampolining in my room and listening to music.”
Amaefuna also found relief in music, which helped him meet one of his best friends at Brown. “Two or three days after I moved in, I was practicing my violin, and my neighbor Peter Sage ’24 came and knocked on my door, because he’s very social. He just introduced himself and the rest is history,” Amaefuna said.
Amaefuna also recalled a particularly large snowstorm, which was when “everyone started coming outside.” He went sledding with Sage and Gustav Hall ’24, who remained close friends throughout his time at Brown.
Benson also found music to be a means of connection. She reminisced about jamming out to Taylor Swift songs with roommates and her keyboard. Engaging with music and theater in the spring helped her form some of her closest friendships at Brown, Benson said.
Amaefuna lived in Slater Hall, where he reported a “dismal vibe.” But the shared difculties brought the class much closer together, he believes.
Zucker has “fond memories” of late-night chats with foormates in Perkins. “Perkins (that winter) was very isolated,” he said. “So you get very close with the people who live there.”
“One thing the pandemic taught everyone is that we’re not meant to be isolated,” Benson said. Even in the most stifing circumstances, connections bloomed.
Testing, testing and more testing
The rapid pivot to online learning and the focus on bringing everyone back to campus was “aided by science, the Chancellor and the ability to do frequent testing,” according to Carey. He considers Brown fortunate to have had the privilege of cutting-edge public health research and resources being available directly on campus.
“We had the ability to do frequent testing. And that’s what I think, especially that year and in the following year, enabled safe, in-person on-campus activity,” Carey said. He celebrated the students and their attitudes in facilitating progress by following mandates.
In addition to limited class time, “there was no intercollegiate athletics,” he added. “It was a very diferent
experience. Under the circumstances, we tried to make things as close to normal as they could be.”
The solivagant spring included a lot of COVID testing. Amaefuna recalled “trekking from Slater on the Main Green” all the way to the testing center at the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center — a necessary but “cumbersome” part of each week at school.
Schreidah was obligated to quarantine in an apartment on Thayer Street normally reserved for visiting scholars after contracting COVID-19, she said. Once her symptoms were manageable, she “explored Providence by walking four to fve miles” during each of the ten days she remained in quarantine.
The ability to test allowed interactions to feel safe, Zucker said. “It was a schlep, but it was worth it. I think it helped keep cases low.”
After a stifing frst academic semester, the University’s frst-years were bursting to see the city in the summer.
Benson described the summer as an “amazing” time of exploration. “It’s one of the reasons why I think the senior class is so tight now. Everyone knows each other, at least through mutual friends,” she said.
She took a seven-person jazz class that met daily. It contained two of her closest friends at Brown and members of her future band.
Schreidah recalled picnics, drives to Newport and visits to New York City. “The summer was my favorite semester at Brown,” she said. Campus was populated overwhelmingly by frst-years and she reminisced about how “walking into the dining hall (and) knowing that anyone you saw was a freshman” was a wonderful way to make new friends. Schreidah took Zoom classes at the beach and embraced the excitement of a summer of exploration.
“Brown’s facilities are not built to hold people in the summer,” Zucker said drily. The extreme heat and lack of air conditioning drove everyone outside — but that made it an “amazing summer, meeting all these new people.”
For Amaefuna, the summer was a reminder of what drew him to Providence in the frst place. “We went through that whole year, together,” he said. “This is Brown — everyone’s incredibly collaborative and very nice.”
Carey believes that “students played a critical role in protecting the health and safety of others. And that is something I think people should acknowledge and be very proud of.”
As students across campus occupied libraries to prepare for their fall fnals last December, Isabella Garo ’24 and 40 other members of the Brown Divest Coalition were occupying University Hall.
Dec. 11 marked the second sit-in calling for the University to divest its endowment from companies afliated with the Israeli government and weapons manufacturers. The frst came in November. Both led to student arrests.
Inside University Hall, police processed the arrests of the sit-in participants. Outside, approximately 400 protesters had gathered in support. But Garo said the activists were in a room with “no windows” that was “basically soundproof.” They had no lines of communication outside the building and didn’t know if others knew of the arrests.
After the frst students were processed and left the building, Garo heard cheers from outside as the doors opened.
Supporters, including members of BDC, had gathered outside. Other individuals in the crowd were members of groups in the Brown Activist Coalition. And others were unafliated with any activist group.
The crowd sang Jewish worship songs and chanted in Arabic, greeting the arrested students with hugs.
“Everyone had been so sad because of how alone we felt at that moment,” Garo said. But when the door opened, she “knew we weren’t alone.”
Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, campus activism has surged on Brown’s campus and across the country to levels not seen since the COVID-19 pandemic.
While both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian activists have organized on campus, the majority of the demonstrations at Brown have shown support for Palestine.
Diferent groups have spearheaded these eforts at Brown. Some, like Students for Justice in Palestine, are recognized by Brown’s Student Activity Ofce. Others, like Jews for Ceasefre Now and BDC, are informal groups that have formed this academic year.
BAC’s web of ofcially registered student groups has expressed support for many of these demonstrations — though no demonstrations have occurred under the BAC banner. But the network has brought a sense of solidarity and support to its member activist groups focused on social justice and accountability on campus, Garo said.
An eight-day hunger strike in February with similar demands to the sit-ins saw backing from BAC member groups such as Students for Educational Equity, Sunrise Brown and Housing Opportunity for People Everywhere.
In other instances, such as the December arrests or the April encampment that concluded in the Corporation committing to vote on divestment in October, BDC has spearheaded eforts on its own.
Caroline Sassan ’24, a lead organizer for the BDC, said that support across activist groups showed that “we can throw our collective weight behind the specifc cause of Palestine
and that it matters to all of us.”
“We need to be supporting each other and standing together,” she said. “That’s the only way that we can win these power struggles.”
Niyanta Nepal ’25, lead organizer for BAC and incoming Undergraduate Council for Students president, explained that BAC ofers space “for students to fnd support and learn how to navigate institutional systems and get advice from people who … have been organizing for a longer time.”
Students from diferent activist groups across campus can brainstorm ideas, pool resources and bring support for mutually backed causes in BAC, Nepal said.
The last Brown Activist Coalition conference in September was attended by representatives from the Student Labor Alliance, SJP, Resource Generation @ Brown, End Sexual Violence @ Brown, Students for Educational Equity, Sunrise Brown and the Teaching Assistant Labor Organization, The Herald previously reported.
It’s “a place for us to see that our missions and campaigns are really intertwined,” Nepal added.
BAC has also focused on issues such as agreements governing voluntary contributions from the University and three other higher education institutions to Providence known colloquially as PILOT.
Under the agreements, Brown will pay $174.4 million to the city over the next 20 years. The agreements drew criticism from BAC-aligned student activists as insufcient given the number of tax-exempt properties the University holds.
In 2023, SEE, Sunrise Brown and the Student Labor Alliance protested the agreements at demonstrations and testifed at City Council hearings. The City Council approved both memoranda, The Herald previously reported.
BAC constituent groups also lead their own campaigns. Sunrise Brown separately pushed for Brown to provide a fossil fuel-free retirement fund option, which was created in February, for Brown staf as part of its DIRE campaign. Earlier in May, it released a report outlining the University’s alleged historic role in environmental injustice.
Sunrise had also planned a week of activities to “reclaim Earth Day” and highlight environmental injustice, although they canceled their programming in solidarity with the students in the encampment and “Palestinian liberation” according to an Instagram post.
‘Concentric circles’: BAC’s structure and day-to-day
Nepal cofounded BAC along with Jada Wooten ’24 in spring 2022.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, a more informal version of the activist coalition met to discuss their campaigns. Nepal described it as a “steering committee.” But during the pandemic, many of the activist groups could not sustain themselves. The coalition dissolved with them.
When Nepal was a frst-year in 2021, she saw an uptick in campus activism. “But there was no way for all of us to share our information on (our) campaigns with one another to work together,” she said.
“We need to be supporting each other and standing together. That’s the only way that we can win these power struggles.”
That led to the reformation of BAC. Now, the coalition hosts meetings every two weeks. There, member organizations “talk about what they’re doing and anything we might want to get going together,” Garo said. Other organizations and individuals are welcome to attend. Garo said BAC is a fairly open space: “We’re not trying to be mean or kick anyone out,” she said.
Wooten described BAC’s structure as “concentric circles.”A group of formal member organizations, including SEE, HOPE, SJP and Sunrise, makes up the core of the coalition. An outer circle of peripheral groups also participates, but might not attend every meeting.
Some of these peripheral organizations include labor and afnity groups like the Black Student Union and the Teaching Assistant Labor Organization, Wooten said.
Organizations interested in joining BAC must attend a meeting. Member clubs then vote on whether to accept them. Garo noted that BAC groups hold “anti-white supremacist, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial” values. Incoming groups are expected to share these beliefs.
Nepal added that BAC also holds foundational values of people power, accountability, solidarity and care.
“Knowledge sharing is super important,” said Gabi Venegas-Ramirez ’26, outreach chair for SJP and founder of Brown’s chapter of Food Not Bombs.
Some of that “institutional knowledge” lives in resources like the Burn Brown Book, a 2020 project that is now shared across groups in BAC.
Because every BAC member group is registered with SAO, they have access to Student Activities Ofce and Undergraduate Finance Board funding. Last fall, when SJP ran low on funding, BAC organizations helped “crowdsource a
lot of their materials,” Garo said.
Sunrise Brown also receives money from Sunrise’s national organization. “Not every group has access to that sort of national or even international funding,” she added. This means Sunrise can often buy more materials to support organizing eforts.
BDC is not part of BAC. Instead, it is a coalition of individuals, not organizations, committed to divestment. And each member of BDC does not participate in each action the coalition takes.
BDC does have members who are also members of BAC-afliated groups and BAC’s leadership itself, like Nepal.
And BAC groups have nearly overlapped into BDC actions. For the Dec. 11 sit-in, BDC initially planned for members from each organization that signed an SJP statement following Oct. 7 to participate, Wooten said.
Many of those groups are BAC-afliated, and BAC itself signed the statement. That plan fell through, but some participants in the sit-in were members of BAC-afliated groups.
Carla Humphris ’24, a lead organizer with the BDC and an active member of Sunrise Brown, said it wouldn’t make sense to register BAC or BDC with SAO: “A coalition is not a formalized group,” she said.
Navigating disagreements
While BAC is united by values, the groups aren’t a monolith. “Theories of change vary,” Humphris said. “There are times when initiatives or ideas have not gone through.”
Before many BAC-aligned groups began expressing support for pro-Palestine activism, Sunrise did not initially sign on to SJP’s statement following Oct. 7.
The statement held “the Israeli regime and its allies unequivocally responsible for all sufering and loss of life, Palestinian or Israeli.”
Garo initially voted against Sunrise signing onto the statement. She said she later regretted voting against it. But at the time, she was aiming to avoid doxxing that had occurred at other universities, as well as “remain as respectful as possible of those who lost loved ones on Oct. 7.”
Garo added she initially thought that if the statement’s language was diferent, signers could avoid having their beliefs misunderstood.
“In hindsight … if you chose to even criticize Israel or the Israeli occupation, no matter how gentle your language, how considerate you are, how kind you are, whether or not you’re Jewish, it does not matter,” she added, noting that blowback will come regardless. Sunrise eventually signed on to the statement after a few weeks of ofering private support.
HOPE’s decision to sign on came earlier but still involved “hours and hours of conversations,” said Hanna Aboueid ’24, one of HOPE’s leadership coordinators. After signing the statement, she reached out to members to let them know “we’re committing to having whatever conversation is needed to get people to feel okay with this moving forward.” HOPE later held a meeting to discuss the choice.
Aboueid said conversations included “critically thinking” about HOPE’s ideals. “Are we going to put our beliefs into action or are we going to take a step back?” she asked. At the meeting, members discussed Palestinian history.
There was “a lot of unlearning” that had to occur, she said.
Wooten emphasized the importance of supporting members emotionally and creating a culture of care within BAC.
“I was really intentional about developing things like capacity check-ins and accountability partners,” she said.
As president of the Black Student Union, Wooten was also conscious of positionality in certain advocacy. She said she took issue with BDC’s initial plan for each group that had signed the SJP statement to send members into the December sit-in.
“Not all the organizations have the same level of commitment, and not all of them have the positionality to put themselves on the line,” Wooten said. In the end, the sit-in was purely voluntary with no “quotas” for the diferent organizations.
Humphris said that during discussions with students about participating in the sit-in, BDC was aware that the “majority of students who sat in were people of color.” That meant those students faced unique risks “coming in contact with the justice system.”
Wooten, now a graduating senior, is no longer particularly active in BAC. “Member diversity and care was probably part of the reason why I left,” Wooten said.
“For the coalition to be sustainable, I felt like I didn’t need to be as involved in facilitating as a senior,” she added.
“At times, white ignorance was frustrating for me,” Wooten said. Around January 2023, when BAC frst formed, she said there were tensions about “care and centering white voices” within BAC groups like Sunrise Brown.
“Sunrise Brown was only about a semester old. We were
“Student activism acts as a way for students to hold university systems accountable, but also to learn about what it means to be an organizer.”
still fnding our footing. And one issue we knew we would need to face head-on was the long history of white-washed and exclusionary environmentalism,” Garo wrote in an email to The Herald. “As a person of color and a Sunrise Brown co-founder, this problem was very personal to me.”
“We had to do the hard work of educating people who maybe didn’t know what it meant to center justice in environmentalism, or who were from very privileged (i.e. white,
SEE ACTIVISM PAGE 25
Katherine Kim ’24, the former president of Brown’s Kappa Delta chapter, often receives texts from girls interested in rushing a sorority asking for advice on what to wear during recruitment. But Kim, who rushed KD entirely on Zoom in 2021, frequently fnds that she doesn’t have much fashion advice to give.
“Looking back, I’m sure (virtual recruitment) was more awkward than I remember,” Kim said. “But at that point, Zoom was so normalized.”
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of students attending the frst round of sorority recruitment dropped drastically, The Herald previously reported. In 2019, 290 students attended the frst round of recruitment. Those numbers declined to 92 students in 2021, the year Kim rushed, and to 82 students in 2022.
But in the past two years, a growing number of students have joined Panhellenic sororities and independent fraternities, marking a steady resurgence of Greek life on College Hill.
According to the Residential Life website, there are currently 16 Greek Life organizations at Brown: four National Panhellenic sororities, six National Panhellenic Council sororities and fraternities, two co-ed residential organizations and four independent residential fraternities locally based at Brown.
Greek life has been “a presence on the Brown University campus for over 175 years” and seeks to establish a “well-rounded college experience” for its participants with “a foundation in scholarship, service leadership and personal development.”
In February, “rush” ofcially began for the four Panhellenic Council sororities on campus, an opportunity for women interested in joining a Greek life organization to get to know the diferent sororities at Brown. This year, recruitment was held over fve days and included open houses, sisterhood, philanthropy, preference rounds and a fnal bid day in which prospective new members learned what sorority they had been accepted into.
Addie Poulson ’26, the current President of Delta Gamma, noted that this year’s recruitment looked signifcantly diferent from her own and that of DG seniors who went through the process during the pandemic.
In 2023, the year Poulson rushed, the frst day of recruitment was held over Zoom due to a sub-zero wind chill
felt across the Northeast. “It can be harder to connect with people and get a good sense of what they’re all about over a screen,” Poulson said.
Kim said she witnessed a growing number of girls joining recruitment and staying through the whole process this year.
“Last year, I ran recruitment and (KD) almost tripled, quadrupled our numbers,” she said. When Kim initially joined KD, “there were maybe five to 10 active members in the organization.”
Greek life on campus also saw a reckoning in September 2020, when Brown’s KD and Kappa Alpha Theta chapters held votes to disaffiliate from their national chapters in the wake of the Abolish Greek Life movement, which criticized Greek life for its “historical, systematic exclusion of people of color,” The Herald previously reported. Unlike local fraternities on campus, panhellenic sororities hold charters from national organizations to operate on campuses. While the chapters chose to remain affiliated with their national organizations, both organizations took hits to their membership, with Theta losing 70 members.
“Now, having more people in an organization who care about the organization has completely changed what Greek life looks like,” Kim added.
This year, 12 new members joined Theta and Alpha Chi Omega, 14 joined DG and 22 joined KD.
“I’ve been able to connect with people of diferent grades and academic interests who I otherwise wouldn’t have crossed paths with.”
For Lucia Dahn ’27, who joined DG this spring, recruitment “was a super organized and easy process.”
“Everyone was super kind, welcoming, informative and understanding, and I appreciated having the opportunity to talk to so many different girls in each house and really get a sense of each sorority’s values and mission,” Dahn said. “I’ve been able to connect with people of different grades and academic interests who I otherwise wouldn’t have crossed paths with.”
Madi Dodd ’25, the current president of KD, echoed a similar sentiment about how Greek Life has allowed her to meet people from different spaces within Brown.
“One of the best things about being in a sorority is getting to meet people that are not your year,” she said. “Getting to hear about their experiences at Brown and having them be kind of a mentor for you and give you guidance on things like different classes or organizations is beneficial.”
John Purdue ’26, president of Theta Alpha, said he wishes Greek life was more prominent at Brown.
“Obviously at some schools (Greek Life) can have a bad reputation, but I think any student group that’s doing good things is positive,” he said. “If we had the ability to be a little more loud about recruitment … I think that could be helpful, both on the fraternity and sorority side.”
Greek Life “can be a pretty positive force,” Purdue said, “like any student group.”
For fraternities at Brown, the recruitment process is more informal than for sororities. For Thete, one of their first recruitment events this semester was watching the Super Bowl as a group. According to Purdue, certain fraternities like Thete are also simply an extension of the University’s sports teams. Out of the 28 football recruits in Purdue’s cohort, 25 rushed Thete.
“Everyone’s parents tell them that they’re going to meet their lifelong best friends in college,” Purdue said. Greek Life “is a medium where (it) will be extremely apparent to you that that’s happening. It’s so easy to get so close with people through this system.”
“I’ve never been in a group (with girls) of such diverse interests who genuinely care about what I’m doing,” Kim said. “I feel so invested in Brown, largely because I have all these friends who themselves have unique interests and passions, and I’m invited into their life as well.”
1) There aren’t many of this type of party at Brown
5) Smash Iggy Azalea hit featuring Charli XCX
10) Administrator Eric ______
15) “That body of yours is absurd” Levine
16) Hello, in Honolulu
17) “Hot in Herre” artist
18) “Couldn’t be me”
19) Skywalker’s alter ego, or why Luke has daddy issues
20) Adds (on)
21) Subject of Brown dorm naming controversy
24) Mimic
25) He made an honest mistake going to the theater
26) Elvy’s workplace at Brown U.
29) ATM digits
32) Make, as a salary
35) “Golly!”
36) Female sheep
37) Comedic Instagram page turned overfowing dumpster whistleblower
40) Brown U. pres.
41) Rising star and lesbian icon Rapp
42) Education advocacy group that is part of BAC
43) Alexa device
45) Parisian priest
47) Slide into their ____
49) ¡_____ la vista!
52) A member of sr. class, soon
54) First two weeks of our experience at Brown
57) Workplace social justice init.
58) A piece of bread at a nudist party?
59) Functional group made with osmium tetroxide (orgo students should know this…)
60) WPRI news reporter ___ Nesi
61) Abbv. for the Creative Capital
62) Help
63) ¿Quieres Bagel Gourmet Café o ___?
65) Never before known, like the times when 21 Across, 37 Across, 54 Across began
72) ____ or Coke?
75) Two-carbon alkyl group
76) Fruit corporation headquartered in Dublin
77) Some may call Ivy Leaguers this
78) What the Bears’ football team sometimes struggles to do
79) Not a “minor” member of an a capella group on campus
80) Smth. the Brown Class of 2024 did not experience
81) Clogs are a type popular with some Brown students
1) Some funkiness, some favor
2) Foul smell
3) One of the Van Wickle pair
4) Bestie, but she lives in Mexico City
5) Famous Jon who worked on Marvel Movies
6) Mathematician played by Benedict
7) One was on the vocal chord of a Pitch Perfect lead character
8) Munch
9) Joann Fabrics purchase measurement
10) Main meal
11) Where your clothes might rip
12) ’90s band, or a haven for trash TV
13) Cousin of the creature trapped in Metcalf during the bomb threat
14) Method, abbv.
22) The Undertow Brass Band for Spring Weekend per formers
23) The high end of BMI scale with a contested defnition
26) Direct from Workday
27) Part of FDR’s New Deal
28)____, Power, God
29) Indy Brown student’s beer of choice, abbv.
30) Fury
31) The worst kind of internship
33) Sq. root of a set’s average square
34)“______ say more?”
38) Plant of choice on April 20th
39) What 37 Across did, informally
40) Blacken
44) “Tonight Tonight” artist, Hot ______ Rae
46) Supply (with)
48) A test you really want to pass?
50) One of ten on the feet
51) Sum
52) What Econ majors dream of
53) Accelerate, as an engine
55) What Naked Doughnut Runners do in the SciLi stairwell
56) Pups with a perm
58) Exile
64) The dreaded question: where will you ____ after graduation?
65) Another type of cord you now need for iOS products
66) Engrave
67) A single sound from a train
68) Brontë heroine
69) Ripped
70) Frozen character just going through something
71) Defunct Facebook page ____ Blueno
72) eg: “Say no to drugs”
73) What your college career has come to
74) Scat
82) Two fruits? ANSWERS ON PAGE 25
March 2020
In midst of COVID-19 pandemic, accepted students react to admissions decisions
Brown transitions 11 varsity teams to club status
July 2020
August 2020 Brown announces trimester plan, leaving frst-years home for the fall
May 2020 Blueno removed
Ukrainian students respond to ongoing Russia-Ukraine war April 2022
August 2022
First in-person Spring Weekend since 2019
Former mock trial members detail racist incidents prompting them to quit team
April 2021
January 2021
First years arrive on campus, navigate transition to college during COVID
November 2020
Students react to historic Biden victory with quiet optimism
March 2022
Hundreds of students protest administrative response to sexual violence
May 2021
First-years return for summer term
October 2021
Understafng, facilities issues stretch workers at Ratty, V-Dub
November 2021
Environmental police remove deer from Morriss Hall following active bomb threat
Students announce creation of Black Star Journal University moves to optional masking, testing
December 2022
Provost Locke to leave Brown for Apple University November 2022
Trader Joe’s opens for business in Fox Point
CS TAs report systemic issues with overworking, Brown’s HR system, move to unionize
September 2023
City Council approves voluntary payments agreements between Brown, Providence
Clubs face lowered budgets after UFB spends full surplus
RISD, facilities workers ratify contract, concluding strike
February 2023
UCS recall election
Hisham Awartani ’25 among three Palestinian students shot in Vermont
At vigil for Palestinian junior, crowd shouts Paxson of microphone amid calls for divestment
November 2023
‘They’re one-in-a-million’: Women’s soccer wins third consecutive Ivy League title
Students occupying University Hall arrested after sit-in demanding divestment, ceasefre
Brown drops charges against 20 Jewish students arrested in sit-in
December 2023
April 2024
Brown community comes together to view solar eclipse
Forty-one students arrested, booked within University Hall following second sit-in
February 2024
Nineteen students announce indefnite hunger strike for divestment proposal ahead of Brown Corporation meeting
Hunger strike ends on eighth day
Around 80 students begin indefnite encampment on Main Green in support of divestment
Tour guides picket for coordinator dismissed following Slack message
University recognizes Brown Center for Students of Color student labor union
Encampment ends, Corp. to vote on divestment from Israel in October
May 2024
Celebrating Commencement 2024
Since the class of 2024 arrived on campus in 2021, College Hill has seen signifcant changes. Restaurants unable to survive the COVID-19 pandemic gave way to new restaurants (or, in the case of Baja’s, old ones). Development of Brown’s campus continued with the opening of the Lindemann Performing Arts Center and the Brook Street Dorms, as well as the Center for Health and Wellness. Long-standing cafes like Blue State Cofee closed their doors (17). And new spots such as Yas Chicken came to the neighborhood. (13).
In the 2020-21 academic year, most Brown frst-years grappled with a unique setup. A trisemester system kept them of campus in the fall, brought them on campus in the spring as public health restrictions shifted and required many to stay on campus again in the summer.
For frst-year athletes in the class of 2024, the academic calendar and pandemic restrictions were just part of that year’s strange introduction to Brown. Entering their frst semester, they faced many bafing questions: ‘How do I keep training?’ ‘How do I meet my teammates?’ and of course, the all-important ‘Where do we go from here?’
Despite those questions four years ago, Brown Athletics has in many ways seen a long run of success since then. The department has recorded multiple Ivy Championships. Across teams, multiple athletes have earned all-American honors and all-Ivy accolades. For all the challenges posed by their frst year on campus, COVID-19 appears not to have slowed down this class of Bears at all.
‘I think our class had an especially tough time’: Fall 2020 at home
When Cierra Jenkins ’24 learned she would be unable to play volleyball for Bruno during her frst year, she was disappointed. “In retrospect, my concerns may seem minor given the global pandemic,” she wrote in an email to The Herald. “Yet the thought of postponing my role as a student-athlete at a prestigious university was crushing.”
During fall 2020, when the vast majority of the class of 2024 was not on campus, many members of the incoming class were unable to interact with their coaches or teammates and could not practice regularly.
That fall, Angela Xing ’24 took a course online at Brown while she trained at home in preparation for joining the gymnastics team.
“I had a really tough time during my sophomore year,” she wrote in an email to The Herald. “A large part I would attribute to the lack of athletics during my freshman year. The transition from high school to college is tough for everyone, but I think our class had an especially tough time.”
Some student-athletes relied on their high school friends and teams to stay on top of their game. Jenkins practiced “peppering” — passing the volleyball back and forth — with her family when possible. When it wasn’t possible, she passed or set the ball against the wall of her house.
Naomi Ferguson ’24 trained with an area youth soccer club to keep her skills honed, a struggle shared amongst several Bruno’s prospective stars, she said.
Kimo Ferrari ’24 recalled staying home in the fall — practicing in outdoor parks with teammates from high school. He went to his friend’s home gym three or four times weekly to complete strength workouts.
Despite the circumstances, Bears athletes stayed on top of their training, hoping to be ready to bring their best when they fnally got the chance to compete.
But being physically ft was only one of many concerns they faced.
“It was defnitely hard to connect with the team before coming to Brown,” Xing said. The team still did its best, organizing Zoom calls.
Some coaches got creative when trying to connect their teams. Ferguson recalled a team Zoom with Crystal Dunn — a fullback for the U.S. Women’s National Team and National Women’s Soccer League team Gotham F.C. — “who was an extremely inspirational voice for our team.”
In addition to special guest speakers, the women’s soccer team also participated in virtual bonding, cooking meals together over Zoom.
For the basketball team, Head Coach Mike Martin ’04 organized weekly calls — and made sure that Ferrari could talk with his frst-year teammates Malachi Ndur ’24 and Felix Kloman ’24.
Being limited to Zoom meetings “wasn’t the ideal scenario, but we learned a great deal about one another by analyzing professional volleyball teams, sharing our insights on the game and connecting with other team members to foster unity and trust,” Jenkins wrote.
“At the time, this routine seemed repetitive, yet it instilled in us a sense of responsibility to be prepared for our meetings, whether we were discussing our breakfast choices or the makeshift weights we found at home,” she added.
Ferguson wrote that her team played a key role in helping her adjust to college life, even on Zoom.
“As someone who was incredibly anxious about the social scene in college, having my teammates made the transition so smooth for me,” she wrote.
‘All these things piled on’: Spring 2021
The spring was marginally better than the fall. Training under lockdown meant that while the worst was over, Bruno still had work to do to get their back on track.
“Training with the team during the spring and summer COVID-19 semesters was challenging,” Jenkins wrote. As an indoor sport, Volleyball faced sharp restrictions on the number of players in the gym — in the spring, no more
than fve at a time were allowed inside. Players wore masks while they trained.
Ferrari was also challenged by restrictions during team practices, struggling to breathe through a sweat-soaked mask.
close-quarters training, others could not even access ap propriate equipment.
use squash courts in the Pizzitola Sports Center over the spring. “We didn’t actually do any gymnastics,” Xing wrote.
landings made it “really tough” for the team to practice events requiring that infrastructure.
time getting her team and career on track. Limited to pods of fve people, she went on runs with her new teammates — with masks on.
“gratitude” and “servant leadership.”
as individuals and players, which ultimately strengthened our side of the net before fac ing opponents that fall,” she wrote.
older teammates about their experiences with “long bus rides to other Ivies, shared team meals, hotel sleepovers and spending time with our coaches out side the gym.” It felt like the wait for those experi ences was “end less.”
the combina tion of aca demics and athletics challenging to balance.
By her soph omore year, when classes were in full
swing, she felt burnt out: She had never gotten to adjust to the life of a student-athlete as a frst-year student.
“All these things piled on, and I remember having a really tough time mentally,” she wrote. “I fnished that year ready to quit the team.”
She stuck with it, though. When Brittany Harris joined as the team’s new head coach, she decided to “give it one more try.” The two-time Women’s Collegiate Gymnastics Association Scholastic All-American never looked back.
“This was probably one of the best decisions ever because I have enjoyed every last second of the past two years with this team,” she wrote.
‘Moments that have profoundly shaped my character and athletic career’: From then on
Looking back on 2021, it’s easy to marvel at how long ago it feels.
Brown Athletics has racked up accomplishments since then: Ferguson was part of a historic Brown women’s soccer team that has won four straight Ivy League championships, including three in her three seasons with the team.
Ferrari played a key role in an unlikely run the Bears made to the Ivy League Championship Game this year. And Jenkins was a part of Brown’s 2022 Ivy Champion squad and was named Ivy Player of the Year in 2021.
“I was fortunate to experience moments that have profoundly shaped my character and athletic career,” Jenkins wrote. “These accolades are not solely my own; they are shared with coaches, teammates and mentors whose guidance and belief in me have been invaluable.”
In the end, the lost time didn’t hang over Ferrari’s experience for too long, he wrote.
“I think just being able to be at so many of my friend’s senior days is a great accomplishment,” Ferrari wrote. “It demonstrates that even though we couldn’t meet and gather freshman year we still were able to connect and develop meaningful relationships during our time at Brown.”
He noted that time with teammates in the locker room on a “meaningless weekday” left indelible memories.
“Beginning my collegiate career in the midst of COVID-19 was unusual, but with the incredible support from my friends, teammates and coaches, I wouldn’t change a thing about my journey,” Jenkins wrote. “Being a member of Brown’s women’s volleyball team is a privilege, and every team member understands … the infuence it has on personal, athletic and academic growth.”
Members say any instrument goes, discuss fnding community through performance
by Rya Vallabhaneni
When Brown students attend a Bilk Bonic performance, they expect to see certain staples on stage: an instrument of every kind present on the stage, countless band members overfowing into the crowd and an instrument dubbed by the band as the “BrewSonic Resonator.”
The Resonator is a simple wooden structure with beer bottles of various sizes suspended from it. The bottles, tuned to diferent notes, are an essential part of the Bilk Bonic experience.
One of Brown’s many student bands, Bilk Bonic includes a string, horn, percussion and synth section, as well as a more traditional funk band and multiple rappers and singers. How is the band so multifaceted? It’s made up of about twenty members.
“We wanted this to be the biggest band we could possibly make it, no matter what the costs were of having an excessive amount of musicians playing with us,” drummer and vocalist Kieran Pandey ’24 said. “People won’t believe that we have so many (members), so when we ask for nineteen backstage passes they’re like sure.”
Formed in the fall of 2023, Bilk Bonic is a student cover band at Brown inspired by “Silk Sonic,” an album by Anderson .Paak and Bruno Mars. Current membership comes from all class years and includes: Kieran Pandey ’24, Lucas Washburn ’24, Makayla MacPherson ’24, Jennora Blair ’24, Mia Humphrey ’25, Connor Purcell ’24, Phela Durosinmi ’27, Triston Roberts ’26, Jesse McCormick-Evans ’25, Peter Sage ’24, JD Gorman ’26, DJ Pennix ’25, Alex Hernandez ’25, Will Hardy ’25, Ifenna Amaefuna ’24, Joshua Lobsenz ’24, Ashley McCoy ’24, Ian Hajra
’26, Ronan Zwa ’27, Siddu Sitaraman ’26, Oliver Grynberg ’25, Christine Alcindor ’25 and Dieudonne Makelele ’27.
Just about any instrument goes, Pandey said.
The idea for the band initially came from Lucas Washburn ’24 — who plays guitar, percussion and the BrewSonic Resonator — after hearing another group cover Silk Sonic’s music at UCLA.
“I saw them do the Silk Sonic intro and that rocked and I was like ‘Dang, why don’t we just do a whole band,’” he said. Pandey described Silk Sonic as “highly infuential with musicians at Brown and probably all over, just because it’s such a nice combination of modern R&B and funk and some pop.”
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BILK FROM PAGE 24
According to Washburn, the band’s original plan was just to dress up as Silk Sonic for Halloween and perform a oneof show. But Bilk Bonic quickly started to become a more permanent presence in Brown’s music scene.
“It was so fun we were like we can’t not do this,” Pandey explained.
The group has since put on several performances around campus, playing on holidays, at fundraising events and even this past semester’s Spring gala. They have also expanded their repertoire well beyond Silk Sonic covers. “What we play is really up to the group,” Washburn said, adding that voting is usually part of the song selection process.
“Sometimes we all come in not knowing a song, but it comes together so well,” said Jennora Blair ’24, singer and rapper for Bilk Bonic. “That’s the beauty of it — we’re always just trying random things and seeing what happens.”
Beyond the original duo’s music, Bilk Bonic was also inspired by Silk Sonic’s performative nature. “Another thing I liked about Silk Sonic as a band is they’re funny,” Washburn said. Bilk Bonic seeks to embody a similar sense of humor during its own shows.
Blair recalled the group’s collective decision to wear fake mustaches at one of their frst shows. “At a specifc moment (in the song) we all pulled them of together,” she said.
“We did a mannequin challenge on stage once,” Washburn said. In another of their gigs, the band just stopped playing and instead began to sing Silent Night together, Pandey added.
“We wanted it to be a performance,” he explained. “We wanted to learn the songs and learn them well, but we wanted also to have enough time and space to then make it a visually entertaining event for the people in the audience.”
“The silliness is so distinct,” Blair said. “I feel like we take it seriously but then we don’t in some ways. And that
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male, wealthy) backgrounds and took up too much space,” Garo wrote. She thinks the group has improved since.
“I am proud of the work we have done to make the group as inclusive and justice-oriented as possible,” she added.
Other failures to recognize positionality have posed challenges, Wooten said. In PILOT organizing, she noted that some white BAC members called for Brown to pay the full amount it would owe to Providence if it were taxed as a for-proft institution — despite the fact that community organizing partners had indicated that activists should instead advocate for a lower amount.
“Diversity is an issue within activist spaces on campus and one we are trying to work through,” Nepal wrote in a message to The Herald. She did not specifcally respond to questions regarding disagreements surrounding PILOT.
“Positionality hugely impacts activism and is also something individuals must be aware of as they engage with activist spaces,” Nepal wrote.
She added that she believes BAC’s membership includes a diverse group of students, highlighting the coalitions caucus for students of color. Still, she said “room for growth” remains.
Over time, Wooten said she’s been inspired by changes in BAC’s composition and approach to care. “This new generation of leadership that’s coming in — it’s diverse,” she said.
combination works really well.”
Bass and synth player JD Gorman ’26 agreed, describing Bilk Bonic as the perfect combination of community and musical challenge. “Putting in goofy stuf like this is a really great reminder that the reason we’re doing this is because we all have so much fun with it, so let’s not lose sight of that,” he said.
In terms of recent performances, Bilk Bonic joined several other student musicians for Gigs on the Green on Saturday, April 20. The group also headlined “The Biggest Party in the World” — “a student-run arts and music block party event approved by the city of Providence,” according to Pandey. As is often the case, the size of the group has required some accommodating.
“We almost weren’t able to perform at Gigs on the Green because the stage is just too small for us,” Pandey said. “We’re going to have ten people on stage at one time … and then the rest in front or behind and rotating onto the stage when a solo part comes up.”
Nonetheless, Bilk Bonic’s members expressed that the size of the band is also one of its greatest strengths. “If orchestrated correctly, having a lot of musicians on stage allows for incredible dynamics,” Pandey explained. “You can bring the music down real low and simple, and then you can build it all the way up into the feeling of an orchestra.”
“There’s so much power in our numbers,” Blair said. According to Gorman, any money that Bilk Bonic makes directly funds the band, whether that be providing a meal for members before a show or transportation to and from gigs.
“We’re doing this for fun and not really to sell tickets or anything,” Pandey said.
“I’m almost one hundred percent confdent to say that everybody in the band is going to continue to have music in their life in one way or another,” he continued. “It’s all integral to who we are.”
Efcacy, the future of activism at Brown
Following the April encampment, the Corporation has committed to vote on divestment in its October meeting.
As a result of previous activism, Paxson had previously ofered to fast-track a divestment proposal to the Advisory Committee on University Resource Management. But she had not indicated if she would advance it to the Corporation.
The future of divestment remains uncertain. University Spokesperson Brian Clark previously stated in an email to The Herald that Brown is “not directly invested in any defense stocks or large munitions manufacturers.” The University has also cast doubt on its ability to divest given that private asset managers independently oversee 96% of the endowment, The Herald previously reported. Past divestment movements occurred when the endowment was more directly controlled by the University itself, rather than third-party asset managers.
Nepal said one of BAC’s biggest successes is increasing student engagement.
“Student activism acts as a way for students to hold university systems accountable, but also to learn about what it means to be an organizer, what it means to be an advocate and test that out while (they are) at university,” she said.
“Students are capable of using our voices and our bodies to create some sort of change or shift public discourse,” said Venegas-Ramirez. Garo referenced the impact student activism had during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement.
“Can you say for sure that SNCC created … massive par-
ticular policy changes? No. But their ability to mobilize and educate members of the organization resulted in a lot of extremely important civil rights activists,” she said.
Aboueid said the “renewed sense of boldness” and “righteous anger” that has spread across college campuses over the past few months has inspired her.
On college campuses across the country, activists staged encampments calling for divestment from companies afliated with the Israeli government and weapons manufacturers.
“Brown loves to promote its legacy of student activism and walkouts,” Venegas-Ramirez said. “We know that legacy. We’re like ‘okay, we’re going to put it to use.’”
Nepal, the UCS president-elect, added that she aims to bridge the gap between UCS and activist voices on campus. She aims to hold more open general body meetings and bring in more voting representatives. After running on a pro-divestment platform, she hopes to facilitate more conversations between student activists and University administrators.
“Having a foot on both sides (is) crucial to be able to properly represent what’s going on,” she said.
Nepal anticipates that future BAC endeavors will focus on ending legacy admissions after Brown delayed a fnal decision on them this spring, removing the University’s recently reinstated standardized testing requirements, continued pro-Palestine activism and working toward environmental justice.
In 2019, before the now-graduating class of seniors began their journey at Brown, it appeared that Stand Up for Graduate Student Employees — now the Graduate Labor Organization — was in danger of ending theirs.
The union had entered contract negotiations with the University in the spring. But a proposed National Labor Relations Board rule threatened to exclude graduate students from classifcation as employees. If passed before the two sides reached a collective bargaining agreement, the University would have “no further obligations to the union,” according to a 2018 agreement between the two parties.
With the proposed rule looming, leaders attempted to amp up pressure. But by February 2020, 10 months of negotiations had efectively reached a standstill.
“We had not made what we felt was signifcant progress on important key proposals like worker protections, on salary and things like that,” former GLO president Rithika Ramamurthy GS said. “It became really clear that we needed to do something big.”
Weeks later, the world ground to a halt at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. SUGSE made the biggest splash it could: In a socially distanced car rally, the organizers “circled Christina Paxon’s presidential mansion and laid on the horn for about two hours,” Ramamurthy said.
Soon after, SUGSE representatives received an email from administrators saying that “they would be down to do negotiations again,” Ramamurthy said. By June, SUGSE and the University reached a tentative contract agreement.
“The reputation we have now is a direct product of our
insistence on being militant, our rank-and-fle’s commitment to our participatory democracy and getting grads to talk to each other,” said Sherena Razek GS, GLO’s current president.
Four years after GLO’s frst collective bargaining agreement, a handful of undergraduate student labor organizations have followed in its footsteps. Undergraduate computer science teaching assistants announced plans to unionize at the end of 2022, with GLO providing legal and procedural support.
“If GLO didn’t exist, we’d have no basis, no foundation,” said Yasmine Abdelaziz ’25, an organizer for the Teaching Assistant Labor Organization.
In March 2023, TALO voted to unionize, becoming the frst undergraduate labor organization on campus and one of the frst in the country. Soon after, the University voluntarily recognized the Labor Organization of Community Coordinators in October and the Third World Labor Organization — a union of Brown Center for Students of Color student workers — in February.
‘It felt like it really mattered’: Teaching Assistant Labor Organization
When Ronnie Shashoua ’25 began her frst stint as a computer science TA in fall 2022, her peers warned her that “you’re gonna sell your soul to the CS department.”
Her friends warned her of long hours and a challenging work-life balance. Many TAs told The Herald at the time that they worked more hours than their cap of 10 per week. The Department of Computer Science clearly outlined to TAs that they should not go over that cap, but many still felt obligated
to do so to keep courses running smoothly, The Herald previously reported.
A group of TAs sent out an “informal” survey to their peers in spring 2023. which culminated in an open letter to the CS department. In that letter, they asked for more predictable hours, better pay and guarantees that course development work would not stretch into the academic year, among other requests. The letter ultimately led to discussions with the department heads, according to Swetabh Changkakoti ’24, The Herald’s former technology director.
But they also sought to organize by other methods. That summer, organizers began working on a mission statement for a union, he said. They held individual conversations with TAs across the department. Foreshadowing GLO’s role in the cascade of unions that soon appeared on campus, TALO organizers began working with GLO staf who provided guidance on the “path to organizing,” Abdelaziz said.
Starting in the fall, Changkakoti said that he and other organizers waited outside ofce hours and approached TAs to discuss what issues the union should prioritize. Both Shashoua and Abdelaziz became involved in early eforts to learn about CS TAs’ experiences to inform the bargaining process, with Abdelaziz joining TALO’s organizing committee.
After the University declined to voluntarily recognize the union in December 2022, organizers fled for an NLRB election.
CS TAs overwhelmingly voted to unionize in March 2023, forcing the University to recognize the union.
The union’s interim contract with the University, efective for the 2023-24 school year, raised wages from $15.50 to $20 per
hour for most CS TAs and granted an hour of paid sick leave for each 35 hours worked.
CS TAs said that TALO has empowered them to set boundaries and communicate with their employers.
“I think TALO facilitates an environment where people are more comfortable knowing that they can set boundaries for themselves and let their professors know or HTAs know that they’re being overworked or feeling stressed,” said Lisa Duan ’25, a former head teaching assistant for CSCI 1810: “Computational Molecular Biology.”
“I’m able to enforce boundaries with the professor I’m working with and I don’t feel like the course falls into my hands anymore,” Abdelaziz said.
Since the 2023-2024 contract took efect, Abdelaziz said they noticed that “people seem to be really happy with their working conditions.”
Another wave of undergraduate unions: LOCC and TWLO
Brown’s Community Coordinators — residential assistants who live in dorms — announced plans to unionize when their position had existed for just over a year.
The Ofce of Residential Life underwent a series of changes in leadership and structure in spring 2022, overhauling the Residential Peer Leader program in favor of the Community Coordinator position that nearly doubled the pay from the RPL program.
Normally, Vivian Miller ’24.5 said she supports student unionization eforts. But she thought this tack would be inefective — and undermine the existing rapport between CCs and ResLife. She did not want to “sully” relationships between CCs and ResLife after the ofce had responded to student demands for better working conditions and pay previously in overhauling the RPL program.
ResLife, she said, had been “extremely generous towards a group of student workers who are often stubborn and a bit insolent.”
LOCC bargaining committee member Anna Ryu ’25 confrmed that an alum was involved in the early organizing of the union. Their presence was “empowering, especially during that really tense and sort of uncertain unstable time of getting ourselves together,” Ryu said.
Ryu noted that LOCC aims to represent the range of CC experiences, both good and bad. “Having that range of voices represented — I think that’s something that we’re trying to maintain and grow.”
The union also builds community for CCs, a group that is otherwise spread across campus, she said. She has also noticed increasing competitiveness for CC positions — to her, a sign that union advocacy makes the position more desirable.
Since February, the union has been negotiating its frst contract with the University.
“I think because they’re still in the bargaining process. … I haven’t really seen a drastic change,” said Elijah Dahunsi ’25, a community coordinator. “But perhaps in the future, there could be a change depending on the progress of the union’s bargaining.”
In February, workers at the Brown Center for Students of Color also announced plans to unionize. 73% of the center’s roughly 50 student workers voted in favor of forming the
Third World Labor Organization in February, The Herald previously reported.
By forming the union, the student workers said they aimed to “protect the Center from censorship, defunding and depoliticization” and protect its employees’ freedom of expression, The Herald previously reported. The students announced their plans at a February Labor for Palestine rally organized by the Graduate Labor Organization.
Soon after, the University voluntarily recognized TWLO.
“Without ensuring freedom of speech in our contract, we are unable to do our jobs well and actually build meaningful relationships in conversations,” Ouyang said. “It’s really important that we stress that in our contract.”
Like TALO and GLO, TWLO and LOCC are afliated with GLO — and in turn, the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, an afliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the Rhode Island AFL-CIO.
Beyond bread, butter
Labor organizations at Brown have also expanded the scope of their advocacy beyond traditional bread-and-butter unionism to broader social and political issues, including calling for the University to divest from companies linked to the Israeli government and weapons manufacturers.
GLO’s Palestine Solidarity Caucus, founded in May 2021, serves as an organizational platform for pro-Palestine advocacy. Signaling event sponsorship with a “Labor for Palestine” banner, the caucus regularly sponsors and appears at events with the Brown Divest Coalition.
It has backed calls for the University to drop criminal charges against the 41 students arrested for trespassing in University Hall at a December pro-Palestine sit-in. It has also claimed that the union’s campaign for divestment is “employment-related,” a categorization that, if recognized by the National Labor Relations Board, would ofer the protests additional protection under federal labor law, The Herald previously reported.
The University updated its FAQ on protests in March, noting that it expects “unions and their leaders” to abide by Brown’s policies when protesting on “a political or other type of opinion on matters unrelated to their employment.”
Shortly after, GLO fled an unfair labor practices complaint stating that the update was a “retaliatory threat of discipline.”
“The union is a democratic vehicle,” Ramamurthy said. “It is an institution that’s supposed to bring as many people as possible to take a stand on these issues that are fundamentally ultimately related to the way that the University invests its money and where it makes its money.”
Razek sees pro-Palestine protests as a necessary and important way to mobilize graduate students.
“Unions that have been powerful and successful and that have made like real waves … are almost always exclusively unions that had broader political commitments and convictions,” she said. “People want something to believe in and a vision that tethers together all that we’re fghting for.”
“Any legal labor law protections that we have, we leverage that power,” she added.
Not all graduate union members agree with the union’s ofcial embrace of political advocacy.
One ffth-year PhD candidate, who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of speech-related revocation of their student visa, expressed skepticism about the graduate union’s role in divestment-related protests on campus. It might stretch the defnition of “work-related conditions” to sponsor events in which individual members should instead participate in their non-union capacity, she said.
“I don’t think the union, in the capacity of it being a labor union, should be involved in issues that are not related to labor and employment,” the student said.
“I do feel like more people should be involved in this political movement,” she said, referencing divestment movements that have gripped college campuses since last fall. “I’m a little bit skeptical whether it’s the union’s job to do so.”
For Changkakoti, the TALO organizer, union solidarity with broader social causes is a matter of “responsibility.”
In December, the United Auto Workers union announced its support for a ceasefre in the war between Israel and Hamas.
“Labor doesn’t have a neutral role in any of this. We hold power by helping the University run,” he said. “Because of our work, we have material power, and we also have a responsibility to use that power for justice more broadly.”
Since arriving at Brown in 2018, Razek has witnessed a “major shift” in GLO’s relationship with University administrators.
“They don’t have a monopoly and they don’t have the sole authority they used to exert,” she said.
When asked how the University’s engagement with GLO had changed in his time at Brown, Graduate School Executive Dean of Administration and Finance Ethan Bernstein wrote in an email to The Herald that the two parties had developed a “productive working relationship.”
“Through regular meetings, negotiation sessions, and working groups, the University has built a productive working relationship with GLO that is guided by a shared commitment to supporting graduate students across campus,” Bernstein wrote.
All the while, undergraduate and graduate workers have reported a change in their lives as a result of union advocacy.
For Ramamurthy, the “union difference” came not only in improved working conditions but in the skills and perspectives she developed during the bargaining process — one she described as “radicalizing.”
For GLO Political Director Michael Ziegler GS, it came in the form of increased wages. He began his PhD program in 2019, before GLO’s first contract. Then, the University offered him a stipend of $31,000 per year. Two contract negotiations and more than six years later, Ziegler hopes to leave the University either next spring or the year after making at least $18,000 more, depending on the year he departs.
“The job is a lot better than it used to be,” Razek said. “if you just want to reduce thinking down to what you can count in your pocket, it’s worth it.”
Brown’s oldest and only harmonica trio discusses meteoric rise, haters, bond over music
What’s your favorite instrument — and why is it the harmonica?
And what’s your favorite song — and why is it “Happy Birthday?”
Die-hard fans of Brown’s campus-famous harmonica trio No Harm No Monica have known the answer to these questions since the band’s summer 2021 conception. But harmonicists Dana Herrnstadt ’24, Evan Donnachie ’24 and Emily Wagg ’24 have cemented a legacy on Brown’s campus as its oldest and only harmonica trio.
They specialize in birthday parties. But from squeaky, impassioned musical Valentines to annual NHNM holiday singalongs, the band has forged a cult-like following. It has also created a community through silliness, stage presence and — of course — harmonica skill.
“God, we never could have imagined it would catch on this way,” Herrnstadt said. “If you’d asked us freshman year if we would get this big, we would have been like, so confused.”
Today, NHNM can boast a dedicated group of fans, a whimsical social media presence and a commitment to mediocre harmonica music. Their repertoire, which ranges from “When the Saints Come Marching In” to “Danny Boy,” never fails to evoke joy and laughter from their fans.
As the triad prepares to walk through the Van Wickle Gates for the second and fnal time, they spoke with The Herald about their journey over the years, their fondest memories and what they hope comes next for the harmonica scene on College Hill.
Same key, meant to be: Getting the band together
It was summer 2021. The class of 2024 had nearly completed its second semester at Brown — in July, due to the pandemic — and had at last gotten a taste of a somewhat normal college experience. Though Herrnstadt, Donnachie and Wagg were not yet fully acquainted, they soon would unite through a mutual love for the harmonica.
At a “Christmas in July” party, Donnachie’s friend gifted him a harmonica.
“The explanation was — ‘I feel like you would just play the harmonica,’” Donnachie said.
Simultaneously and — shockingly — separately, Herrnstadt and Wagg had already discussed the possibility of buying and learning to play harmonicas. Herrstadt had previously met Donnachie through speed friending and a sociology course. She knew Wagg from a geology course.
Then, they found each other. It was meant to be from the start.
“All of our harmonicas were in the key of C,” Herrnstadt said.
Before long, the trio sat on the Quiet Green with their harmonicas: one acquired from Christmas in July, the others $10 purple Amazon specials.
The three of them played their very frst chord. NHNM couldn’t recall which chord, as the group refused to learn the names of any chords as a matter of practice.
“We’re not like a formal group yet,” Herrnstadt explained. “We’re just a group of people who all have harmonicas in the same place.”
Until Madeline Canfeld ’24 walked by.
“She says, ‘What’s going on here?’” Herrnstadt recounted. The three responded that they were playing harmonica. Canfeld then asked “‘Oh, do you guys have like a group?’ And we were like, I guess so.”
Canfeld asked for a name. The trio didn’t have one, so deliberations began. They landed on the “No Harm” moniker. In hindsight, each of the three thought they had come up with it.
“I think it was me,” Herrnstadt said.
“Dana says it was her,” Donacchie chimed in.
“I know it was certainly either me or Evan… it was not Emily,” Herrnstadt concurred.
“I didn’t totally think it was me, but I was like... it could have been me,” Wagg laughed.
At the time, they thought of the name as a pun that they didn’t love. The trio planned to employ it as a placeholder until they came up with a better name, Herrnstadt said. They never did. And thus, a legend was born.
The cult of No Harm No Monica: A rise to fame for the birthday band
“People, for some reason, really latched on,” Wagg said. “We had some pretty devoted fans pretty early on. We started getting invited to birthdays.”
She clarifed: “Which was to play harmonica, not for social reasons.”
No Harm No Monica quickly made “Happy Birthday” their staple song. They standardized a party routine. First, they entered the party as the cake was cut. They wore statement hats — eventually landing on matching yellow rain hats — and brought their harmonicas to then perform a squeaky rendition of the birthday song. And then as quick as they entered, they departed.
“People, for some reason, really latched on. We had some pretty devoted fans pretty early on.”
“The best ones are when you can tell like nobody knows what’s going on, we run in. And then by the end of their performance, just like smiles on everyone’s faces,” Donnachie explained. With every party, more fans joined the fandom of No Harm No Monica.
Sometimes these birthday bashes proved awkward. At one party their sophomore year, Herrnstadt vaguely knew the person who hired the trio for their $3 booking fee. But the trio knew nobody else at the party.
When the party itself came, the student who had hired NHNM for the gig was absent.
“They bring us into the room. No one knew what we were,” Wagg said. “It was like an intimate gathering, it wasn’t a party. They were seniors.”
But the trio persevered, playing their classic song with renewed passion despite the uncomfortable circumstances. “And at the end of that, we have a roomful of new fans,” Wagg said.
The gig that never was
As NHNM’s star rose, the group decided to take their birthday gigs to the next level in January 2022. What better way than to perform for President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 herself on her birthday?
The three resolved to make it happen, Wagg said, by “cold emailing” Paxson’s husband, Ari Gabinet, and Paxson’s assistant.
“We plugged our Instagram because we always think it’s important for people to know what they’re getting. We don’t want to mislead people.”
The group had slim hopes that this dream would become a reality — or that they would even receive a response.
But Gabinet exceeded their expectations with an invitation to perform for Paxson at an upcoming dinner for the Brown Corporation, the University’s highest governing body.
Gabinet “accidentally copied his whole conversation between him and the assistant (in his response). She says, ‘Hi, Ari, hope you’re doing well. Any context on this / Chris’s opinion on harmonicas?’” Wagg recounted. At some point, Gabinet decided he was sold, according to emails reviewed by The Herald.
It would be NHNM’s biggest gig yet.
“We decided we were gonna go of book for this,” Wagg said, which the trio had never even attempted to do previously. Gabinet asked if they would play another song in addition to “Happy Birthday.”
The group settled on “My Girl” by The Temptations, a song out of their repertoire and at a “higher skill level than we were used to playing,” Herrnstadt said.
The three practiced daily in the week leading up to the performance, avoiding parties and other social events out of fear of contracting COVID-19. But still, fate intervened.
Two days before the event, Wagg felt sick but repeatedly tested negative. She chalked up the symptoms to stress. Then a positive test came back. Then Herrnstadt tested positive. Then Donnachie.
“People were heartbroken. Someone even said it was the curse of Monica,” Wagg said. “Obviously that’s been a scandal that we’ve had to deal with.”
NHNM never found out how the Corporation might have reacted to an NHNM performance. But the lead-up and social media discussion was enough to keep the fanbase going.
‘The curse of Monica’: NHNM and their haters
No Harm No Monica has created countless fans. It has also prompted detractors, such as Pro Harm Pro Monica. PHPM’s Instagram bio reads: “Brown’s oldest NoHarmNoMonica hate group. We support all the Monicas and channel all the hate to NoHarmNoMonica.”
“The Pro Harm Pro Monica scandal is tough,” Wagg said. “Every good group has haters.”
“We don’t even know who it is. It just cropped up on Instagram called Pro Harm Pro Monica,” Herrnstadt added. The account regularly posts criticism after each NHNM gig. Sometimes, it posts photos of an NHNM member on campus criticizing them for not playing harmonica in a given moment.
The trio explained that PHPM was afliated with the renegade kazoo group “Kazoom Kaboom” which crashed their holiday sing-along in 2022.
The hate account has only a fraction of NHNM’s following.
“The rumors are that it’s a roommate of mine,” Wagg said.
“Trusted sources say that I might be afliated with it,” said Tierra Sherlock ’24, a follower of NHNM and roommate of Wagg. “I can’t disclose who those sources are.”
Sherlock did not confrm to The Herald that she ran the Pro Harm Pro Monica account. But she said she appreciated PHPM’s values.
“I knew they were starting to rise to some fame — they were dealing well with the spotlight,” Sherlock said. “I wondered … could this group stand the test of some critique.”
Wagg shared that her grandmother had direct-messaged the PHPM account “saying something like, ‘your hate is unjustifed. You are so unkind.’ She was a ferce defender of the group.”
“The Pro Harm Pro Monica scandal is tough. Every good group has haters.”
The hate account has been dormant for a year now. But the adversity allowed NHNM to mature musically and as a group overall, the trio agreed.
Building community and a collective identity: NHNM’s legacy
Through all the silliness, fallen-through Corporation gigs, Happy Birthdays and hate groups, No Harm No Monica has forged a dedicated fanbase and community — for those in the group and beyond.
“I’ve had a friend who transferred come up to me after a holiday sing-along and say, ‘This is why I transferred to Brown, essentially because Brown has things like this,’” Herrnstadt said. “Which was really nice.”
The holiday singalongs particularly fostered camaraderie and holiday spirit. “We realized a sing-along is great, one for holiday cheer, for everyone to be singing in community and two, the less they are actively hearing us,” Wagg said.
Wagg, Donnachie and Herrnstadt each emphasized how they never expected the group to make it this far, or develop such a following. The group documented its “Road to Gigs on the Green” in a mockumentary-style Instagram reel, which garnered over 1,800 views.
“We made a decision our frst year to promote it via Instagram and live stream it because as much as we have a fan base here, we have fans across the world,” Wagg said, citing the group members’ parents and their parents’ book club friends.
And though the group has always gracefully straddled the line between seriousness and satire, the trio felt No Harm No Monica had meaningfully contributed to their college experience.
“I do genuinely feel like No Harm No Monica has just been like a very fun and silly outlet. And something that I probably wouldn’t do outside of Brown,” Wagg said. “It’s a very uncomfortable experience to have the three of us play harmonica at you on your birthday. And I think it’s fun to do that to other people.”
“This is something I never would have kind of had the guts
Some of my ‘lasts’ at Brown have been easy to keep track of — last frst day of classes, last Spring Weekend, last late night at the Rock working on my thesis. I’m writing this before May, but I have no doubt that my next few weeks will fnd me desperately seeking out other lasts, egged on by the fnality of my remaining time in Providence. My unsuspecting friends will be dragged to the Main Green, picnic blanket in hand, to spend one more afternoon in the sun. I’ll beg them to come with me to our “Last Meal at the Ratty” if only to feign indecisiveness over food options that we have all had many times before. In a moment alone, maybe I’ll take a long walk across the pedestrian bridge, only half-heartedly chiding myself for overshooting the Hay, where I should be studying for fnals.
But even as I meticulously structure the time I have left at Brown, there are too many lasts that have already passed me by without fanfare, poignant only when I’m looking back at them from afar.
Over the course of my freshman year, I must have introduced myself by name and concentration hundreds of
Do not fear change by Rolake Feyisetan ’24
About four years ago, my college journey started with the Brown 2024 GroupMe. I had imagined my frst year of college in many different ways except getting delayed and taking place online. I had watched many YouTube videos to get an idea of what the freshman dorms looked like or what the college experience would be. None of them were my reality. I ended up spending my frst year in a sophomore dorm, Hope College. I, and others, had a spring, summer and fall semester — speeding up the burnout process. And with limited orientation activities and communication with my advisor and upperclassmen at that time, I was stuck in the same routine from high school. Keep your head down. Complete your requirements. Strive for whatever honors you can.
I’m sure of the many reasons we all chose Brown, one of them was the Open Curriculum. I still remember my alumni interview. I was asked “Why Brown?” At that time,
times — never mind how unhelpful my “undeclared” status was for people trying to get to know me. Later, I delighted in eliciting amused chuckles with my computer science and art history double concentration. The STEM-plus-humanities combination is so quintessentially Brown that it is almost trite, but I still felt special in revealing — mostly to myself — that it was possible for me to be intellectually curious about disparate felds in deeply serious ways.
I can’t remember when it happened, but at some point, new acquaintances started to instead ask about my postgrad plans. So my default introduction has changed; I’ve turned from a senior concentrating in computer science and art history into a soon-to-be software engineer moving to Denver. Even if it’s just an indulgent excuse for me to reminisce on the hours I’ve spent poring over Italian Renaissance art, I miss being asked for my name and concentration. I don’t know if my last name-and-concentration introduction is gone. I hope not, but I have no way of knowing.
Maybe I started with this quotidian college icebreaker because as far as ‘lasts’ go, there are far more painful ones coming my way. Discussing the end of childhood in her flm “Little Women” — which follows the lives of four sisters — director Greta Gerwig said: “Once they’re all in their separate lives as adults — Amy is in Europe and Jo is in New York and Meg has her own home and Beth is in her childhood home — they’re never all together again. The thing that they loved, that we love, is already gone. That thing of not knowing what the last day you had altogether was. You just know that you’ve never had it again.”
it was easy for me to respond “the Open Curriculum and the option to take my classes pass/fail.” But it was not easy for me to put that into action once I got to Brown.
In my frst semester, I took all STEM classes in a race against myself to complete my neuroscience requirements early. Even though I had previously thought of taking advantage of the academic freedom and exploring classes outside of my requirements, I was still stuck in the mindset of following one straight path into graduate school. Quickly, I realized how terrible of an idea that was. The following summer semester, I took creative nonfction, my frst mandatory pass/fail class.
I truly enjoyed the creative nonfction. The readings. The discussions. The fuidity of focusing on the class content without the stress of being “perfect”. So the next fall I took VISA 0100 and a language course. And then in the spring, I went further outside my comfort zone and took a class in the Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences department. And then later a course in the Hispanic Studies department and so on. I also went on to voluntarily pass/fail numerous classes.
One of my most memorable classes was EEPS 1220: “Climate Extremes and Human Rights” with Professor Amanda Lynch and Visiting Professor Charles Norchi. The class included a trip to Geneva, where we spent time at the World Meteorological Organization and the United
There will be a last time that I hear my housemates laughing in their kitchen downstairs as they make dinner. There will be a last time that I walk down my street and take a picture of a new fower in bloom, knowing that it hadn’t been the day before. There will be a last time that I luck into a table at Ceremony only to waste away my afternoon people-watching, rose matcha in hand. Even the long days with my friends during senior week will have their lasts, whether it ends up being the Friday before our families arrive for graduation or the Monday after, when each of us will get ready to leave the others. I can’t know it’s the last until it’s over — like Gerwig says, until I never have it again.
Maybe that is the beauty of these kinds of lasts, though. They are heartbreaking because they are moments that I love. Yet they are allowed to be so unceremonious because they are so common. I have lived these moments again and again over the last four years. They are everywhere, and they are uncountable. They form far more of my life than any of the grand fnales I’ll celebrate during commencement weekend, and I still won’t get to say goodbye to them. It’s bittersweet, but I’m learning to fnd this feeling gratifying in its own way. For every one of the lasts that I overlook, I hope there is also a frst that I still haven’t noticed, oblivious to how happy it will make me and yet to discover how much it will come to mean to me. Even if I only make such discoveries as a result of careless missed goodbyes, they are a
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Nations. During my time there, I learned about disaster risk reduction and explored sample case studies. The trip ignited something in me, allowing me to fll a void I wasn’t aware of in my class catalog. I was able to think more deeply about what career I wanted to pursue and my purpose in life.
I was also inspired to study abroad for a longer period, so I spent my senior fall in London. I had never thought of studying abroad, especially given the requirements in my concentration, but the fexibility aforded to me by the Open Curriculum allowed me to take this bold step. Being abroad or in a new environment for at least a semester is an experience I wish everyone could have in college. You get to learn in a diferent curriculum, take classes you might have never had the chance to take on your home campus and meet people from diferent walks of life. These things, however little they might have been, were the big little things in my college journey. Embracing the change brought by the curriculum at Brown made me realize that my future can be anything I want it to be.
You might or might not have a similar story of your own. But as we stand on the brink of a new chapter, I encourage each of you to refect on your own journeys. Perhaps, like
I anticipate that the enduring identity of Brown’s class of 2024 will inevitably center on our scattered start to college in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. It will be mentioned in speeches throughout Commencement weekend and at reunions down the line. I am a member of the class of 2024, but in many ways, I do not feel like one. Having started my Brown experience pre-pandemic in the fall of 2019 and taken a full year of during COVID-19 plus a semester abroad means that I’ve only overlapped on campus with the peers in my class for fve of my eight semesters. Many of my current classmates — at least 40 of us, if a photo we all took together ofers an indication — did the same, which leaves us graduating with a confusing conception of our graduating class identity.
The cohort of ’23s turned ’24s is the last remaining group of undergraduates on campus that remembers Brown was like pre-pandemic. Andrews Commons served brownie sundaes until 2 a.m., Wednesday nights were “Whiskey Wednesdays” at a sports bar on the river called the Whiskey Republic, and Blueno kept watch from his perch on Ruth J. Simmons Quad. We are the remnants of the old generation who still refer to the Vartan Gregorian Quadrangle as “New Dorm,” not “Greg,” since Brown didn’t begin construction on newer dorms until after our freshman year.
Most members of the class of 2024 spent their freshman year in back-to-back trimesters. They hold fond memories of a summer semester that felt like sleep-away camp, but starting college during COVID-19 meant they built friendships through
Truth be told, I was once denied from Brown.
As a high school senior, I had an 1130 on my SAT and a transcript marred by Bs. Objectively speaking, by these metrics, I did not belong at Brown. But the stakes were high: I knew what a Brown education would mean and most of all, I knew what it would mean for my family. And so I set out over two years to make a better case for my admission.
Growing up, I spent a lot of time learning how to make a good case. I was raised in the pews of nearby courtrooms, where I listened to my Dad, a criminal defense attorney, make a case for his clients — not necessarily for their innocence, but for their humanity. He knew that their past did not defne their future; there were simply too many other moments in between.
When I was 14, he stopped making cases for his clients and started mounting a case against his newly diagnosed cancer. But stage IV gastric cancer had already made up its mind. Nine months later, about a mile away from the
pods of fewer than six people. This experience is completely foreign to me and fellow “super seniors.” My freshman year was defned by sweaty parties in the crew house basement, packed concerts around Providence and Boston, and waiting in long lines at the Ratty, eyeing a roomful of unfamiliar faces that were well within six feet of each other.
We are no longer members of our original class of 2023, even though we might feel more of a connection to it. We consciously chose to put our college experiences on hold during COVID-19. We embarked on a wide array of adventures throughout that strange year, while our current classmates navigated a dystopian COVID-19 campus that we know existed but never laid eyes on.
The existence of this super senior cohort speaks to our deep love for Brown; most of us elected to take a year of to preserve our college experience and get more out of it on the backend. For a handful of my fellow ’23s turned ’24s, their COVID-19 gap year was their second gap year in three years, but that didn’t sap their willingness to wait for all of the things we loved about our freshman year at Brown to return.
Brown (and the world at large) has fnally returned to a somewhat stable normalcy, but the pandemic’s widespread impacts can be glimpsed in every facet of modern life. On a more granular level, it is strange to realize that my graduating peers did not have senior proms or real high school graduations. COVID-19 afected all of us, but I was fortunate enough to have only six weeks of Zoom school at the end of the spring 2020 semester rather than six months.
When we gathered for the photo to memorialize our unique collective identity, I recognized many faces: Groups of us have remained close friends since freshman year. But there were some people I didn’t even realize were still on campus.
When I chose to take leave from Brown during the pandemic, many of my close friends from freshman year elected to stay and
Pembroke side of campus, he would pass away in the care of oncologists and palliative care doctors — all of whom were on the Brown faculty.
For this reason and many more, Brown is where I wanted to spend the next four years. But at frst, I was rejected. I just needed to build a better case. After two years, an SAT score 300 points higher, an extra year of high school and some stroke of a miracle, I was accepted. I had won the case and gotten into Brown. But unbeknownst to me at the time, the biggest of all was still ahead. I would need to make a case to myself that I belonged here.
I was of to a bad start, though. I got the third-lowest score in the class on my frst exam. I was rejected from every club that I applied to. I learned that my intended major, public policy, would soon be dissolved. And as if that all was not enough, the varsity team that brought me to Brown was soon cut. By the end of my frst year, there was barely anything left for me. I felt, viscerally, like nothing but an impostor on this campus.
But, as I learned from my Dad, one’s past does not have to defne their future. And so I tried, again and again, to fnd my place here — and most importantly, to feel like I had a place here.
I began by circling back to where it all began: Rhode Island Hospital. For several hours a week, I shadowed and learned from the same faculty members who cared for my Dad. My past was slowly being connected to my present
ultimately graduated on time with our original class. As a result, I made unexpected new friendships both during my gap year and when I returned. But socially I have always felt more like a member of the class of 2023, never quite in the class of 2024. It makes perfect sense that the class of 2024’s Brown experience has been quite singular and therefore uniting — a trauma bonding of sorts.
Returning to campus this January after watching most of my close friends graduate last spring and then spending the subsequent fall semester abroad in Spain felt like whiplash. Most people I ran into thought I had already graduated. They were well into their senior year routine and savoring last moments with established friend groups. The feelings of social discomfort and isolation I remembered from freshman fall returned with a force. I promptly decided that this was no way to spend my senior spring, and within a few weeks, I remembered just how easy it is to put myself out there at Brown — to join a flm crew, shop a life-changing seminar, or turn an acquaintance into a best friend. There will never be a shortage of cool people and opportunities on this campus. While my eighth semester has looked diferent than all seven prior, I can leave feeling satiated that I made the most of it.
The Brown journey has been singular and trail-blazing for everyone graduating this year, regardless of whether we began our college experience in the middle of the pandemic or returned to it afterward. I’m not yet sure whether years down the line I will return to campus for reunions with the class of 2023 or with the class of 2024. There will be gaps present in either scenario, with friends and shared experiences missing from both. Nonetheless, the Brown experience remains universally beloved and singular. Not even a pandemic could stop certain traditions from carrying on or quench a fre as fervent as Brown students’ love for their school and Brown alumnae for their alma mater.
and in short order, these experiences ignited the way for some small and immeasurable wins. Eventually, the small wins added up to bigger ones. Recently, the biggest win happened when I was named a Churchill Scholar, which has given me the extraordinary gift of a graduate degree at the University of Cambridge next year.
I hope my story inspires a bit of a collective reckoning. As much as this experience is mine, I know that so many of you also spend the majority of your time feeling like an outsider. Impostor syndrome is endemic on this campus. All of you, in some form or another, have questioned whether or not Brown made a mistake, if you could pass that class or whether you could make it here today. And yet we have barely talked about it. But how can we walk through those gates, go forth and “commence” into the next chapter without reconciling this important piece of our experience? After all, how do we know when we begin to belong?
When I received an email about winning the Churchill scholarship, it was somewhat ambiguous. On a later Zoom call, I asked “At what moment will I know if I’ve won?” They responded, “At this moment.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. For once, my past did not defne my future.
At that moment, I felt vindicated. Like I had fnally
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This weekend marks the culmination of years of hard work, dedication, personal — and for many — fnancial sacrifces. Our graduation not only celebrates academic achievements but also honors the resilience, growth and transformation that each of us has undergone during our time at Brown.
In the last several years we have been part of an incredibly diverse community of scholars and professionals. This community has given us the opportunity to speak with people diferent from ourselves. It has exposed us to new concepts and issues, and it has pushed us outside of our comfort zones.
In the midst of a charged political climate, multiple wars and a world in fux that continue to impact us all deeply on campus and many of our families, we have been challenged to ask difcult questions, to be objective and yet empathetic and to listen to the stories and experiences of others.
I will start with a piece of my story. My family is from Russia and Ukraine. Some of my family members died in the pogroms and the Holocaust. My parents and grandparents moved to the United States from the former Soviet Union as refugees escaping antisemitism and religious persecution. The conficts in Israel and Ukraine have impacted me deeply, and my heart is with my family members and friends, as well as those of my peers, who are in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and so many other parts of the world
that are experiencing war and dislocation.
We all have our own paths and stories. But regardless of religion, ethnicity, race or even political afliation, we are one community. On campus, although we have experienced heightened tensions, we have been called upon to navigate our diferences, think critically and listen compassionately.
And though our backgrounds and opinions may difer, many of our experiences here at Brown have been shared. From meeting each other for the frst time in online game nights and Zoom classes during the height of COVID-19, to forming friend “pods” in dorm hallways with masks on our faces and eating Ratty to-go meals six feet apart, look how far we’ve come and how we’ve grown. We’ve all formed incredibly strong bonds and created many memories and fond stories of our Brown experiences.
To share some of these memories, I want to relate many of our long-time traditions to our Alma Mater:
“Alma Mater! we hail thee with loyal devotion, And bring to thine altar our of ’ring of praise; Our hearts swell within us, with joyful emotion, As the name of old Brown in loud chorus we raise.
The happiest moments of youth’s feeting hours, We’ve passed, ’neath the shade of these time-honored walls, And sorrows as transient as April’s brief showers Have clouded our life in Brunonia’s halls.”
“In loud chorus” we’ve let out our darkest fears and worries together in the Primal Scream. During Spring Weekend our hearts indeed “swelled within us with joyful emotion” as we sang and danced our hearts out in the rain, stamping out “sorrows as transient as April’s brief showers.” And, oh yes, some of the “happiest moments of youth’s feeting hours” were spent together in one too
We are all born lacking by Ethan Zucker ’24
We are all born lacking. It might sound like an insult. But to me, that phrase not only provides me perspective, it’s a beacon of optimism. “We Are All Born Lacking” is the name of a poem written by author Elizabeth Shapiro for my mother on the day of her birth in the middle of a blizzard in rural Illinois. She was born with ectrodactyly, a genetic condition leaving her with only one fnger on each hand, shortened forearms and one toe on each foot — a condition that she passed onto my brother Charlie and me. Throughout our lives, strangers have literally jumped back, stunned at the sight of us. They assume we must be greatly limited, incapable of living a life equally as fulflling as theirs. But that assumption is far from the truth. Instead of feeling less than, I’ve come to believe that having ectrodactyly is my greatest gift. Why? Well, for one, only the most wonderful people want to know me, spend time with me and have unconditionally accepted me. And this is despite my life being perceived as “abnormal.”
Back in 2020, I was a mildly neurotic 18-year-old waiting to enter Brown University. In the summer, I got an email, like everyone else, informing me that our first year of college was delayed until January because of COVID-19. I had started to make friends at Brown through Zoom game nights, which today feel like a fever dream. I remember many of my peers were understandably frustrated that we weren’t going to get a “normal college experience,” and that we were denied a normal orientation, in-person classes and unlimited social contact. Maybe I was just in denial, but I shrugged it off. I then realized that I think a little differently than many of my peers.
Because of my personal journey, I had long ago let go of fixating on what my life “should be.” I came to accept that not only is life not always fair, but, as it turns out, it is okay too. So with my expectations in check, why should I panic about a messed-up first year of college? It had been drilled into my head that we are all born lacking. Maybe if we were the Class of 2015 instead of the Class of 2024 we would’ve had four “normal” years of college. But because our experience was so drastically different, it allowed us to gain valuable understanding and perspective. Instead of arriving for our first semester fixated on minor details, we started reshuffling our priorities with a new understanding of what was truly
many a line waiting for yogurt and burrito bowls at Andrews, a seat in the Organ Concert at Sayles Hall, Courses@Brown course registration, or our favorite, the housing lottery — thanks, ResLife! But through it all, we had each other.
And the bonds, solidifed through shared triumphs and challenges, will serve as the foundation upon which we build our futures, ensuring that the spirit of camaraderie and collaboration we have cultivated at Brown remains an integral part of our journey beyond these “time-honored walls.”
Now, as we step into the wider world, let’s commit to seek truth and amplify unheard voices. As future leaders, let us cultivate a society founded on empathy, respect and honest storytelling. In the grand tapestry of life, each of our paths and stories will shape our shared humanity.
We may have difering perspectives on the world, but time and time again we came together despite this. As we embark on our next life chapter beyond the Van Wickle Gates and Brunonia’s halls, let’s bring this same energy into a future flled with endless possibilities. In the words of the great civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, “Peace is not merely the absence of some negative force — war, tension, confusion, but it is the presence of some positive force — justice, goodwill, the power of the kingdom of God.” As Brown graduates, let’s spread that positive force.
I challenge us to teach others how to have difcult conversations. Show our colleagues and friends how to listen and engage with people of other identities. Let’s prove to everyone how much stronger we as a society can be when we leverage the power of our diferences to transform our world, together
important. We refused to take even the littlest things for granted. We cherished the opportunity to just be on campus. What was extraordinary about our class in that first semester was that we felt like we had so much taken away, but then we were catapulted into a new dimension of unconditional acceptance and gratitude for what we were finally being given.
My mom also raised me to embrace the proverb “Let go and let live.” It reminds me how our summer semester in many ways was a wonderful time — we were vaccinated, the world was opening up, friend groups were falling apart and, for most people, that was great! The only thing we lacked was air conditioning. In early July, in the middle of the night, I called my mom in a state of overheated panic. She calmed me down by telling me that magnificent phrase: Let go and let live. If I only got 3 hours of sleep, so be it. That phrase, plus some very cold showers, got me through the rest of the summer. But it’s a phrase that can be applied to so many situations in college and in life. Are you anxious that you took the wrong courses this semester? Take a deep breath and let go and let live. Are you worried about getting your dream job? Let go and let live. It’s a powerful way to live life. To accept that your life won’t meet your most ideal expectations, but then choose to let go and
“Who are you?”
“No, really, who are you?”
This was the frst question I was asked in my frst class at Brown, ENGL 0900: “Critical Reading and Writing,” taught by Professor of the Practice of English Robert Ward. I set out to discover the answer.
For most of us, the end of our high school years was marked by the onset of the pandemic. For others, it was our frst or second year of college. The global catastrophe encompassed some of the most formative years of our lives, in which our sense of self was irrevocably altered. Some of us took time of for health reasons, others became caretakers of loved ones who had fallen sick and some spent this time in countries that had shut themselves of from the rest of the world. Precisely because of this uncertainty, we took life one day at a time. We turned to new interests to keep ourselves busy: knitting, baking, hiking, woodworking, making music. The pandemic turned us back into blank slates, ready to rediscover who we were.
Stepping foot in Providence for the frst time in January 2021 after fying more than 3,000 miles alone from the United Kingdom, I was terrifed. Months of minimal interaction with the people and world around me made me scared even to make eye contact with people I passed in the hallway, less a fear of infection than a fear of social rejection. How would I share parts of myself with others when I didn’t truly know who I was? I took classes in eight diferent departments during my frst year, even contemplating concentrating in computer science — though I knew I wasn’t destined to study CS when I could not even fgure out how to use Scratch, which describes itself as “the world’s largest coding community for children and a coding language with a simple visual interface.” I tried joining over 30 student clubs. I waited for some special moment, the epiphany that would strike me, when I would discover who I was and what I truly love and everything would fall neatly into place. It never did.
During sophomore year, I read something which described work by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk that has stuck with me ever since:
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me, you’ve encountered the power of embracing change — a change that expands horizons and ultimately shapes the person you are becoming. Our collective experiences, our collaborative eforts, do not only shape our individual futures but also contribute to a broader narrative of “Attracting Children from Nations and Returning Leaders to Nations,” a saying instilled in me during my primary school days.
As we embark on the next phase of our lives, we are becoming the leaders of tomorrow. Some of us are going to further our studies, while others are entering the professional realm. Irrespective of our individual journeys, it’s vital to remember that there are diverse paths leading to a common goal. The journey is what you make it to be. It may not always follow a straight line, but it is in the twists
“Der Mensch, als ein lebenslang Übender, sich im Üben selbst erschaft.”
“The human, as a lifelong practitioner, creates themself through practice.”
It’s not about fnding ourselves. It’s about creating ourselves, every day.
Creating, not discovering. Brown epitomizes this philosophy, teaching us to be lifelong practitioners. We select classes based on our own passions. And if none of the 80 concentrations ofered strike your fancy, you can develop your own. Only at Brown do students graduate with independent concentrations like “Food and Culture”, “Studies of Death and Life” or “The Body: Trans Studies, Aesthetic Culture and Creative Practice.”
Crafting extends beyond our personal journeys, too. Brown is special in that our community is so collaborative, supportive, and loving. The care we have for each other is palpable. That’s why I chose Brown four years ago, and why I will always choose Brown. Brown community members come and go, but the care stays. I saw it in the alumni I spoke to when I was applying to Brown and I see it in my peers today.
I saw it the night before my frst introductory chemistry midterm — CHEM 0330: “Equilibrium, Rate, and Structure,” for those of us who know and love it. That night, I panicked, realizing how much I still did not understand, despite spending hours poring over my notes. I texted someone in the same class who I had met only a week earlier, asking for help on a practice question. She called me via Zoom and spent three hours explaining the basics of quantum mechanics to me. I still did quite badly on that midterm, but I passed. For someone who cried before, during and after every one of the three exams in that class, I really did surprise myself by becoming a chemistry concentrator.
Whenever I think of my frst experiences with chemistry, I think of the kindness my friend showed toward me. I think of the camaraderie that is so inherent to the Brown community. I think of the dining and custodial staf whom some of us have befriended. I think of Arlindo, who tells me about his weekend soccer outings with his 9-year-old son while cooking up the best omelets I’ve ever tasted. I think of taking TAPS 0220: “Persuasive Communication” with Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Barbara Tannenbaum and Adjunct Lecturer and CEO Clif Dutton ’84, and of the many extra hours they spent with each of us outside of class to help us
and turns that we discover our resilience, adaptability and the ability to craft our unique narratives. Today, we celebrate not just the destination but the transformative process that has molded us into graduates of Brown University. The world we enter is dynamic, and the challenges we face are ever-evolving. Be open to new ideas, welcome diversity of thought, and embrace the continuous process of learning. Remember that change is not to be feared but welcomed as a catalyst for growth.
As we say in the Yoruba language: “Ìgbà ò lọ bí òréré; ayé ò lọ bí ọpá ìbọn.” “A season does not go on endlessly; life isn’t always as straight as the barrel of a gun”. [Change is inevitable: nothing lasts forever; life often comes with twists and turns.]
grow our confdence. I think of my peers, the student leaders who leave an indelible infuence on their mentees and on this community. Engaging with all of these incredible, talented and, most of all, caring individuals has crafted me into the person I am and has motivated me to pursue the things I love. We don’t need a global catastrophe for us to create ourselves, to sculpt our impact on this world. Each interaction is an opportunity for us all to guide ourselves towards new directions, or to continue steadily along.
Every conversation we have with someone new, every time we put ourselves in a new environment, we sculpt who we want to be. The sixth foor of the Sciences Library is the meeting place for one of my favorite communities — people who love languages, and language-learning. Every Monday at 6 p.m., the space becomes a choir of excited voices as language open hours encourage strangers to converse in their native tongues. We move around from table to table, leading the conversation at one, learning a few phrases at another and just listening or watching at a third. People open their hearts to each other. I love teaching Cantonese and sharing the experiences of my childhood in Hong Kong — it’s a way to connect with the city I grew up in, one that I’ve had to leave in my parents’ permanent move to England. I love learning about loan words in Urdu from one of the most passionate language enthusiasts I have met. I love watching the camaraderie of the American Sign Language speakers who always stay past the hour to teach each other new phrases. The sixth foor of the Sciences Library is now part of me.
How will you create your place in this world? We’ve been fortunate enough to have gone to — and soon graduate from — Brown. We’ve learned from the countless brilliant minds and caring souls around us. How will you take the tools Brown has given us to sculpt your impact on this world?
In my last semester here, I took a class with Professor Ward again. I was, once again, asked “Who are you? No, really, who are you?” I’m a chemist who loves languages. I love to try new things. I still don’t know all of who I will become. But my time here has imbued me with the tools and confdence that I will use to craft the person I want to be.
“The human, as a lifelong practitioner, creates themself through practice.”
So, I ask not “Who are you?” but rather, “How will you create yourself?” I can’t wait to see.
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testament to the abundance of meaning in my life — meaning that I can stumble upon by accident, meaning that I can lose track of, meaning that will return to embrace me on a random Thursday afternoon.
None of this changes the inevitable desire to say goodbye. Like Jo, Amy, Meg, and Beth, my friends and I will be spread out across the world, starting new lives. Like them, we’ll miss our old lives — the sense of sisterhood and intimacy and gentleness they were imbued with. I know we’ll treasure how happy our time at Brown was. However, I also want us to remember that most of that happiness was so casual, so unassuming, so subtle in the places we found it — my purest joys have been quiet ones. If, over these past few months, lasts have been everywhere, it only means that in the next few months, frsts could be anywhere. I hope we allow ourselves to fnd them.
At the beginning of this semester, I decided to hang a string of rainbow lights around the perimeter of my room. Later that same evening, when the sun had fnally set, I plugged the lights into the extension cord near my bed and marveled as the tiny red, green, yellow and blue bulbs illuminated my tiny single dorm room in a pale pink glow. As I sat there that night, pondering the start of my last semester here at Brown, I was transported back to my frst day on campus three springs ago, when as a fresh-faced frst year, I sat on my bed and bathed in those very same lights.
A lot has changed since the class of 2024 arrived in Rhode Island three years ago. At the height of the pandemic, our Brown careers began with a one-semester delay, “special student” status, and a single online class from home. I can only speak for myself, but for that whole fall, I felt like my life had been put on pause. I had spent so many years chasing my dream of going to college and, when I had nearly made it, the fnish line shifted and I had to wait another three months for the next stage of my life to begin. It felt as if time had run still; while the world around me was in a state of greater fux and uncertainty than anyone I knew had ever seen, I was stuck in the in-between, in a place of stagnation while my future was temporarily on hold. Instead of moving into school, I spent what should have been my freshman fall, a period of enormous change and growth and new experiences, sitting miserably alone in my bedroom. Eventually, I and the rest of my frst-year peers became unstuck, and we at long last made it to Providence. Masked
up, we moved into single occupancy rooms scattered across campus, picked up meals in red reusable dining bags and diligently walked through the January cold to the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center for the frst of many COVID-19 tests. Moving into college for the frst time is an adjustment regardless, but the isolation of Quiet Period made it a particularly challenging experience for many, myself very much included. Never in my life have I been one to speak frst, to put myself out there, to introduce myself to strangers. Yet there I was, alone in a double room to myself that I wasn’t supposed to leave, with nothing but strangers all around me as neighbors. As I sat on my bed, silently staring at the faintly glowing rainbow lights I had hung up hours before with my dad and already beginning to agonize over feeling completely alone once again, I heard voices down the hall. To this day, I’m still surprised that I gathered the courage to put on shoes and leave my room, but I’m glad I did; it was the frst of many tiny risks I’d take in my time here at Brown. Some of the people I met that night are still my closest friends to this day.
Winter gradually melted into spring, and Zoom game nights and pod gatherings quickly turned into late-night CVS runs and quiet study nights in the frst-foor EmWool lounge. As spring blossomed into summer, and we all returned to Brown for our second semester, an experience like no other class has ever and perhaps will ever have, we traded dinners on FaceTime for picnics on the Main Green, carried out from the Ratty in those same red reusable dining bags. We made it through a brutal heat wave, most of us only mildly envious of our peers in Greg (not New Dorm, defnitely not New Dorm) who had air conditioning in their rooms. We took the unfortunate hand that fate had dealt us, the constant setbacks and challenges that arose, and faced them head-on every single time with tenacity and optimism.
I’ve spent a lot of time this semester refecting on our frst year at Brown. What I’ve shared is just a tiny and oversimplifed snapshot of it all, and what I’ve come to realize is how it
I want to address the elephant in the room: Yes, my name is Dorra. I used to hate how my name sounded like that of a certain cartoon character with a watermelon-shaped head and a talking monkey. I realized, though, that I can relate to Dora the Explorer in more ways than I thought, and I’m sure you all can too. Just hear me out. Dora likes nothing more than to explore, and at Brown University, we do just that. One can’t refect on Brown without mentioning the open curriculum, so I’ll just get that part out of the way. The open curriculum — paired perfectly with our interdisciplinary interests — allowed us to probe a plethora of disciplines, from archaeology to computational biology. From classes on Tai Chi to astronomy, we learned everything under the sun.
And we didn’t just explore academically, but culturally too. Whether you studied abroad, learned a new language or went to one of the ever-increasing Bajas on Thayer Street, at Brown we engaged in activities that enlarged our horizons and allowed us to become more well-rounded individuals. And
even if you never left our beloved Brown bubble at all, our classmates are from all over the world, and we were able to travel simply by getting to know one another, embarking on a journey through each other’s stories.
When I was trying to fgure out what to write in this column for my fellow graduating seniors, I wanted to make sure it wasn’t too cheesy, yet still inspirational. After asking ChatGPT and binge-watching all the commencement speeches I could fnd, I was still stuck.
So naturally, I turned to the place where it all began: the Brown University website. That was the frst place many of us learned about Brown, so it must be doing something right. And among the “open curriculum this” or “collaboration that,” one sentence particularly struck me: “Brown brings people together in creative, unexpected ways.”
It got me thinking: Who would Dora the Explorer be without her talking monkey sidekick, Boots? How could Dora go on all these adventures without her best friend by her side? This applies to us more than any other class, because though we all tried to forget about it, we are, in fact, the “COVID-19 class.” You could even say that COVID was our Swiper. Like the thieving fox that hinders Dora and Boots, it came out of nowhere wearing a blue mask and gloves.
I remembered how the frst time I met some of my classmates was in our enormous GroupMe chat, or during chemistry ofce hours hosted on Twitch or in a painfully awkward
feels like just yesterday we walked in through the Van Wickle Gates for the frst time, yet at the same time 2021 feels so far away. Time is a fckle thing, and while a moment might feel so inescapable while you’re in it, it’s gone in the blink of an eye. Friends you’ve only just met a year ago can feel like people you’ve known your whole life. Hours spent talking and laughing in a lounge can escape from you like nothing at all. The agony of waiting for a response to a risky text makes a minute feel like far, far more than that. Time is relative and our experience of it is constantly changing, and while the reason behind it might be something out of my or your grasp, the one thing I can say for certain is that it’s feeting.
We have only had so much time here together. Eight semesters, 35 months and that’s it. It’s a little sad to think about, that our time here as undergraduates has come to an end. But I’d like to think that we made the most of our time here while we still had it, and we still have so much ahead of us. One of the greatest things that I’ve learned to be here at Brown is spontaneous, to be unafraid of taking those tiny risks, like breaking out of my comfort zone and meeting new people down the hall. Once that moment of opportunity is gone, it’s gone for good. It’s easy to try to push things down the line, to cancel a dinner with a friend because you’ll see them tomorrow anyways, to cancel your audition slot because you’ll just try out again next semester, to skip a club meeting or practice because there’s always next week, but we never really know, do we? Will we have the same opportunity to go to the beach with our friends next weekend? Or take that ski trip? Or go to that concert in Boston? When you have the chance to do something diferent, something that will bring you joy, something that is diferent and exciting and makes the mundane parts of life that much more worthwhile, why not take it? Our time at Brown may be over, and all those choices are in the past, but we all still have so much more time and so many more choices ahead of us, so take that risk, even if it’s as teeny tiny as stepping out of your room during Quiet Period, because it might make all the diference.
breakout room where everyone was muted with cameras of. Parents who had previously congratulated me on my acceptance to Brown were now saying, “It must suck starting college of like this.” Indeed, that’s how I felt as well.
But the Brown website is right about one thing: “Brown brings people together in creative, unexpected ways.” I mean, did you expect your best friend to be the person who you went on weekly trips to the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center to take regular COVID tests with? Would you have ever thought your new gym partner would be the person who stayed up with you until 12:01 every night to reserve a spot at the Nelson? Did you think your future roommate would be the person ahead of you in line to pick up your daily hardboiled egg breakfast bag from the Sharpe Refectory? I can’t speak for everyone, but I can confdently say that I have found multiple Boots here at Brown — people who want to explore just as much as I do and embrace every adventure together. We have all learned so much from each other, which is something I will be eternally grateful for.
And now that I’m pretty deep into the Dora the Explorer metaphor, let me tell you about my friend, Backpack. Backpack is equipped with all the tools you may need during your adventure. For example, one thing I am confdent is in each and every one of your backpacks is resilience. We had to stay in our dorms for a sweaty summer semester. Many of us were students for 5 semesters in a row. Class of 2024, we are noth-
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The local legend says that if you drink from the fountain outside the Athanæum, you will never leave College Hill. Brown poet and Professor Keith Waldrop once told Robert Arellano ’91 MA’94 that this legend was originally pronounced by Edgar Allan Poe after he was dumped by lifelong Providence resident Sarah Helen Whitman in the 1800s.
Upon discovering this, the frst thing that I did was enjoy a long gulp from the fountain. I was a sophomore transfer with three years ticking before me, and, like so many of us, I wished for my time at Brown to last forever, even at the cost of joining Josiah S. Carberry as another friendly ghost.
Over the past few years, I have come to redefne what it means for me to never depart from Brown. I realized that a person can carry a place in their heart long after leaving because I keep my hometown of Palermo, Sicily within me every day.
As surreal as it feels, the day has come for us, the class of 2024, to depart from our beloved undergraduate life. I am thrilled to present a guide on how to remain connected to the essence of Brown long after crossing through the Van Wickle gates. Through these words, I intend to transmute my nostalgia into an action-oriented and ever-growing love for Brown. If I were to defne Brown, I would say it is far more than an institution. I believe that the essence of Brown is a poem: our experiences on this campus are timeless and intangible, but they will remain alive within our hearts for the rest of our lives. The poem of Brown is written by all of our voices. Each of us shares something intangible that brought us together here today through countless challenges. We are brought to this guide’s rule #1: Trust your unique voice and speak from your heart even when your voice trembles. I remember the frst time that I decided to share my poetry at an open mic
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earned my place at Brown. But in retrospect, no award or honor could ever have that power. It had to be all of the moments in between.
When a faculty member answered my email about wanting to work with her, igniting a world of opportunity and a mentor-mentee relationship that is stronger than ever today, despite it now spanning across state lines.
When, after several of my close friends graduated, a group of incredibly thoughtful and funny sophomore boys took me in as their friend.
When a professor that I had as a frst-year spent three consecutive hours with me (on Halloween night) preparing me for one of the most important interviews of my life, despite us being disconnected for over three years. And so many more.
I am certain that all of us belong here, in this moment of graduation, but we have also belonged in the moments in between. The Class of 2024 will graduate as one of the toughest and most resilient classes in Brown’s 259-year history. We began this journey, four years ago, in the
overlooking the Main Green.
As a transfer student adjusting to a foreign language, I peered at the sea of unfamiliar faces anxiously. But looking up at the tessellation of Main Green branches, I remembered that I had trusted Brown to be a space for our collective self-expression. I will never forget the sight of my peers cheering me on with genuine joy. It was then that I learned what it means to let people into my heart, the key to fnding a home thousands of miles away from Sicily. Shoutout to you, class of 2024, for showing up for each other’s most vulnerable selves for the past four years. May we internalize this uplifting energy and continue to express our authentic voices in the next stage of our lives.
In COST 1020: “Neuroscience of Meditation,” as we were learning about the neural correlates of anxiety, we also examined fear through a Buddhist perspective. Professor Sara Lazar told us to view fear as a temporary guest rather than as a part of us. I practiced this idea through daily meditations that became easier as I gradually developed acceptance of uncomfortable feelings. Eventually, I stopped viewing fear as an obstacle to progress. This was one of the greatest lessons of my Brown career. It is also rule #2: no matter how much fear you may feel in the future, remember that it will never defne you.
On the topic of fear, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge how courageous you have all been to become independent architects of your own education through the Open Curriculum. There are few things in life scarier than the freedom to make an important choice, and you have all successfully traversed the uncertain, developing your own autodidactic judgment. You should be extremely proud of yourselves, class of 2024. Let’s take this moment to thank our families here today for their unrelenting support, kindness, and love. We wouldn’t be here without your lifelong guidance. Let us also acknowledge the precious support of our mentors: our professors, advisors, deans and staf members at Brown for taking us seriously and believing in our potential. E un omaggio a Palermo, che ti ho nell’anima.
The exploratory nature of the Open Curriculum has taught me to challenge myself to dig beyond discomfort in my aca-
heart of a pandemic. We have watched the world around us, in nearly every aspect, grow increasingly polarized and hateful. And today, we continue to grapple with a brutal war that has, at times, divided our campus and divided our world. When refecting on the events of the past four years, it is hard to see anything beyond these realities – all of which have made it harder to feel like we belong not only here, but everywhere.
And yet, we transcended these seemingly impossible moments. Somehow, we have found a way for heartbreak and joy to coexist. As we go forward, I am convinced that the only prescription for fnding our way through the challenges that await us on the other side of the gates is to continue to do just that.
And if all else fails, remember the words of 1984 honorary degree recipient, Maya Angelou: “Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.”
I am so proud to walk through those gates and to be with you all today as a member of this extraordinary class. We did it. And in case no one has told you yet — you belong here.
demic pursuits. For instance, in writing my honors thesis in poetry, I confessed to my advisor, Senior Lecturer in Literary Arts Gale Nelson: “I feel like I’ve been subconsciously imitating my favorite poets — I don’t know if I’ve found my voice yet.” He calmly responded: “Giordana, that takes a lifetime to learn. Focus on writing. The rest will come from the process.” I will cherish these words years from now, bringing us to rule #3: May the Open Curriculum inspire within us love for lifelong learning and trust in the process, even in the face of uncertainty. Think about the unimaginable ways in which we are yet to grow as scholars, leaders, and inventors. The poem of Brown is nowhere near fnished.
I realize that I cannot picture Brown without its fercely passionate students fghting for a better world. What would the Main Green be without your voices calling for a more equitable, accessible, and climate-conscious world? My frst professor at Brown, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Larson DiFiori, once told me: you must create your vision of the world and share it. As a sophomore, I felt uncertain, but those words took root in my mind, nourished by the campus’s vibrant student activity. I soon began to devote myself to building a world in which the women around me were protected from domestic and sexual violence. During my presidency of the Brown Women’s Collective, we established a monthly volunteering, educational, and fundraising program with Sojourner House, a nonproft that supports survivors of domestic and sexual violence. We also led a demonstration on the Main Green to bring awareness to the femicide of Giulia Checchettin and called for systemic change through Italia@Brown, the student organization that I co-founded to share Italian culture and current events with our community. This leads us to rule #4: in the years to come, continue to devote yourself to a greater cause which brings tears to your eyes.
I am honored to be graduating alongside this brilliant, kind and inquisitive class. In the journey of realizing our dreams, let us never forget the curious, idealistic and open-hearted teenagers we were when we frst stepped foot on this campus. As long as we maintain our innate spirit of enthusiasm for knowledge
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ZUCKER FROM PAGE 32
enjoy it anyway. To enjoy all the time we did have at Brown, rather than fixate on the time we didn’t have.
In the Greek myth of Sisyphus, the tyrannical king pushes a boulder up a mountain in the underworld only to have it roll back down every time he reaches the top. It reminds me that we cannot live in desperate search of an imaginary standard of what life should be, because that is a mountain that you will never actually reach the top of. If there’s anything that my time at Brown and being born with only two fingers has taught me, it’s that we can move past anything we consider a roadblock and allow ourselves to pursue careers, relationships and knowledge while still appreciating the blessings that we do have.
When I think back to all those strangers and their startled reactions, I let it roll off my back. That’s because perfection doesn’t exist in any one of us. So I believe it’s best to focus on not what we are missing but on making the most out of what we’ve been given. After all, we are all born lacking.
Wednesday, August 7, 2024
5:30 to 8:00 P.M.
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to do in high school,” Herrnstadt said. “And here I am. Doing it, making a name for ourselves, hanging out with my friends. I’m playing harmonica.”
Donnachie agreed that beyond ofering a good conversation starter, No Harm No Monica has been a touchstone of his time at Brown. “I really feel like it has become part of my identity here at Brown. Like, it’s always like when people ask about me, it’s one of the frst things I tell them; I’m a harmonica player,” he said. “It’s gonna be weird if I ever play harmonica after college. It won’t feel the same.”
“I’m glad that we all were able to just talk about harmonica freshman summer,” Wagg said. “And that Madeline (Canfeld) was able to walk by and ask if we were a group.”
The trio had debated holding auditions for new harmonicists to take over following their graduation. But they
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ing if not persistent (and a little bit crazy too). And that’s just one skill in all of our collective backpacks, but we all acquired many more, such as creativity, strength, ambition, rigor and open-mindedness, to list a few.
Our time here has been more than just an academic journey, but an exploration of our creativity, diversity and unexpected connections. The essence of Brown lies not only in what we’ve learned but in how we’ve learned it — collaboratively, creatively and often in ways we could have never anticipated. One could even say that Brown has been the map for us all to pursue our passions. It’s in the classrooms where every voice is not just heard, but celebrated. It’s in the Dear Blueno posts, and the craziness of shopping period and the swarm of people
decided that was not in the spirit of NHNM, resolving for the group to graduate with them.
Then, three juniors studying engineering — Dani Jayinski ’25, Allison Stein ’25 and Becca Martin-Welp ’25 — reached out.
“I think No Harm, No Monica is the spirit and idea more than anything else,” Wagg said. “So if people want to continue this spirit, then we’re happy to let them do it.”
Herrnstadt said that while the Brown community has been receptive to NHNM, it speaks to a broader phenomenon in the human spirit. “Brown certainly has helped and making it catch on quickly and widely. I mean, there’s been institutional support and non-institutional support,” Herrnstadt said. “However, I think that there is room in any community for a little bit of No Harm No Monica.”
“To all of our fans, thank you,” she added. “We couldn’t have done it without you.”
waiting to get late-night fries at Jo’s.
“Brown brings students together in creative, unexpected ways.” I quoted this before and I’m quoting it now. But now it has a new meaning, doesn’t it? Now — hopefully — you actually are starting to believe it. From the Naked Donut Run to the Halloween Midnight Organ concert, this school does just that. It’s not just the endless lecture content and the intensive studying, but rather the discussions you have in the monstrous Andrews Commons yogurt-bowl line, or the random encounter you have with someone in the Brown Design Workshop, or even the conversations on the bathroom wall of the Sciences Library basement. These are the times when being at Brown allows us to learn and grow from one another and make deeper connections. Whether we met each other online or face-to-face, on purpose or by accident, Brown has brought us together and fostered an
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and free inquiry which drew us to Brown, our minds and hearts will remain luminous.
I will conclude with a fnal thought. In homage to Waldo G. Leland, class of 1900, I will recite his poem that I discovered in my exploration of a 1900 yearbook. Many students and I have sworn that it still rings true.
College Days at Brown
Time of our truest endeavor, Time of our greatest schemes, Time of our greatest sorrows, Time of our dearest dreams, Scene of our happiest moments, Scene of fate’s smile and frown; Time and scene of the best we love – Our college days at Brown.
environment for us to learn and grow from one another.
Sure, there may have been Swipers along the way that tried to bring us down, but that never stopped us. In the end, we always had our Boots — our peers, our friends, our mentors — to help us along the way and our Backpack to provide us with all the tools we needed to face adversity.
So, my fellow soon-to-be graduates, as we embark on this exciting journey ahead, let us be the architects of unexpected connections, the champions of creative collaboration and the ambassadors of unity in diversity. Just like Dora, you all are resilient explorers, equipped with a plethora of skills in your Backpacks, ready to face any Swipers that might come your way because you will always know that you have Boots by your side. I am so excited to see where each of our Maps will lead us next.
The mission of the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics is to promote research and teaching that engages in scholarship across all fields that intersect through those three disciplinary and topical boundaries. Guided by an expansive appreciation for interdisciplinary and multi-method approaches, the Center is focused on advancing critical thinking and constructive civil discourse in the service of public and scholarly understanding of pressing social issues.
Each semester the PPE Center offers lectures open to the entire Brown community and the general public, as well as a series of smaller workshops that are by invitation. Invited guests are experts in their field from around the world who present diverse topics that are interdisciplinary in nature. The PPE Center offers three different venues for advancing important interdisciplinary scholarship and civil discourse: Janus Forum Lectures, Odyssey Lectures, and a specialized PPE Research Workshop.
Led by Director David Skarbek and Associate Director Melvin Rogers, the PPE Center is proud to engage with undergraduates in many ways. This includes teaching popular courses, such as Professor Ryan Doody's "Intro to PPE" course. The Center also supports two vibrant undergraduate groups, the PPE Society and the Brown Political Review. To learn more, visit our website and explore our social media.
Congratulations Class of 2024!
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