Commencement Magazine 2011

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The Brown Daily Herald Commencement 2011

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Commencement 2011 | May 29, 2011 | Serving the community daily since 1891

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raduation is a time for cliches, and in this moment of finality, we have decided to embrace it. And indeed, oh, the places we’ll go!

But as we reflect on our four years at Brown, it is hard not to also look back on the places we’ve gone. We’ve moved from Keeney to Keene Street, from Convocation to Commencement. And as we have grown and changed over the past four years, Brown has, too.

“Out there things can happen and frequently do,” Dr. Seuss wrote. As we sat on our perch atop College Hill and in our newsroom, things did happen. Brown spread across the world, recruiting the best and brightest from around the globe in droves.

The University turned old factories into a medical school, gave the arts a new home and drastically expanded its physical footprint. Science took on new prominence with buildings, departments and research programs.

In many ways, Brown is now a different school than the one we entered in 2007. And with double the applications for the class of 2015 than when we applied, who’s to say if we would even make the cut today? But as we — the class of 2011 — walk out the same gates we walked through four years ago, we will have changed, too.

So, Brown, we pass on the message to you that Dr. Seuss has written to us: “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.” In four years, you’ve gone many places, and yet there is still growing to do. There are changes to be made and new things to see. But everyone keeps telling us that’s the fun part.

commencement 2 Schedule of events 3 Senior orators 5 Baccalaureate address and honorary degree recipients

cover story 10 Oh, the places Brown’s gone 13 Mingling cultures 17 Closer to home: growing campus 19 Where Brown didn’t go 19 The consequences of expansion 21 Growth in science

features 24 Richard Holbrooke ’62 28 Putting the “Blog” in Daily Herald

— The 120th Editorial Board

editors Ben Hyman Sophia Li Emmy Liss Chaz Kelsh

George Miller Seth Motel Joanna Wohlmuth

looking back

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senior survey

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senior columns

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class of 2011 by the numbers

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final thoughts

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writers Rebecca Ballhaus David Chung Greg Jordan-Detamore Sarah Forman Talia Kagan

Brian Mastroianni Lindor Qunaj Mark Raymond Anne Simons Emma Wohl

creative Jonathan Bateman Gili Kliger Anna Migliaccio Hilary Rosenthal Nick Sinnott-Armstrong

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C O M M E N C E M E N T 2 011 schedule of major events Fr i d a y ,

M a y 27

Sunday,

May 29

5:30 p.m. – 9 p.m.

Brown Bear Buffet, one of Brown’s oldest traditions. A delicious meal and entertainment by Brown a cappella groups.

Sharpe Refectory, Main Dining Room

9:45 a.m.

Commencement Procession Starts Faunce Arch, Main Green

9 p.m. – 1 a.m.

Campus Dance, sponsored by the Brown Alumni Association.

Main Green, Lincoln Field

10:30 a.m.

The Medical School Convocation Ceremonial awarding of degrees.

The First Unitarian Church

Saturday, 9:30 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Commencement Forums, a series of academic colloquia by faculty, alums and distinguished guests.

May 28

report directly to the First Baptist Church in America at 1:45 p.m.

Main Green

2:30 p.m.

Baccalaureate Service 1:30 p.m.

The multi-faith Baccalaureate ceremony will be videoProcession Formation broadcast on the Main Graduating seniors Green and in Salomon assemble on Waterman Center and Sayles Hall.

Street, facing east The First Baptist toward Thayer Street, Church in America with the line beginning at Faunce Arch wearing 4 p.m. – 6 p.m. cap and gown. In Brown Daily Herald case of heavy rain, Alumni Reunion graduating seniors 195 Angell St.

10:15 a.m.

Graduate School Convocation Ceremonial awarding of degrees.

Lincoln Field

12:10 p.m. estimated College Ceremony Live video broadcast on the Main Green and in Salomon Center, Sayles Hall and the Pizzitola Center. Live audiocast into Manning Chapel and Meehan Auditorium.

The Grounds of the First Baptist Church in America 12:45 p.m. estimated University Ceremony. Senior Orations and awarding of honorary degrees.

Main Green 2:15 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. estimated Diploma Ceremonies for each department at assigned locations, as listed in the Commencement program.

In the event of a severe storm, the Commencement procession will be cancelled and the storm plan will go into effect. A message will be posted on the Brown website and sent via text message to all seniors.

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SENIOR ORATORS JACOB COMBS ’11 When Combs attended Brown’s Summer Session after his sophomore year in high school, he fell in love with the University.

He decided Brown was the place for him, and he applied early decision.

An English concentrator from Los Angeles, Combs recently completed a thesis comparing the adolescent experiences of Juliet from “Romeo and Juliet” and Maria from “West Side Story.” He produced his own interpretation, examining literary adaptations and theoretical frameworks of adolescence as well as the characters’ experiences in the context of their families and ancestors.

Combs will speak about the effect Virginia Woolf’s work has had on him. He first discovered her work in a class last semester, and he said Woolf taught him to read and write in a new way and appreciate “what it can do for us as people.”

“I really found myself responding to her work,” he said. “It made my whole experience as an English concentrator come together.”

Combs has also been heavily involved in the music scene at Brown. He has played the piano through the Applied Music Program, directed two shows, composed two musicals, taken composition, theory and history courses in the Department of Music and more.

“I find music an amazing way to express myself emotionally,” he said, “and I love writing music because it’s so intangible, yet it speaks so directly to us.”

Combs said he eventually hopes to become a composer and a lyricist. He will be teaching at Summerbridge San Francisco this summer and plans to attend graduate school in the future.

ELYSE VyVy TRINH ’11.5 Trinh, a student in the Program in Liberal Medical Education, came to Brown from Fremont, Calif., hoping to eventually use her medical degree for the betterment of the community.

She was drawn by the freedom of the University’s curriculum and looked forward to exploring various disciplines, including history.

But, said Trinh, who will be graduating in December as a human biology concentrator, “throughout my time at Brown, I felt a lot of conflict between art and science.” She initially focused extensively on the humanities but became worried that the classes would not prepare her technically for health work in the community. When she began to

explore human biology, she realized she was losing sight of her original goals of gaining a comprehensive education.

At Commencement, Trinh will speak about the “tension” she experienced between the humanities and the sciences and the necessity of “finding the balance.”

Trinh said her future is not yet set in stone, but she plans to work within the realm of medicine and public health. In the fall, she will be traveling to South Africa, China and India with the International Honors Program to study health within the context of local communities, and in the fall of 2012, she will begin her medical education at Alpert Medical School.

— David Chung photos by Hilary Rosenthal

Commencement 2011

Honorary degree recipients At this year’s Commencement, Brown will award honorar y degrees to 10 individuals prominent in a variety of fields, including film, public service and historical scholarship.

The recipients were selected by the Board of Fellows

of the Corporation, based on recommendations from the Advisor y Committee on Honorar y Degrees. The committee, which is composed of faculty, staff and students, solicits nominations from the campus community each spring.

Kenneth Roth ’77 Roth has served as the executive director of Human Rights Watch since 1993, during which time the organization has grown substantially and now operates in more than 90 countries, documenting war crimes in the Balkans and working to convict Latin American dictators, among many other accomplishments.

After graduating from Brown, Roth continued his studies at Yale Law School and worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York as a federal prosecutor.

Roth continues to write pieces on many human rights issues for a wide range of newspapers and academic journals.

Roth will be the speaker at this year’s Baccalaureate Ser vice on Saturday, May 28, at 2:30 p.m. There will be a live video broadcast of the ceremony on the Main Green. He will be awarded an honorar y degree along with the nine other chosen individuals during Sunday’s University Ceremony.

Katie King Crowley ’97 Currently the head coach of the women’s ice hockey team at Boston College, King Crowley won gold, silver and bronze medals in the 1998, 2002 and 2006 Winter Olympics, respectively. At Brown, she was a star athlete, excelling at both ice hockey and softball. She scored 123 goals on the ice hockey team, setting a still-unbeaten record for the Brown team, and was also named the Ivy League Player of the Year for ice hockey and softball. At the time she retired from the Olympics, she held the record for most goals — 23 — scored by an American in the games. Crowley has also taught at various hockey development camps.

Arianna Huffington Co-founder of the widely read news site the Huffington Post, Huffington is also an author, syndicated columnist and host of “Both Sides Now,” a radio program focused on political issues in the United States. Originally from Greece, Huffington moved to the United Kingdom during her teenage years and studied economics at Cambridge University, where she was also the president of the institution’s large debating society. In 2009, Forbes magazine included her in its list of the most influential women in media.

Huffington has also been involved in California politics, running for governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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Honorary degree recipients David Mumford Mumford, a professor emeritus of applied mathematics at Brown, joined the University’s faculty in 1996, where he helped found the interdisciplinary Brain Science Program. A renowned mathematician, Mumford has studied and made advancements in algebraic geometry, computer vision and pattern theory, and is best known for his invention of geometric invariant theory.

In fall 2010, he was awarded the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest scientific honor, for the work he has done throughout his career.

Though his last graduate student advisee graduated last spring, he still maintains ties to the University and his former collaborators.

Zhenkai Zhao Zhao, also known by his pseudonym Bei Dao, is a Chinese poet of international fame, best recognized for his poem “Answer.” Though he was initially a member of the pro-Mao Red Guards, he eventually grew critical of the government and his poetry became popular among pro-democracy groups in China.

In the late 1980s, he was not permitted to return to his home country and has written, lived and taught throughout Europe and the United States ever since. Zhao’s work has been translated into many different languages and he has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times. Just four years ago, Zhao moved back to Asia with his family, accepting an offer as a professor of humanities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Some of his compilations of poetry include “The August Sleepwalker,” “Landscape Over Zero” and “The Rose of Time.”

Nicholas D. Kristof Kristof, a two-time recipient of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize and a New York Times op-ed columnist, has traveled extensively to report on issues such as human rights abuses, global health and the environment. In the past seven years, he has traveled to the Darfur region nearly a dozen times and written many columns on the conflict. A 1981 graduate of Harvard, Kristof also studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and has written a number of books with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, including the bestseller “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.” He was the New York Times’ first blogger and has a particular interest in online journalism.

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Lynn Ida Nottage ’86 Nottage, a playwright who went on to study at Yale’s School of Drama and then work for the international human rights organization Amnesty International after her time at Brown, has written a number of plays primarily on themes relating to the experience of African-Americans and women. These very popular shows, which include “Intimate Apparel” and “Ruined,” have been produced in many theaters across the country and internationally. Nottage has also received multiple prizes recognizing her work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, a MacArthur Genius Award in 2007 and most recently, a Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

David R. Scott Scott, a retired Air Force pilot who studied at West Point and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been in outer space for more than 500 hours. A Gemini and Apollo astronaut, Scott has been involved in numerous missions, including three excursions onto the moon. He also worked as an executive at NASA and was awarded three Distinguished Service Medals for his work with the agency. Since then, Scott has served as a consultant for various TV shows and movies about outer space flight, such as “Apollo 13.”

He is currently the president of Baron Company Ltd., a company looking into potential opportunities in the commercial space sector.

Lisa Randall Currently a professor at Harvard, Randall is one of the most cited figures in the field of theoretical physics. She previously taught at Princeton, where she became the first woman to receive tenure in the school’s physics department.

Randall, who has been admitted into the National Academy of Sciences and has won numerous awards and prizes for her work, researches elementary particles and cosmology in an effort to refine and expand understanding of the interactions of matter and the extra dimensions of space.

Her regular articles, TV and radio appearances and lectures have put her very much in the public eye. In 2007, she was named one of the most influential people of the year by Time magazine.

Jack Nicholson P’12.5 Well-known throughout the world for his roles in films such as “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Terms of Endearment,” “A Few Good Men,” and “The Departed,” Nicholson has worked on more than 60 feature films.

He has won three Academy Awards and has more nominations than any other male actor in history and in 1999, was awarded a Golden Globe lifetime achievement award. Aside from acting, Nicholson has also been involved in directing and producing films, and is a prominent fan of the Los Angeles Lakers, attending virtually all of the NBA team’s home games.

— Lindor Qunaj

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The Brown Daily Herald

Oh, the places Brown’s gone: The University’s bid to go global

BY SARAH FORMAN

Since 2006, when the youngest reunion class last passed through the Van Wickle Gates, Brown has embarked on an internationalization process with more fervor and coordination than ever before. Brown has more applicants and alums living abroad, more rigorous requirements for International Relations concentrators and more partnerships with research institutions around the world, making it, undeniably, a more internationally focused school.

Commencement 2011

‘A whole higher level’ Of course, Brown has been building its worldwide presence for the better part of the last century, explained Vice President for International Affairs Matthew Gutmann P’14.

“We’ve been a global university for a long, long time,” he said, adding that for decades Brown has worked to incorporate foreign perspectives into the classroom, offered study abroad opportunities and encouraged faculty to collaborate with their counterparts abroad.

The precursor to the Watson Institute for International Studies — the Center for Foreign Policy Development — had already been in place for 25 years when the latest drive to internationalize began.

“This is not new,” he said. “What’s new is that we’re taking it to a whole higher level.”

It all started in 2006, when President Ruth Simmons listed increasing Brown’s international profile as one of the top priorities for the next academic year. At its October meeting that fall, the Corporation — Brown’s highest governing body — authorized a 30 percent increase in financial aid for international students and offered a series of recommendations to strengthen the school’s global reach.

As a result, newly appointed Provost David Kertzer ’69 P’95 P’98 took the helm of an internationalization committee that tried to “think deeply about how Brown could become more of a world university,” he said.

In its 2007 report, the committee called for more international research and educational initiatives, better University-wide coordination of internationally focused coursework and the creation of advisory councils to focus on understudied world regions.

The report also identified the “distinct European bias” to study abroad patterns, stating that although 35 percent of the junior class spent a semester or year abroad in 2005-06, more students needed to be drawn to India, China, Africa and other areas.

In the fall of 2007, University Hall unveiled a new office dedicated entirely to fulfilling these objectives, and David Kennedy ’76 stepped in to lead it, as Brown’s first-ever vice president for international affairs.

Gutmann — who took over for Kennedy in September 2009 — now directs the office and manages many of the key aspects of Brown’s internationalization: coordinating funding for international projects, overseeing the annual Brown International Advanced Research Institutes conference and building and maintaining meaningful partnerships with foreign research universities.

“I think there’s a great deal of enthusiasm from the faculty and students. There’s a lot of support from the administration,” Gutmann said. “The fact is that if you want to be a top university in the world today, you’ve got to be working with the top people, you’ve got

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to be attracting the top students.” And that means internationalizing.

listings of relevant coursework, research opportunities, internships and job postings.

Over 100 courses Though Brown had an international focus long before 2006, the University needed an organizing body to coordinate all of its resources and to “highlight those aspects of Brown that are international already,” Kertzer said.

For example, even before the Global Health Initiative emerged in 2009 as an outgrowth of the internationalization process, Brown boasted a wealth of global health projects in over 30 countries involving more than 100 faculty members. But these were mostly run independently and without a unifying focus.

“Nobody was minding the store,” said Susan Cu-Uvin, professor of obstetrics, gynecology and medicine at The Miriam Hospital and the Warren Alpert Medical School, who became director of the program. She said it was so difficult to find information about Brown’s international health programs that the Consortium for Universities in Global Health was not even sure whom to contact when it tried to invite Brown to participate in events.

Simply by building a website and sending weekly emails, Cu-Uvin said, the Initiative was able to better coordinate faculty efforts and connect more people with resources. In a particularly poignant example, the Initiatve put together a listing of all the courses Brown already offered with relevance to global health, and came up with over 100 classes spanning disciplines like Africana Studies and Anthropology all the way to Political Science and Sociology. Pulling these courses together not only alerts them to each others’ existence and allows for collaboration, but it also means outsiders can have a better picture of what global health looks like at Brown, she said.

Furthermore, with a set of administrators dedicated to supporting University-wide global health initiatives, Brown has access to more grant and fellowship opportunities than it would with only the disconnected efforts of individual research teams.

Many new funding opportunities require that researchers combine multiple disciplines — like biomedicine and engineering or anthropology and community health — and a centralized office is well-poised to bring those different specialties together, Cu-Uvin said. The Initiative has been able to bring in funding from the Framework in Global Health, USAID and AIDS International.

Many of the area studies programs — like Middle East Studies and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies — have taken similar steps over the past few years, expanding their online presence and their

‘Year of’ series Some of those area-studies programs have also been heavily involved in the “Year of” series, a new initiative that has brought two semesters of University-wide focus to several major world centers.

The Year of Latin America, Year of Africa and Year of India were implemented for 200708, 2008-09 and 2009-10 academic years, respectively, and the upcoming year has already been established as the Year of China.

The months of lectures, video screenings, conferences and discussions that compose these endeavors bring energy and attention to Brown’s efforts to expand its connections to these parts of the world, said Dean of the Faculty Rajiv Vohra P’07, who spearheaded the Year of India.

With its 70 panel discussions, student productions, lectures and more, the Year of India provided a structure and framework for a plethora of short-term programs that drew immediate attention to India’s importance on the global stage. Salman Rushdie’s talk in February 2010 filled nearly every seat in the Salomon Center, and the thousands of attendees at last year’s Commencement ceremonies saw President Ruth Simmons present Indian historian Romila Thapar with an honorary degree.

But the Year of India’s biggest success, Vohra said, was in encouraging “long term initiatives which have strengthened our relationship to partners in India.”

“The real aim was to think of it as an investment in our future,” Vohra added. He accompanied Simmons on a trip to Delhi and Mumbai last March, as part of the Year of India, and said her visit allowed Brown to expand an existing exchange program with St. Stephen’s College, an Indian university in Delhi. While Brown students had travelled to St. Stephen’s for study abroad in the past, the program only became a full exchange when they agreed to send a master’s student from India to study at Brown.

“While that had been under discussion for some time, we were able to use President Simmons’ visit to St. Stephen’s College to renew that agreement,” he said. The visit also generated a lot of media attention in India, making many more Indians aware of Brown as a world-class academic center.

That media buzz, alongside longer-term efforts by the Office for International Affairs to increase Brown’s visibility, has lead to an ever-growing alumni base and applicant pool in India, Gutmann said.

In part to support alums and applicants, Brown is now planning to build a new office

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Brown’s growing footprint “Brown Plus One” at the University of Edinburgh, begun 2011

Year of Latin America, 2007–08

in Delhi, India, he said.

Chung-I Tan, professor of physics and past chair of the Faculty Executive Committee, said he hopes the upcoming Year of China will be similarly beneficial for Brown’s relationship to the most populous country in the world.

“We certainly would like to leverage the enthusiasm and activities we have now to further Brown’s contacts and connections with institutions abroad,” said Tan, who is spearheading the initiative. Already, Tan is working to involve the robust alumni base in the area and faculty members from all disciplines in the effort.

The program is a “very natural outgrowth of this whole internationalization of Brown’s curriculum,” Tan said, particularly because it involves such a wide range of University players. Every incoming first-year student will be drawn in to the project, since Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron chose Leslie Chang’s “Factory Girls” as this year’s “First Reading” to herald the Year of China, Tan said. Because the year’s programming will

Joint business master’s program, Instituto de Empresa, begun 2010

Year of Africa, 2008–09

Year of India, 2009–10

address everything from traditional culture and society to international perspectives on China from the past century, Tan said he hopes every discipline can find a way to participate.

In March 2011, Tan told The Herald that past “Year of” initiatives had not successfully reached a large portion of the student body and that he wanted to make sure the Year of China was more successful with outreach.

Neither the Year of Africa nor the Year of Latin America maintained much of a longterm presence after they ended.

The Office for International Affairs is supporting the Year of China, and it is also working tirelessly to expand the long-term connections that Tan hopes the year will generate. Gutmann spent a week and a half in the country this May meeting with representatives from Chinese academic centers, and he looked at offices opened in Beijing and Shanghai by some of Brown’s peer institutions.

Gutmann said he would “love to see” Brown open its own center in China — simi-

Year of China, 2011–12

“Brown Plus One” at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, begun 2011

lar to the one planned for India — and that partnerships and exchanges between the community at Brown and Chinese students and faculty are continuing to grow. During Simmons’ and Gutmann’s visit to China and Hong Kong in November 2010, Brown representatives signed two major memorandums of understanding; one established a NanjingBrown Forum in which social sciences and humanities faculty at Nanjing University and Brown will have annual exchanges, and the other renewed the Zheijiang UniversityBrown Medical School exchange program.

Other initiatives focused on environmental research are also in the works.

What’s next?

“We have by no means achieved all of the ambitious goals set for Brown as an international University,” Simmons wrote in an email to The Herald. “But we are well on our way.”

Because of the growing severity and complexity of world problems and the increasingly international nature of academia and many professional occupations, Brown

Commencement 2011

must continue to intensify and expand its internationalization efforts, Simmons wrote.

Among the many specific programs Brown will start and expand over the next few years is the Brown International Advanced Research Institutes, a summer conference that brings together hundreds of young faculty members from around the world for colloquiums and presentations, and sends them back to their home countries with new professional connections and scholarly understandings coordinated by Brown, Gutmann said.

There is also a particularly strong focus on bringing together international scholars to address climate change, a discussion of noting language expertise on students’ transcripts and work being done to create more English-language study abroad opportunities for engineering and science students, he added.

A few of the more recently established partnerships and study abroad opportunities — particularly for graduate students — will also demand continued support from the University. For the first time this year, sophomores could apply to the “Brown Plus

One” program — a new initiative where they will graduate with a bachelor’s degree from Brown and a master’s from either the University of Edinburgh in England or the Chinese University of Hong Kong. These students will spend an undergraduate semester or two and a post-baccalaureate year at the partner school, so they earn nearly two full years of international experience with their degrees.

This year also marked the start of a joint business master’s program with the Instituto de Empresa in Spain. The 24 students in the inaugural class ­— representing 12 different industries and a dozen nationalities — will have a chance to combine liberal arts learning and international focus with conventional business skills, The Herald reported in March.

The Brown Plus One and joint business master’s programs join the study abroad programs in 10 countries Brown already offers to undergraduates. Brown operates its program under a consortia model — where it uses partnerships with other universities — rather than building campuses in other countries. At the end of May, Gutmann is

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meeting with the Council for Advanced Studies Abroad to discuss coordinating with other American universities to start new consortium programs in Turkey, Argentina, China and other countries.

These sorts of new initiatives all take time and money, and not everything has been easy. Even after years of effort, the Office for International Affairs has yet to create a system that lets Brown researchers know that their peers in other fields are doing research in the same countries, Gutmann said. Brown is still not as well known as some of its peer institutions in countries like China and India, and it needs to continue to build its presence before it will be fully competitive.

But administrators agree that despite the financial burden and immense challenge of working on an international stage, the University will continue to focus its efforts on building its global profile.

“It’s really the entire administration that is permeated with these international goals,” Kertzer said. It all comes down to making Brown “better known as one of the greatest universities in the world.”

Mingling cultures: Brown’s international student body

BY REBECCA BALLHAUS Blair Cameron ’13 of New Zealand never imagined that fraternities were really like in the movies. But when he arrived in the United States for the first time, he was in for a surprise — “Oh, it’s actually like that,” he remembered thinking.

For Sumitha Raman ’13, CVS was a fascinating discovery. “It’s a pharmacy, but you get basically anything and everything that you could ever imagine,” she marveled.

Angela Wu ’11 found Americans’ personal space boundaries stricter than in her home country of Paraguay. “I always took it for granted — it’s so normal to hug someone when greeting them,” she said, “but I realized that people get very uncomfortable.”

Whether it is the party scene or Thayer Street’s many offerings, international students arriving at Brown face a distinctly different lifestyle that many label a “culture shock.”

But this shock has not stopped Brown’s ever-growing international student population. Though the University’s admission website boasts that about 10 percent of the student population hails from abroad, “the percentage is actually larger” when taking into account students who are schooled abroad but have American passports, and other such technicalities, said Panetha Ott, director of international admissions.

Compared to similar institutions, Brown is “slightly on the healthier side” in terms of percentage of international students, Ott added.

The Office of Admission does not strive to consciously increase that number, though the University will occasionally set a certain rate.

“There’s talent all over the world,” Ott said. “We’re just getting the best students.”

“Historically, universities have thrived when there have been people from all over the world coming to the table to share their ideas and share their cultures,” she added.

“Very often what (students) remember the most is that the people next door to them or down the hall from them came from a very different background and that really changed their lives.”

Brown receives the most international applications from China, Canada, the United Kingdom, Singapore, India and Korea, in that order. Because the European Union allows citizens of member countries to study anywhere in the union for free or at very low cost, applications from European countries are relatively low, Ott said.

Foreign student admission is not needblind.

‘Freedom to explore’ Students choose to come to Brown from

abroad for a wide variety of reasons. Sofia Ruiz ’14, from Mexico, said going to school in her home country was not a good idea “for safety reasons.”

Ana Bermudez ’12, from Bogota, Colombia, was attracted to the idea of living on campus. At Brown, “there’s a lot of space to do extracurricular activities and community service projects,” she said. “At home, it’s much more the academic college experience.”

But most students offered the same answer that American students give when asked why they chose Brown — the open curriculum. “At the time I graduated from high school, I was not quite certain what I wanted to study,” said Marco Sanchez Junco ’11, who hails from Mexico and is one of the four coordinators of the International Mentoring Program, a peer support group attached to the Office of Campus Life. “I knew coming to the U.S. and even more so coming to Brown would give me the freedom to explore more areas.”

Katharina Windemuth ’15, who was born in Paris and has since moved around Europe, will come to the United States in September because she wants a “more exciting” education. “The American approach to educa-

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tion seems to be more liberal and open than that of any country I’ve lived in so far,” she wrote in an email to The Herald.

Before coming to campus, international students are assigned a mentor through the student-run International Mentoring Program. Students can communicate with their mentors over the summer and meet with them throughout the year. The program was “important in terms of getting me used to Brown,” Raman said. “The mentors and everyone really stay with you for the rest of the year and even after that, because you end up forming relationships with people that don’t really go away.”

New challenges When international students arrive on campus for the first time, they go through an orientation process during which they meet other international students and are provided with “critical information about academic expectations, campus life and student immigration and visa policies,” according to the Office of Student Life’s website.

In recent years, orientation has lasted for three days, but this year it will be a day longer. The International Mentoring Program will pair up with the Writing Center and Excellence at Brown — an optional orientation process that introduces students to academics at Brown — to orient international students to writing and “provide support to people who feel they need a helping hand with regards to their English,” Junco said.

As the trend in students’ countries of origin shifts, the international community is in increasing need of English as a second language support, Junco said.

Even for students who do come to Brown with English proficiency, the academic environment provides new challenges. “There’s a particular American style that professors look for here,” said Bermudez, who found the Writing Center helpful in her first semester.

The University also offers an Office of International Student and Scholar Services, which helps students integrate themselves into the community by offering help with issues such as visas and work permission.

There are also a number of student organizations dedicated to providing support for international students. The Brown International Organization is made up of about 20 to 30 members — in addition to a fixed board of 12 students — and is open both to internationals and to Americans.

“It’s essentially a platform to throw activities, lectures, events which have an international aspect to them,” said Artemis Stamatiadis ’11, co-president of BRIO. “The idea is that international students can come and bring traditions and holidays from back home and all those traditions will be known

Shifting trends: Where do international students come from?

International applicants, Class of 2010

International applicants, Class of 2015

Canada

240 applicants

785 applicants

Singapore

162 applicants

People’s Republic of China

United Kingdom

129 applicants

Canada

489 applicants

112 applicants

United Kingdom

353 applicants

Korea People’s Republic of China

100 applicants

Singapore

341 applicants

India

317 applicants

Data from the Office of Admission

to other (cultures).”

Buxton International House is a program house also open to both international and American students. “Often I see students from the same country sticking to others from the same country and I think I would be opposed to that,” Buxton resident Stamatiadis said. But, she added, “Buxton is a great place because you have the opportunity to go into a house that students are chosen to go in.”

Lloyd Rajoo ’13, who is from Singapore, agreed that it can be tempting to associate with people from similar backgrounds. But, he said, “I think the best thing for me was living with a local (from Rhode Island). It was a lot of fun and really important.”

For some, the idea of adapting to the American lifestyle can seem intimidating.

“I guess feeling a little helpless at first is part of the freshman experience, but I’d like to avoid being the awkward European kid next year,” Windemuth wrote. “It sounds silly, but the prospect of Americanizing my habits seems a little daunting right now.”

Ruiz said she felt welcomed by the community when she arrived. “I think people really are fascinated when you’re international so it actually makes it really easy,” she explained.

“American students are very receptive to hearing about other people’s experiences and perspectives on issues that we talk about inside and outside the classroom,” said Minoo Ramanathan ’11, who was born in India and attended school in Oman. “I realized it was actually a big advantage to have that perspective as long as you were open minded

… (having grown up abroad) was a great way to start a conversation with people.”

Finding support Internationals’ need for extra advising when they first arrive varies. Wu did not feel the need to seek advising when she arrived at Brown her freshman year.

“I didn’t think the culture shock or anything we had to go through was that bad,” she said.

Internationals agreed that advising is there if students want it — but “it’s not forcing anyone to do anything,” Wu said.

But some said they wished international advising would take a more proactive stance.

“When I came here, I wished there had been (events) I could go to that explained Social Security numbers and things like that straight away,” Cameron said. “I had to go get the help … it’s pretty obvious that most international kids who go to Brown are going to need those things, so having things like that straight away would be great.”

International students can also be “more hesitant” to reach out for help, a feature that is “very characteristic about the way resources are set up at Brown,” Junco said.

“Faculty needs to step in” and offer help more actively, he added.

One of the main concerns for international students currently is offering more financial help to students from abroad, according to Wu. As a member of the Brown International Scholarship Committee, Wu has been working with the committee and the Brown Annual Fund for two years to create a tradition where graduating interna-

Commencement 2011

tional students will create a scholarship for an incoming student from abroad.

Other students expressed concern about life after Brown. “I think that is something that a lot of colleges, including Brown, don’t really think about,” Raman said. “But it’s really hard to consider the fact that when international students are coming to Brown, most often they’re not going to just be able to go back to their home countries … be-

cause forms of education vary so much.”

Raman, a pre-medical student, said it is her “dream” to go to medical school in the United States, especially at Brown. But since acceptance to medical schools for international students is based on “complete ability to pay,” she said, it would be impossible for her to achieve that dream.

“I really wish that, as in all the other ways that Brown redefines norms, that it would

15

also redefine this norm.”

Ultimately, though students have found a strong support system in the international community, “it’s very hard to make a clear distinction between students who are American and those who are not,” Junco said. “There’s just such a variety.”

“In so many ways Brown is about bringing Brown to the world,” Raman added. “But it’s also about bringing the world to Brown.”

Commencement 2011

17

Oh, the places brown’s gone

Closer to home: Growing Brown’s campus

BY MARK RAYMOND

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nyone who has been on campus in the past few years has seen the ubiquitous “Building Brown” fences circling construction projects. This effort to build — or in some cases rebuild — Brown has been a part of President Ruth Simmons’ Plan for Academic Enrichment, a course of action for the University she established in 2002.

Most recently, the University unveiled the completed Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, a facility dedicated to bringing together students and faculty around the arts. This follows a number of other large projects on campus, including the Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center at Faunce House, the renovation of the J. Walter Wilson building and the construction of the new campus pathway called The Walk.

This summer the new Medical Education Building will open in Providence’s Jewelry District, followed by the new Aquatics and Fitness Center in the winter.

Not all the “Building Brown” projects are entirely new buildings. In light of the economic crisis, the University chose to renovate many buildings rather than build from scratch.

With the exception of the soon-to-be-complete renovation of the Metcalf Laboratories, these projects are now finished and in use

by students.

Medical Education Building The University is moving off College Hill for the new Medical Education Building, which will be home to the Alpert Medical School. The $45 million facility, a renovated factory in the Jewelry District of Providence, will open this summer to medical students and faculty.

“This is a huge deal for the medical students,” said Ed Wing, dean of medicine and biological sciences. “They felt that they’ve never really had a home.”

Wing added that medical students are “wildly enthusiastic” about the new facility and that it will provide them with three times the amount of space they currently have.

The project has received much attention due to its location in the Jewelry District, an area the city is trying to re-brand as the Knowledge District.

“This is really symbolic,” Wing said. “This is Brown moving off the hill.”

Wing said the medical school project is “rejuvenating the whole Jewelry District” and also providing hundreds of jobs to local unionized workers.

He said that in addition to providing around 350 construction and 200 related jobs, the district will see an uptick in eco-

nomic activity as more businesses move into the area surrounding the medical school.

In addition to improving the economy of the Jewelry District, the move will allow for more “synergy” between Brown medical students and students from other institutions, Wing said.

Brown will be much closer to Johnson and Wales University, and the University of Rhode Island is considering moving their nursing school closer to the area, he said.

Though the medical school is currently the only project underway off the main College Hill campus, the University will likely expand beyond the Hill in the coming years, said Dick Spies, executive vice president for planning and senior adviser to the president.

“Our capacity to grow on the existing campus, particularly in the sciences, is pretty limited,” he said. “We will inevitably grow over time.”

Construction for the Medical Education Building is slated to complete July 12, with a grand opening taking place Aug. 15.

Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center Faunce House went through a $20 million renovation, completed last year, and now houses the Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Cen-

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ter. The new facility is home to the new Blue Room cafe, study spaces and offices for student organizations, among other amenities.

Spies said providing places for students to interact and share ideas with one another was one of the main goals for the building.

“What makes a place like Brown so special is the opportunity to interact on a 24/7 basis with other students and faculty,” he said. “The best spaces at Brown are those spaces where people can come together in informal, unplanned ways.”

Spies added that the campus center, as well as all the new facilities on campus, are part of the larger mission by the University to enhance student life and foster a greater level of dialogue among students.

“I think overall what it represents is a broader, stronger academic and residential educational program that enables students to push the Brown envelope further than they could before,” he said.

The project was completed last summer and has been open to students for the past academic year.

Aquatics and Fitness Center The new Aquatics and Fitness Center is set to open next March at a cost of $48.1 million. The complex, located next to the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center on Hope Street, is “really three buildings in one,” according to Michael Goldberger, director of athletics.

The building will include the Katherine Moran Coleman Aquatics Center, the Nelson Fitness Center and the David J. Zucconi ’55 Varsity Strength and Conditioning Center.

Goldberger said the recreation center will provide students with state-of-the-art equipment for workouts, as well as dance and other recreational rooms.

The swimming pool will allow for recreational swimming and varsity practices to occur simultaneously, something that wasn’t possible in the previous pool or the temporary Aquatics Bubble currently in use, he said.

“It’s going to offer the quality of life that students want,” he said. “It’s going to be a beautiful building and a beautiful space.”

The new building is expected to be a significant draw for both current students and prospective students, many of whom view athletics as a critical component in their college experience, Goldberger said.

“People are just more health-conscious now,” he said. “It’s going to be important for students trying to decide where they’re going to go to college.”

Creative Arts Center The most recent project to be completed was the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, located on Angell Street adjacent to The Walk.

Herald file photos

A $20 million renovation transformed Faunce House into the Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center.

$60 million was raised for the project in total, with $38 million going toward construction, $2 million going toward program development and $12 million for an operating endowment.

The building, which opened to classes in January, includes an auditorium, production studios, an art gallery, a multimedia lab and a recording studio.

Richard Fishman P’89, director of the Creative Arts Council and professor of visual art, said seven academic courses and around 40 events have been held in the building.

“It has become a sought-after venue,” Fishman said. “Half of the events have been for things not necessarily related to the arts.”

One of the most prominent aspects of the Granoff Center is its unique design, devised

by Diller Scofidio and Renfro, an architectural firm from New York.

“The dynamic architecture is symbolic of Brown thinking in new directions and making a statement that the arts are important to the University and society,” Fishman said.

Fishman added that the building is made to broaden the appeal of the arts and encourage collaboration between different disciplines.

“One of the goals is to integrate different attitudes and ideas about art and reach out to the greater community,” he said. “Art with science and technology is an area we have been having many conversations about.”

Spies shared Fishman’s sentiments about the center’s purpose.

“The Granoff Center is a place where students and faculty with different interests

and different perspectives in the arts come together and try new things,” Spies said.

Fishman said he hopes that, in addition to reaching out to a diverse group of students and faculty at Brown, the Granoff will allow for collaboration with artists who aren’t associated with the University.

Other projects The Peter Green House previously stood in the way of what is now The Walk, the pathway connecting Pembroke and main campus. The house, home to the history department, now rests at the corner of Brown and Angell streets.

Pembroke Hall underwent renovations in 2008 and became home to the Cogut Humanities Center and the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.

Rhode Island Hall was transformed to house the Joukowsky Institute at a cost of $12 million. The renovation, which was completed in fall 2009, included a restoration of skylights, a new classroom, conference rooms and study space.

The Metcalf complex is currently being renovated into the home of the newly created Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences. The $42 million project is slated to be completed in the fall.

The J. Walter Wilson building was renovated in 2008 to house the mail room and four floors of student services, including academic advising, the Writing Center, the Office of International Programs and Psychological Services. The project cost the University $18 million.

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19

Where Brown didn’t go

By Greg Jordan-Detamore

A number of building projects have transformed campus in recent years, including the renovations of J. Walter Wilson, Faunce House, Rhode Island Hall and Pembroke Hall, as well as the recently completed construction of the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts. But not all plans have reached such a smooth completion. The 2008 financial collapse and recession have impacted the University’s finances, and other circumstances have delayed some projects.

When the University began developing the Plan for Academic Enrichment in 2002, the initiatives it laid out required physical growth and building projects. So in June of that year, the University hired architectural firm Kliment Halsband to draft such a plan, which became the Strategic Framework for Physical Planning. This plan outlined general principles to guide future growth, laid out possibilities for repurposing existing buildings and identified locations for potential new buildings. It also established a vision of expansion into Providence’s Jewelry District.

Also envisioned in the framework was a new pathway, called “The Walk,” linking Brown’s main and Pembroke campuses, with green space and new buildings fronting it.

While construction of The Walk is complete — aside from a long-term vision of connecting it to Lincoln Field — plans for an adjoining “Mind Brain Behavior Center” never came to fruition. In 2007, the Corporation approved a location on the south side

of Angell Street, between J. Walter Wilson and The Walk, to construct a home for the departments of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences and Psychology, which ultimately merged in 2010. But the recession put the brakes on the project. Struggles to raise the approximately $70 million needed forced administrators to think twice about the new building.

The location of the proposed Mind Brain Behavior building also met resistance from students and faculty because it would have required removing the Urban Environmental Lab from its current location and either finding it a new site or scrapping it altogether.

With few other suitable sites and without the money for new construction, administrators took a new look at an old building: Metcalf Chemistry and Research Laboratory. The building housed the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences and was partially vacant following the move of the Department of Neuroscience to Sidney Frank Hall for Life Sciences. Metcalf is currently undergoing a $42 million renovation to be completed in October, and will house the growing cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences faculty.

Similarly, a new building had been planned for the Alpert Medical School. But financial troubles also transformed that project into a renovation. The Medical Education Building, which is a renovation of a former industrial building in the Jewelry District, will open in

August for the start of Med School classes.

Administrators offer an upbeat take on the decision to renovate existing buildings, promoting historic preservation and environmental friendliness as benefits of the more cost-effective projects. “We can still achieve almost 99 percent of what we had intended to do,” Richard Spies, executive vice president for planning told The Herald in 2009. And Stephen Maiorisi, vice president for facilities management, called renovations a “very green thing to do.”

Though these renovation projects are all moving ahead, one building project is missing from campus — new residence halls.

University officials, including President Ruth Simmons, have been discussing the need for new dorms for years. At the Oct. 2006 Corporation meeting, officials evaluated different building sites and looked at financial models. But as of 2007, the planning seemed to have been put on hold.

Since then, the Corporation has discussed building and renovating dorms at its meetings, and its members approved funding in Oct. 2010 for the 32-bed building at 315 Thayer St. to be converted into an expanded residence hall. Simmons also told the Undergraduate Council of Students at a March 2010 meeting that she envisioned a large new dorm project. Currently, administrators say they are working on plans for dorm construction and renovation, but no other specific projects are in the works yet.

The consequences of expansion

By Emma Wohl

Brown’s expansion on and off College Hill has been met with some resistance from the city of Providence, especially as the state capital teeters on the brink of an economic meltdown. Currently faced with what Mayor Angel Taveras has characterized as an unprecedented financial crisis, the Rhode Island state legislature entertained a proposal in May to levy property taxes on nonprofit institutions such as private universities and hospitals.

The bill, proposed by Rep. John Carnevale, D-Providence and Johnston, would allow communities to tax nonprofits up to 25 percent of what they would pay if they were not tax-exempt. Upon introduction of his bill, Carnevale specifically targeted Brown, telling the legislature that the University “is literally gobbling up whole city blocks,” according to the Providence Journal. Brown’s physical footprint has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, the Journal reported.

Beginning in 2003, Brown has contributed to the city in the form of voluntary payments

in lieu of taxes. These contributions are intended to “be a steady stream of funding for the city that would enable growth of the nonprofit sector,” and will contribute $50 million to the city over 20 years, said Marisa Quinn, vice president of public affairs and University relations.

But since 2003, the city’s financial situation has become more precarious. Taveras, who took office in January, has stated he is willing to keep all options for bringing in revenue on the table, according to an April 28 article in The Herald.

A number of other universities make voluntary payments to their home cities. Princeton makes payments equaling about $1.7 million to the Borough and Township of Princeton, according to a May 11 article in the New York Times. But when local officials tried to stop a major university building project, university officials suggested that they would have to rethink the voluntary payments.

In Boston, where tax-exempt property takes up more than half the land, Mayor

Thomas Menino has sent requests to the city’s largest nonprofits asking them to begin making annual payments that would rise to 25 percent of the tax value on their property.

In Rhode Island, the two sides have yet to reach an agreement. “We have told Mayor Taveras that we understand the difficult situation,” Quinn said. “There are ways for colleges and universities to engage with the city and state that … will provide for longterm growth.”

“But efforts to tax universities are simply counterproductive,” she added.

Taveras has called the proposed bill key to closing the city’s $110 million budget deficit. But the University remains reluctant to entertain discussion of the bill.

“There’s a question of whether or not this is even constitutional,” Quinn said, adding that nonprofit status is protected at a state and federal level.

Carnevale’s bill has been held for further study by the House Finance Committee since May 11.

Commencement 2011

21

Oh, the places brown’s gone

Research catalyzes growth in science

By Talia Kagan

A

bout half a decade ago, the Office of Admission realized that while Brown was well-respected in some areas, prospective applicants remained unaware of its other academic strengths.

“It became pretty clear that people didn’t think about Brown and science in the same thought,” said Jim Miller ’73, dean of admission.

The office started talking up sciencerelated resources at Brown to prospective students. Since then, the office has seen a steady increase in applicants interested in pursuing the life and physical sciences, Miller said. When the class of 2011 applied to Brown, 45 percent of students indicated an interest in those fields, compared to 53 percent of next year’s freshmen, according to data provided by the admission office.

The recruitment effort is part of a larger push to bolster the sciences at Brown. In recent years, the University has made growth in the sciences an academic priority, investing millions of dollars in new buildings and planning an extension of the campus dedicated to the sciences in the Jewelry District.

Such changes are closely related to the University’s evolution into a research-driven institution. Research at Brown occurs in all disciplines, but last year the life and physical sciences received roughly 80 percent of research funding from sources outside the University, excluding funding from the

federal stimulus, according to Clyde Briant, vice president for research.

Culturing change Brown is deliberately cultivating growth in specific fields. It is significantly expanding existing academic programs in engineering and public health and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration among scientific fields.

The faculty voted last year to convert the University’s Division of Engineering into a School of Engineering, a move that has improved the program’s visibility, according to Interim Dean of Engineering Rodney Clifton.

The increase in applicants interested in the sciences has been even more pronounced in engineering — in the last three years, the number of applicants planning to pursue engineering rose by 43 percent, compared to an overall increase in applicants of 24 percent, according to data from the Office of Admission.

The new school is an attempt by Brown to catch up to its Ivy League peers, who all already had schools of engineering. Clifton’s colleagues have jokingly told him, “It’s about time,” he said.

But engineering won’t be the only new school on the block. The Division of Biology and Medicine is currently “putting the finishing touches” on a similar proposal: “We hope that next spring we will be able to declare a school of public health,” said Edward Wing,

dean of medicine and biological sciences.

The school, which has been in the works for roughly a decade, will be an important complement to the Alpert Medical School, which has an emphasis on primary care and the social determinants of health, he said.

The planned creation of a new school has been accompanied by an increase in BioMed faculty. There has been a net increase of 32 campus-based BioMed faculty members since 2002, according to data provided by the office.

The establishment of the School of Engineering mandates an increase in faculty: a first wave of three new positions in the school’s first three years, with the possibility of six additional new positions, depending on the school’s fundraising success, Clifton said.

There is also a separate proposal for the expansion of Brown’s offerings in “brain science” over the next five years, Wing said. The expansion will “form what we think will be a world-class institute on brain science,” he said. The University is currently renovating Metcalf Chemistry and Research Laboratory, which will open next October as the home of the newly consolidated Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences.

Physical growth A jaunt around campus and across the river reveals Brown’s brick-and-mortar investment in the sciences.

Since 2002, the University has “put over $270 million into buildings for BioMed,” Wing said. These buildings include the Sidney Frank Hall for Life Sciences, laboratory space at 70 Ship Street, a building for public health and the Medical Education Building, which opens this summer, for a total of almost 500,000 square feet of new space for the life sciences and public health, he said. “That’s a big statement about where the University’s going.”

The new Medical Education Building in the Jewelry District will provide a center with an anatomy lab, classrooms and a coffee bar to the 108 medical students who will attend their first classes there when the building opens Aug. 15.

A decade ago, each medical school class included about 70 students, according to data provided by the BioMed website. Next year’s incoming class will have roughly 120 students, a size that will remain consistent in the foreseeable future, Wing said.

Other departments in the sciences, such as engineering and neuroscience, may follow BioMed down the hill, Wing said. The University plans to transform the Jewelry District into an area of collaboration between Brown, local hospitals and other Rhode Island schools.

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A close lens on research Seeking more dollars for research has become a priority for Brown. The past decade has seen a steady increase in these research dollars, according to Briant. In 2001, the University pulled in approximately $102 million in external research funding.

Last year, the University received $152.7 from federal agencies and private sources, excluding stimulus funds.

The latest University Resources Committee report recommended additions to current research support in order to “increase and strengthen research activity as a central part of Brown’s institutional mission.” Recommendations included increased staff resources for multi-investigator grant proposals and increased seed funding for research.

The University also recently created the position of director for scientific outreach in an effort to make Brown faculty’s grant proposals more attractive to federal funders. Scientific outreach is “important for researchers who are looking for (federal) grants” because it helps show funding agents evidence of the required “broader impact” of the proposal, said Oludurotimi Adetunji, the new director of scientific outreach.

But research funded by external sources often requires additional funding from the University to cover facilities and administrative costs that are not fully funded by federal grants.

“Research is not a money-making proposition in and of itself,” Briant said, adding that it requires investment by the University. The office of the vice president for research has

Herald file photo

The new Medical Education building, which opens this summer, may provide an anchor for other Brown science departments to migrate to the Jewelry District as expansion continues.

already grown by six to eight people in the last five years and may soon hire an additional staff member, Briant said.

The federal government provides most of the external money that goes toward research, but the University is “trying very significantly to build our corporate sponsorship and research,” Briant said. In 2009, the federal stimulus package boosted research funding — ­ but as those funds run dry, the University is turning to corporate sponsors as another potential source of research money.

Corporate funding is still viewed with

suspicion by those who worry about the implications of private partnership.

“We much prefer federal funding,” Wing said. “Drug company funding is always a problem.”

But even corporate-funded research must follow University research guidelines, Briant said. “We watch this very, very carefully.”

The University has also invested in advanced equipment for computing and genetics research. Its most notable purchase has been a multimillion-dollar supercomputer — the most powerful in the state — housed in the Center for Computation and Visualiza-

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tion. But while the University has invested in research, its endowment pales in comparison to those of many of the top-level research institutions.

“We’ve got to set our goals high,” Briant said. For its size, Brown is “highly competitive” in its areas of focus, he said.

Balancing the scales The increased focus on the “university” in “university-college” has some worried.

While administrators have an eye on Brown’s movements in national university rankings, others view the administration’s emphasis on research with suspicion. Several community members have expressed worries that moving toward a research institution would displace attention from the primary role of a college: teaching.

Observers also point out that focusing on externally-funded research privileges the natural and physical sciences over the humanities and social sciences, which typically do not receive as much outside funding.

But while the sciences have benefited from much of Brown’s recent physical growth, they are not alone: The Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts and the expanding Cogut Center for Humanities are two examples of projects dedicated to the arts and humanities.

Faculty and administrators are also quick to point out that undergraduates benefit from well-funded research labs. The more funding for faculty research, the more opportunities for undergraduates and the better the experience.

“Good instruction and good research go together,” Clifton said, citing the “sense of discovery, sense of creativity” in both.

The University’s encouragement of research is also not a top-down mandate, he said — it supports faculty’s own interests.

“Faculty members aren’t forced to do research,” he said. “That’s how they got their PhDs.” The fossil record This debate is hardly new. The nature of a university is prone to tide-like ebb and flow. In the early 1980s, about 45 percent of undergraduates concentrated in the sciences, Miller said — compared to 32 percent of last year’s graduating class, according to the Office of Institutional Research.

The admission office does not have any particular demographic target for the future, but it does want to “bring science up to the same level” as other disciplines, he said.

“I think it’s pretty clear to everyone that Brown’s sciences profile has to equal its humanities profile,” Miller said.

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Perhaps today’s developments represent the growth that one English professor predicted decades ago.

In 1971, the chair of the Department of English, Mark Spilka, gained campuswide attention for insisting that funding for expansion of the humanities equal financing for Brown’s new medical school, The Herald reported.

The long-term results of creating a medical school would be a “change in the nature of the university, an imbalance in favor of the sciences, which will perpetuate and increase present tensions and resentments and will drive faculty away from Brown in subordinate fields,” Spilka said forty years ago.

During the height of the Cold War, many universities expanded their scientific offerings in a rush to compete with the Soviets, according to Associate Professor of History Naoko Shibusawa.

We are currently in a similar historical moment. After all, President Ruth Simmons is not the only president calling for increased focus on the sciences — science and math education was a major topic in President Barack Obama’s last State of the Union address. As Brown fills in the Jewelry District with research labs and expanding science programs, the University’s cyclical changes may be part of a broader national trend.

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The Brown Daily Herald

From The Herald to the UN Memories of Richard Holbrooke ’62 at Brown

BY BRIAN MASTROIANNI

T

“

he room allocated to the Russians for press conferences was full,” wrote then-Herald staff writer Richard Holbrooke ’62 in an Oct. 9, 1960 supplement to The Herald. “Reporters flowed out into the hall as Mikhail A. Kharlamov, Soviet press secretary, began speaking ... then we walked across the lobby — crossing an invisible Iron Curtain somewhere on the way.”

As a Brown sophomore, Holbrooke was in an enviable position for many young journalists, as he accompanied New York Times correspondents to a press conference at the 1960 Paris Peace Summit. Held between the “big four” global powers — the United States, the Soviet Union, Germany and France — the summit was ultimately a failed attempt to reach diplomatic understanding between nations immersed in Cold War politics. On May 1, a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down in Soviet airspace. The event poisoned the tenor of the summit’s peace talks, and Holbrooke was there, right in the thick of it, watching history unfold before his very eyes.

Crossing through that “Iron Curtain” would not be the last time Holbrooke would find himself caught up in the tumult and excitement of history being made. During his life after Brown, he would often play the role of history maker.

While he is remembered as one of the nation’s leading diplomats, the Holbrooke who wrote that piece for The Herald was

Courtesy of the University Archives

far removed from the future deal maker and player on the international stage he would later become. Known simply as Dick to his friends, the undergrad Holbrooke was a young man staring at diplomats from the outside, wanting to use his skills as a writer and communicator for journalism, not foreign policy.

While most Brown students focused on coursework and exams in Providence, Holbrooke was sent by The Herald to cover the summit in a seven-part series. Only a sophomore at the time, Holbrooke was sent as part of an initiative geared to expand “coverage of significant extra-campus events,” as described in a short April 28, 1960 press release in The Herald.

He ended up doing much more. Two days before the summit’s opening session, Holbrooke met Clifton Daniel, assistant managing editor of the Times, who asked him to help the newspaper’s staff during their coverage of the event.

Holbrooke was there for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s press conference in front of television camera crews and nearly 3,000 correspondents from various media outlets. In the supplement — which describes his experience working with the Times’ reporters — Holbrooke writes in a perceptive, detailed way, often tinged with slight humor.

“There was a short silence, and then, sud-

denly, unexpectedly, the round, bald head of Premier (Khrushchev) rose from behind the podium,” Holbrooke wrote.

He continued by describing the journalists’ reactions to Khrushchev’s appearance. “The Palais de Chaillot went berserk.

Journalists who are expected to present to a person conducting a press conference a certain minimum objectivity, were screaming, yelling, booing, hissing, and cheering.”

Holbrooke’s piece for The Herald offers a fascinating snapshot of history written by a man who himself would eventually be the subject of countless articles and news reports. After Brown, he would grow into one of the most influential diplomats in United States history. His accomplishments are too many to list. They include brokering the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that effectively ended the Bosnian War, serving as Assistant Secretary of State for both Asia and Europe, and in his last public position, serving as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan under the Obama administration — just a few in a storied career.

On Dec. 13, 2010, Holbrooke died suddenly from a ruptured aorta. He was 69 years old, and he had seen the world, living at the heart of some of the most momentous events in modern history.

The college sweetheart For those who knew him at Brown, Holbrooke is remembered as a friend and leader before he was a diplomat.

“We met at the very beginning of his junior year, my sophomore year,” said Litty Holbrooke ’63, Holbrooke’s first wife and college girlfriend.

They met on a blind date arranged by a mutual friend, and Litty — whose last name was Sullivan at the time — said the two of them got along immediately. “I thought he was cute,” she said, adding that “we hit it off and we started dating, and that was just it. We immediately fell in together and we continued that way.”

It was the beginning of a relationship that would continue long after they both left College Hill. The pair married in June 1964 when Holbrooke was working in Saigon for the State Department, and spent most of the years of their marriage traveling to the different places where he was stationed for work, having two sons along the way.

In college, Holbrooke’s professional aspirations were always balanced between foreign service and journalism.

“I think at Brown, he kind of half-jokingly, half-sincerely used to say that what he aspired to be would be either Secretary of State or Managing Editor of the New York Times,” Litty said.

After Brown, Holbrooke applied to, and was rejected by, the Times. He then decided

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to work for the State Department, a choice that would pave the way for his later work as a diplomat.

Despite moving up the ranks of foreign policy makers, Holbrooke never moved too far from his love of journalism. During the early years of their marriage when Holbrooke was stationed in Saigon, Litty lived in Bangkok and welcomed visits from some of her husband’s journalist friends.

“He would tell his friends to come and visit me and take me out to dinner, so I had a nice succession of journalists who would come through Bangkok for visits,” she said.

A mind ‘like a sponge’ This interest in journalism began at Brown, where Holbrooke’s work at The Herald led him to move up the ranks from a staff writer to editor-in-chief.

“The BDH was very important to him,” Litty said. “The BDH was the most important of his extracurriculars at Brown.”

Bob Ebin ’62, a former Herald business manager, remained a close friend of Holbrooke’s over the past 50 years. Ebin and Holbrooke even lived in the same apartment house in New York for a little over a decade.

“In college, we would prowl around with our girlfriends,” Ebin said. “He was a very interesting guy.”

“He did not drink, which was unusual for the time, and he had an incredible, searching mind.”

Both history majors, Ebin and Holbrooke took several classes together. It was in these classes where Ebin was able to observe firsthand the ways in which “Dick’s mind was like a sponge — it would soak up everything and anything,” he said.

Litty agreed. “He was very interested in history, and I think that is something that hasn’t really been written about a lot,” she said.

“That was a lifelong interest for him, and he was genuinely interested in it. He loved history so much so that he always loved hanging out with men who had lived it,” she added.

Making history As a man who lived history, Holbrooke made some of his own while at Brown. During his time as Herald editor-in-chief, Holbrooke found the paper facing a writer shortage. In order to increase recruitment, Holbrooke decided to seek out writers at Pembroke College, Brown’s all-female sister college.

With separate campus activities, dormitories and curfews, Pembroke and Brown stood as two sides of the same College Hill campus community. While The Herald was an all-male daily publication, the Pembroke Record offered a weekly equivalent for the sister campus.

Susanna Opper ’62 answered Holbrooke’s

ad looking for new writers.

“I liked to break down barriers and I said, ‘OK,’ ” Opper said. “My first article assigned was a review of a dance program.”

Opper said that while the concept of having female staff members on a male college newspaper does not seem that radical now, at the time, it caused some controversy at Pembroke.

“It was a pretty radical step, and the Record was very upset with me,” Opper said.

The following summer, Opper was given the opportunity to work on a more complex piece for Holbrooke. She was in Germany when Lyndon Johnson came to speak to the people of Berlin to address the building of the Berlin Wall. Opper wrote an article about the speech, a topic that immediately appealed to Holbrooke.

“He was at Brown what he was to become later on — no-nonsense, get the job done,” she said. “He was someone of the philosophy of, take the tough stand if you need to.”

“You want women on the paper? He needed to do it, and then he did it,” she said. “He was very conscientious about the paper. If you had a deadline, you met the deadline.”

Another history-making move by Holbrooke was his initiative to bring Malcolm X to speak on campus. At the height of his fame, Malcolm X brought an air of controversy to campus, Litty said.

“Dick arranged it, and The Brown Daily Herald and some other organization invited him to speak. Brown was quite unhappy about it because this guy was controversial and also a little scary in the sense that he always traveled with all of these bodyguards,” Litty said.

Litty said she remembered the packed room and the excitement that spread around campus. “It was all quite tense and exciting.

It was a major event on campus at that point and Dick organized it.”

‘Deadly serious and seriously playful’ Underneath the hard work and dedication to the paper, Holbrooke’s friends knew his lighter and gentler side, too.

“Dick was an odd but thoroughly engaging mixture of deadly serious and seriously playful,” wrote Larry Chase ’62 in an email to The Herald.

A former Herald editorial chairman, Chase spent a summer sharing a Greenwich Village apartment in New York with Holbrooke.

Holbrooke was a “copy boy” at the New York Times, while Chase had a job with the New York Telephone Company.

Within a month of his employment, Holbrooke managed to have a piece published in the Times. It was an editorial piece on graffiti, and even though Holbrooke did not receive a byline, “it was a three-to-five paragraph piece that he was proud to get published,” Litty said.

According to Chase, Holbrooke’s appetite

25

Courtesy of the University Archives

Holbrooke, here in an undated photo from his time at The Herald, phased out the paper’s gender barrier as editor-in-chief.

Herald file photo

Even as diplomacy became his career, Holbrooke remained close to journalism.

for news was unquenchable. Working the night shift at the Times, Holbrooke would come home to the apartment each morning with copies of the Times, in addition to all of the other New York papers, and read every one, Chase wrote.

Holbrooke’s appetite extended beyond news. Chase wrote that it was a summer of eating hot dogs for dinner, with Chase buying packages of eight. While he would eat two hot dogs, “Dick would eat the other six at a single sitting.”

It was this playful side that extended to nights working on The Herald. “He — and the rest of the BDHers — enjoyed poking fun at the administration in the paper, finding ways to work around Pembroke’s nightly curfew, etc.,” Chase wrote.

“Once I found him in the BDH office tightly wrapping a BDH colleague in a long strip of that spooled yellow wire-service paper that used to spit out (Associated Press) and (United Press International) reports,” Chase wrote. “The victim needed help to escape.”

continued on next page

26

The Brown Daily Herald

‘The beginnings of it all’ Through the lighter college years, Litty said that there were clear signs of the man Holbrooke would become.

“Obviously we were very different people then, and he was a very different person then,” she said. “He wasn’t at the prime of his career, but you could see the beginnings of it all.”

“After Bosnia and Milosevic, he became much tougher, and he wasn’t that way at Brown or in the earlier years,” she added.

Though Holbrooke and his friends would joke about his ambitions to be a star journalist

or Secretary of State, for Chase it was clear that Dick was on a unique path.

“I suspect not one of us was ever the least bit surprised to read about him in the papers over the years,” he wrote.

When he died, the United States mourned the loss of a national champion who defended diplomacy abroad. But for those who knew him at Brown, he was something a bit more human than the larger-than-life image that developed.

“I felt there was a hole in my heart,” Ebin said. “He had a relationship with a lot of people

close to him who felt an enormous loss.”

In reading Holbrooke’s piece in The Herald supplement about his time at the summit, one can sense the young man’s intense excitement at observing a piece of history.

“The summit was over. We all knew we had witnessed a terrible turning-point in the Cold War,” Holbrooke wrote.

There he was, standing with a crowd of seasoned journalists, a young man present at the breakdown of diplomacy. Little did he know, he would end up being one of diplomacy’s most prominent champions.

Thanks to the members of the class of 2011 who spent countless hours writing, reporting, editing, photographing, designing, illustrating and blogging each day at Brown.

You will always be a member of the Brown Daily Herald Alumni Association.

— 120

Justin, From the day you were born you have given us endless moments of happiness, pride and joy.

Your accomplishments are many and your positive attitude is an inspiration to us all.

Never lose sight of your goals, and may all of your dreams come true!

We love you, Mom, Dad and Anthony

28

The Brown Daily Herald

Putting the ‘Blog’ in Daily Herald

T

he first step to running a successful publication is to stop referring to it as “the bastard stepchild of (other more successful publication).”

When we were first handed the reins to BlogDailyHerald from former Herald Senior Editor and blog manager Ellen Cushing ’10 last spring, there was no doubt in either of our minds that we had signed up for a year’s worth of blank stares when we told friends and professors that we ran “the Herald blog.”

The fundamental problem with the blog from the start was that The Herald already had a website. And so for most of the 2009-10 school year, the only reason the blog seemed to exist was to act as a dumping ground for Brownrelated news that didn’t quite meet the paper’s standards of professionalism and relevancy.

Our first semester on the job was something of a mess. Joined at the helm by Anne Simons ’11 and four day editors, our editorial board meetings consisted mostly of run-ins on the street and in the Ratty. Our new writer “recruitment strategy” was simple: We told freshmen, “If you write for the blog, you won’t have to do any work!” We had set an initial endof-semester goal of at least 2,000 daily hits by December. By the time exams rolled around, our meager 1,000 visits per day weren’t even close to that number.

So, we changed things up. We completely restructured the editorial board around a risky, but ultimately much more tenable, scheme: We reduced the number of editors to five (one editor in chief, one managing editor and three deputy managing editors). We began to have weekly Sunday staff meetings. We created an email address to send out staff-wide emails (it’s still hard to believe that we went without one for an entire semester). We created a posting calendar. We embraced our electronic roots and got a staff Dropbox account.

Our goal was simple: We wanted to both demand more from our writers and build a community of bloggers who had formerly

By Matt Klimerman and David Winer only been connected by a disorganized web of emails and blog posts. The weekly meetings were incredibly important to achieving this goal — we didn’t frame them as optional, and we told each of our writers they had to come prepared with two post ideas to present to the staff. We even had a meeting on the Sunday of Spring Weekend. (Note: Given the level of inebriation at that meeting, only David still thinks that was a good idea.)

But, our — and our staff’s — hard work ultimately paid off. By the end of the spring semester, the site regularly had upward of 2,500 hits a day. Those blank stares we used to get when we told people we worked for BlogDailyHerald? We have finally said goodbye to them forever.

At some point this year, we realized that just because we couldn’t cover the same news as The Herald, it didn’t mean there was nothing substantive for us to write about. After several semesters of trying to define what we do in contrast to The Herald, the only concrete difference we’ve been able to come up with is, “We don’t take ourselves quite as seriously.”

Certainly, the writing on the blog tends to be quippier and more playful than in The Herald, and we use our medium to our advantage to make posts more engaging by including hyperlinks, photos and videos. The content on the blog is still meant to be informative and serve as a resource for students. We just have a different idea of what Brunonians are looking for as far as information goes.

Every day, for example, we post a “timewaster”: a site or video that is meant to enhance Brown students’ procrastination abilities, along with a comparison of the Ratty and V-Dub menus and a rundown of free food around campus. We have also developed recurring series that range from area restaurant reviews to Frosh-cessities (necessities for freshmen) to a weekly sex column that has covered pressing issues like the best places to have sex on campus — and get caught.

This year, the blog also took the lead in covering and investigating some of the biggest news stories affecting the student body, including the collapse of POLS 1510: “Great Powers and Empires,” the Fish Co. shut-down fiasco and the Crusaders for Traditional Marriage rally. We broke the Spring Weekend acts and extensively covered Spring Week happenings in our “12 Days of Spring Weekend” series, which, of course, included the details about the adventures of the blog’s Spring Week Furby. We jumped outside of your browser with our viral Spring Weekend wardrobe campaign “White Out for Diddy.” We even got Diddy to join in the fun (though we couldn’t get photographic evidence to that effect, due to pesky BCA agreements with Diddy-Dirty Money).

The biggest aim we have for next semester is to make BlogDailyHerald a central part of student life. Too lofty a goal? We don’t think so.

Brown is sorely in need of a cohesive online community. Student startup sites like BrownU. Me, Spotted@Brown and BrownFML haven’t managed to fill this gaping void (but eduHookups sure seems promising!). We’ve seen what low-budget (and, in our case, no-budget) college blogs can do for college campuses, like at NYU and Wesleyan, with NYULocal and Wesleying, respectively. We envision BlogDailyHerald having this same sort of unifying effect.

Looking back, it’s hard to say our main goal was ever to get other people to stop making fun of us when we talked about the blog and how excited we were. They still do — after all, we both still spend way too much time on it. Our aim was just to get everyone else to join in on the conversation.

Matt Klimerman ’13, managing editor of BlogDailyHerald, is afraid of sand. David Winer ’13, editor-in-chief, does not have irrational fears. See all the places they’ve gone this year at blogdailyherald.com.

34

The Brown Daily Herald

Looking Back Dec. 27, 2007

Oct. 20, 2007

Republican Bobby Jindal ’91.5 is elected as governor of Louisiana with 54 percent of the vote in a four-way race.

World july

august

september

March 17, 2008

Jan. 2, 2008

In a stunning deal, JPMorgan Chase agrees to buy rival investment bank Bear Stearns for $2 a share. Only a year before, Bear’s shares had sold for $170.

Oil prices rise to $100 per barrel in the wake of a weak U.S. dollar and violence in oil-producing countries.

Oct. 12, 2007

Former Vice President Al Gore shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about manmade climate change.”

In the midst of her campaign to become the Prime Minister of Pakistan for a third time, Benazir Bhutto is killed in a suicide attack at a political rally.

Feb. 3, 2008

2007

october november december

The New England Patriots lose Super Bowl XLII to the New York Giants (with Zak DeOssie ’07) after starting the season 18-0.

Feb. 24, 2008

81-year-old Fidel Castro is replaced by his brother, Raul, as president of Cuba.

january

Dec. 5, 2007

Dean of Medicine Eli Adashi announces resignation, surprising colleagues.

february

march

april

may

2008

june

Brown

March 15, 2008

Two Molotov cocktails are thrown at the off-campus apartment of Brown/RISD Hillel employee and Israeli emissary Yossi Knafo.

Weekend of April 12, 2008

Oct. 13, 2007 Soapbox cars race down College Hill in Red Bull-sponsored competition.

December 2007

Lupe Fiasco, Vampire Weekend, Umphrey’s McGee, Girl Talk and M.I.A. play Spring Weekend shows in Meehan.

President Ruth Simmons is named a Glamour Woman of the Year.

April 22, 2008

A pair of students throw pies at New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman during a lecture in Salomon 101.

Commencement 2011

Oct. 3, 2008

Feb. 5, 2009

Amid widespread panic in financial markets and in response to swiftly declining stock prices, former President Bush enacts a $700 billion bailout package for unstable financial institutions.

Over 131 million Americans go to the polls.

Barack Obama is elected president in a landslide, besting John McCain by 10 million votes.

Then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., officially receives the nomination to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colo.

july

august

Cell phone pictures of Michael Phelps inhaling from a marijuana pipe surface and the Olympic gold medalist swimmer is suspended from the sport for three months.

Nov. 4, 2008

Aug. 27, 2008

World

35

Oct. 18, 2008

january

february

march

2009

Oct. 30, 2008

Members of Students for a Democratic Society attempt to enter the Corporation’s meeting in University Hall. Seven are eventually given probation after a disciplinary hearing.

Mexican officials confirm cases of H1N1 influenza referred to as swine flu. Several thousand cases are soon confirmed worldwide as the disease spreads.

Barack Obama is inaugurated as president. Almost two million people travel to the National Mall to watch.

october november december

Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee tells a full Salomon 101 that the presidential race lacked substantial policy debate.

April 2009

Jan. 20, 2009

2008

september

Feb. 17, 2009

President Barack Obama signs the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, commonly known as the stimulus package, alloting $787 billion to states to revive the economy.

Jan. 27, 2009

President Ruth Simmons announces that the University is assuming that the endowment will lose nearly 30 percent by the end of June.

Administrators later say the loss occurred by the end of 2008.

april

may

june

Brown April 1, 2009

Administrators announce that two students did not return to campus from their spring break trip to Trinidad.

The students are later found and a parent says no foul play was involved.

Weekend of April 18, 2009

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Nas, Santigold and Of Montreal play Spring Weekend concerts on the Main Green.

Nov. 24, 2008

April 7, 2009

Brown football ties Harvard for the Ivy League championship.

The faculty vote to rename the Columbus Day holiday to Fall Weekend on the academic calendar. Providence mayor David Cicilline ’83 and radio personality Rush Limbaugh are among those who decry the change.

Nov. 4, 2008

Students storm the Main Green after Barack Obama is elected president.

March 10, 2009

Former Senator John Edwards emphasizes the nation’s responsibility to end poverty during a lecture in Salomon 101.

Events that shaped life, on campus and beyond

36

The Brown Daily Herald

Looking Back September 10, 2009

February 2010

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, successfully circulates proton beams for the first time.

The XXI Winter Olympic Games are held in Vancouver. Host nation Canada sets an Olympic record with 14 gold medals, and American snowboarder Shaun White unveils the Double McTwist 1260.

January 12, 2010

July 28, 2009

A 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastates the Caribbean nation of Haiti. 230,000 lives are lost, and 1,000,000 are left without homes

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed by the United States Senate by a vote of 68 to 31. Sotomayor becomes the first Hispanic justice on the court.

2009

World july

august

september

october november december

january

March 23, 2010

By a vote of 220-211, the U.S. House of Representatives passes the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, extending health care coverage to millions of uninsured Americans

february

march

april

2010

may

june

Brown

October 2009

After escaping from the Taliban in June, New York Times reporter David Rohde ’90 publishes five front-page stories in the Times detailing his capture and escape.

February 2010

As the investment banking and securities firm Goldman Sachs faces allegations of financial wrongdoing, President Ruth Simmons opts not to stand for re-election to its Board of Directors.

Weekend of April 23, 2010

Oct. 12, 2009

The University observes its first Fall Weekend as Providence and the rest of the country celebrates Columbus Day. DPS officers arrest one protestor at an anti-Fall Weekend rally on campus.

October 2009

After tense negotiations and protests, Brown Dining Services employees and the University sign a new contract, avoiding the possibility of a strike.

Snoop Dogg, MGMT, Major Lazer, the Black Keys and Wale play the 50th Spring Weekend concerts on the Main Green.

Commencement 2011

December 22, 2010

President Obama signs the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act, which ends a Clinton-era policy that required gay Americans serving in the military to hide their sexuality.

37

March 11, 2011

Eastern Japan is struck by a 9.1-magnitude earthquake and a resulting tsunami. The events caused thousands of deaths and created crises at several nuclear power plants.

March 2011

The United States, along with United Nations allies, conducts air strikes on Libya, which had seen weeks of violence between those who want to depost dictator Muammar Gaddafi and pro-Gadaffi forces.

November 2, 2010

Americans head to the polls for midterm elections. The Democrats lose six seats in the Senate, although they retain their majority. The lose control of the House of Representatives.

World july

august

2010 september

May 2, 2011

Presaident Obama announces United States special operations forces had killed Osama bin Laden in a raid at his safe house in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

February 11, 2011

Embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigns after weeks of largescale protests in Cairo and other cities.

october november december

january

february

January 2011

The Fish Company, long-time popular Wednesday night destination for students, announces it will close down.

march

april

may

june

2011 B r o w n

Weekend of April 15, 2011

August 16, 2010

Faunce House reopens after a year of extensive renovations, featuring a revamped Blue Room and new study spaces

Diddy Dirty Money, Wyclef Jean, TV on the Radio, Das Racist, Lee Fields and the Expressions and Rebirth Brass Band play Spring Weekend concerts in Meehan.

March 14, 2011

Sept. 25, 2010

Brown football beats Harvard in its first night game in the history of Brown stadium.

The Office of the Provost published a report revealing the University will offer professionally oriented master’s programs as early as fall 2012.

January 26, 2011

The Marty and Perry Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Brown’s newest fixture of modern architecture, opens for classes.

May 29, 2011

Brown University’s 243rd graduating class marches through the Van Wickle Gates.

April 29, 2011

President Simmons announces there will be no immediate decision on the future of the varsity wrestling, fencing, skiing teams. Student athletes and supporters had protested the suddent elimination of these teams recommended by the Athletics Review Committee.

Events that shaped life, on campus and beyond

38

The Brown Daily Herald

the senior survey

The Herald’s highly unscientific senior survey was conducted online through MyCourses, from May 3 to May 13.

621 seniors completed the survey.

What are your plans for after graduation?

What are your plans after graduation?

If you could do it all over again, would you…

...choose Brown?

Yes: No:

94% 6%

I don’t know

...still pick your chosen concentration(s)?

Yes: No:

19%

3%

73% 27%

Another job

Graduate or professional school

15%

30%

34%

If Brown calculated class rank based on GPA, where in the graduating class do you think you would fall?

Government employment

Nonprofit employment

4%

12%

Do you think you’re selling out?

27%

33%

Corporate employment

17%

Other

Yes: No:

5% 95%

Second Middle 20% 20%

1%

Top 20%

6%

Do you think Brown culture has changed in the four years that you’ve been on campus?

Fourth 20%

Bottom 20%

Yes, for better: 11%

Yes, for worse: 17% It’s pretty much the same: 72%

What is your favorite memory of college?

Too many to count • Going to watch shooting stars with my friends during a meteor shower and then grabbing Loui’s followed by class with no sleep • Getting into the Brown Derbies • Leading a BOLT trip • Finding 164 solo cups full of alcohol in the basement freshman year on a Tuesday night • Spring Weekend • Mario Kart Wii/Pandemic with suitemates • Foam party, junior year • The Rock • cooking • Smoking weed • Hanging out outside with the cast of the last play I was in • My friends’ conversations all over the damn place • spring emergence • my first Interfaith House party • the Barefoot Boogie • Climbing rooftops and walking through private gardens • Audition for AAArcapella • Spagfest • going to office hours • Every day I spent at Brown • Snowy evening, sitting around a piano with some friends singing Christmas carols with a fire going in the fireplace • Unplanned, random nights with my friends • All of college is my favorite memory, except sophomore year • Being on Molly at the MGMT concert junior year • making lots of spaghetti while high in the Caswell kitchen • Dancing around with friends drinking good-tasting beer • Throwing a party at my off-campus house, concluding with sex with a girl at the party • Campus Dance • Reenacting the Battle of Qadesh! • Table tennis nationals • before Xmas break my sophomore year, I drank so much, and played one-on-one Beirut with my best bro. Yeah, I threw up • Indy Banquet • deciding at Spats karaoke to drive to Foxwoods, gamble, start a bubble bath dance party only to get security called on us for a noise complaint and make it home for my 10 a.m. Italian class • Sucking at intramural sports • staying up all night making a paper • Leaving • I have no idea • naked run around Patriots Court with two of my best friends • Wiffle ball in the rain with a professor • Late-night bonding over problem sets • meeting my boyfriend • scavenger hunts • Streaking through the Main Green for Obama on election night • the rugby team • Being a freshman • just hanging out with my friends on the Main Green in nice weather • Freshman Orientation • staying up late to discuss the most random logical/philosophical topics with my closest friends • Playing tag in the dark in the Andrews Dining Hall • I can’t remember my best moments • chatting with friends about life goals and personal values • Everything • the wonderful diverse friends I have made • having friends with brains • Spring daytime parties

Commencement 2011

How satisfied were you with...

39

...housing?

Have you ever…

…had breakfast at Loui’s at 5 a.m.? ...meal plan?

...UCS?

70% 30%

Yes: No:

38% 62%

Yes: No:

31% 69%

...meal plan?

Not very 7%

…attended a Brown football game?

Yes: No:

Yes: No:

libraries?

Yes: No:

Somewhat 54%

Not very 27%

Not at all 6%

Extremely 12% Somewhat 52%

...UCS?

Not very 29%

Not at all 13%

Extremely 7% Extremely 54%

...campus safety?

Not very 6%

Somewhat 40%

...Providence?

Extremely 45%

Not Not very at all 7% 2%

Somewhat 46%

Not at all

14% 23% 86%

…hooked up with a teaching assistant? ...teaching?

...University

Not at all 5%

71% 29%

…had sex in a Brown library? ...advising?

Not very 19%

Extremely 17%

…attended a naked party?

...Providence?

Somewhat Somewhat 59% 59%

...housing?

…attended Sex Power God?

...campus safety?

Yes: No:

How satisfied were you with…

9% 91%

Not very 26%

Somewhat 40%

...advising?

Not at all 23%

Extremely 10%

...teaching?

Extremely 55%

...libraries?

Extremely 56%

Not very 2%

Somewhat 41%

…gone to Fish Co.?

...tuition?

Yes: No:

65% 35%

…completed the SciLi Challenge? ...Banner?

Yes: No:

16% 84%

…had a one-night stand?

Yes: No:

54% 46%

Somewhat 34%

...tuition?

Not very 4%

Somewhat 40%

Not very 41%

Not at all 19%

Extremely 6%

...Banner?

Extremely 16%

0.0

Not very 23%

Somewhat 51%

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

Not at all 10%

1.0

Organizing sexuality events • Going abroad to Australia • my first kiss with my now fiancee on a roof top • Staying up until 5 a.m. at a cast party singing random musical theatre pieces • Winning Ivy League championship • Rooftop climbing, especially Faunce when it was under construction • being with my significant other (cheesy, I know) • Freshman year Eighties Party • Covering the Brown bear statue on the Main Green with sparkles and colorful fabric as part of the Ultimate Frisbee program’s pump up traditions • Late night, drunken rants about every pretentious topic under the sun • Nothing appropriate enough for this survey comes to mind • Coming back after every summer and realizing everything I had idealized about Brown during the break was actually true • the SciLi • Varsity Athletics • Freshman year cuddle puddles • Quiet Green • Snoop Dogg • The changing seasons • Meeting my best friends freshman year who are still my best friends today • Late night at Thete • Spring Weekend sophomore year • The entire experience — late nights with friends, conversations with professors, being in my fraternity • Having our own SexPowerGod party • Kiva Ball • Swaying in a circle of love with all my best girls • listening to MGMT at Spring Weekend and staring at the green • green leaves on the trees • Having a threesome during a naked party • Walking into a class on metaphysics and hearing, “Oh, do come in. We were just talking about space and time” • Losing my virginity • Late night NCIS marathons • Ultimate frisbee • Breaking into the pool at 3 a.m. during finals last year with about 15 of my best friends and being chased out by Brown Police in our underwear • Binder • Dinner at the Ratty • Every small seminar I’ve had, every scintillating section that spilled over after class • Meeting my best friend • Gala • My sophomore roommate experience • going to drinks with my professor at the bar • Walking through the gates • Away football games with the Brown University Band • Completing the SciLi challenge and then impulsively going to a naked party with some of my closest friends • Beer pong tournaments • Fish Co. Wednesdays • Late nights early mornings • Doing Mande outside in the sunshine in the spring • Rewiring the Champlin elevator for April Fool’s Day • Drinking champagne on the roof of The Rock • Beating UConn in the NCAA tournament • Mud sliding on Lincoln Field • Going abroad • sledding on Ratty trays • my varsity team

1.2

40

The Brown Daily Herald

How many sexual partners have you had during college?

How many classes did you choose to take satisfactory/no credit? (not including classes that were mandatory S/NC) 18%

17%

16%

16% 13%

13%

13% 11%

10%

10%

9%

8% 7%

6%

6%

4% 4% 4%

3% 3%

4% 3%

1%

2%

0 1

0

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11+

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9 10

More than 10

Who was the best professor you had at Brown?

22 votes 15 Barrett Hazeltine

5 4 3 1

James Morone

10

Richard Bungiro

Amy Remensnyder, Anani Dzidzienyo, Dietrich Neumann, John Stein, Luther Spoehr, Patricia Sobral, Tricia Rose

9

Mark Blyth Jan Tullis Gary Wessel

Gregory Elliott, Heather Leslie, James Egan, John Tomasi, Josef Mittlemann, Kym Moore, Lundy Braun, Mary Flynn, Meera Viswanathan, Rebecca Molholt, Robert Hurt, Ruth Adler Ben Yehuda, Timothy Harris Andy van Dam, Ann Dill, Bruce Becker, Cristina Abbona-Sneider, David Berson, Ethan Pollock, Gail Cohee, James Green, Kaivan Munshi, Karl Jacoby, Kenneth Sacks, Lynne Joyrich, Manher Jariwala, Maria Carkovic, Michael Paradiso, Nicholas Townsend, Onesimo Almeida, Patrick Malone, Peter Andreas, Ralph Rodriguez, Ravit Reichman, Rick Benjamin, Ross Levine, Susan Harvey

8

Deak Nabers Minh Luong Wendy Schiller

2

7

Arnold Weinstein Laurel Bestock Peter Saval Joseph Pucci

6

Barbara Tannenbaum Matthew Harrison Rashid Zia

Akio Yasuhara, Ashutosh Varshney, Beth Zielinski, Bianca Dahl, Brian Hayden, Carrie Spearin, Catherine Imbriglio, Claudia Elliott, Corey Walker, Cornel Ban, Courtney Cahill, David Josephson, David Sheinberg, Derek Stein, Harold Roth, Jack Wright, James Doll, James Russell, Kenneth Chay, Kevin Gee, Kiri Miller, Mark Johnson, Mark Zervas, Matthew Garcia, Matthew Zimmt, Michael Vorenberg, Pascal van Hentenryck, Patricia Symonds, Patrick Heller, Patrick Sylvain, Peter Shank, Philip Gould, Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, Richard Stratt, Robert Self, Sarah Delaney, Seth Rockman, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Stephanie Merrim, Stephanie Ravillon, Stephen McGarvey, Stephen Porder, Stephen Smith, Thalia Field, Ulrich Krotz, Wendy Edwards

162 others received one vote

Describe Brown culture in a few words. inspiring • solid • open • socially engaged • cooperative • progressive • compassionate • hilarious • intelligent • Britney Spears meets Foucault • liberal bubble • work hard play hard • cliques • chic and snobby • driven • down to party • assertive • crazy • dynamic • diverse • studious • accepting • love community deep thought • pretty laid-back • relaxed • beautiful • maturing • disciplined • hipster • nerdy • hippie • provocative • very open yet very politically correct • tolerant • quirky • globally minded • not competitive • independent • beautifully different and crazy • like a delicious organic stew of creativity and also drama • needless competition • a little bit of fakeness • awesome gays • self-conscious • hip • eager beavers • crunchy • takes themselves a bit too seriously at times • anti-establishment • cooperative • drug use • choice • relaxed and safe • magical • artificial and immature • socially adept • awesome • apolitical content uncompetitive overachievers • self-directed • self-motivated • free • naive • homogenous • awkward • bizarre • sometimes hypocritical • nonprofit go-getters • insane • overabundant • eclectic • caring • a tad too many hippies with a rich daddy • race is a social construction • comfortable if you’re liberal and queer • intentional • inquisitive • compassionate • energetic • green • slightly contrived • self-congratulatory • collaborative • nakedness • questioning for the sake of questions • a libertarian paradise • invigorating • welcoming • radically independent and flexible • becoming a little too pre-professional for my tastes • unconstrained • organic • veganista • aware • study hard relax hard • party party party • theoretical • cheap • light-hearted and free-spirited • funky • dorky • independent, but with a superficial sense of activism • esoteric • more intellectual than radical • intelligentsia • generally nice people • intellectually stimulating • creative • curious • so hip it hurts • stuck up • socialite • happy • confident • a bit elitist • not the hippy paradise I had assumed • entitled kids protesting meaningless causes • self-important students • very few “well-rounded people” • inexplicably happy • super bro • funky • stoner chic • quietly snobby • good-looking enough • world-conscious • a bit of everything • stagnant • there are so many factions • segregated based on race and class • passionate to a fault • obsessed with being alternative/quirky • sense of community • meh but a good meh • sporty • sexy • self-knowingly intellectual • soulfully bougie • baller • overextended in every capacity • intellectually rigourous • more naked • narcissistic and psychotic • anything goes • deconstructed • everything is optional • a little too liberal • irreverent • friendly, but not too friendly • embracing • magical • go hip or go home • mix of everyone and everything • fashionable • too cool for school • not as hip as TV says • mainline aspirational • pretty f—ing awesome

44

The Brown Daily Herald

SEnior COLUMNS An economic approach to college Claire Kiely

E

conomics uses a term called utility to refer to an individual’s satisfaction or happiness at a given point in time.

An individual’s utility is expressed by a model or function that demonstrates how and from where a person derives their happiness. An individual actively “maximizes” the variables of this function where he or she derives the most happiness.

For example, hot chocolate and a popsicle both make me happy, but in order to have the most satisfac-

U = A(

concentration + professor notoriety + electives + research + thesis

tion at a certain time, I would want to maximize my consumption of hot chocolate during the winter and popsicles during the summer.

As graduation nears and I begin to think about signing an apartment lease and working long hours at a job that isn’t grading papers or holding office hours as a T.A., I have begun to reflect on the past four years. I am very proud of my accomplishments during my time at Brown and would not change any major components of it, aca-

) + S(

Looking back on my four years, as a freshman, the future prospects component, F, was not even on my radar and my overall health consisted of maximizing my rattycerealbar time. My utility or happiness was derived principally from maximizing the Social component of this function, most importantly friendships and activities, and following the advice of my Meiklejohn and focusing on electiveclasses rather than concentration in the Academic component. In sophomore and junior years, my maximization was spread more evenly across all parts. There was a noticeable spike in the GCBfishcoSpatsHouseParties variable from my 21st birthday when entrance to the beloved nonprofit basement bar was possible and a substantial

friendships + GCB, Fish Co., Spats, house parties + lazy dorm time + activities + what do you call it, is it a relationship?

demic, social or otherwise. But I was curious as to how my experiences as a student at Brown could be mapped using this economic concept.

Were I to create a utility function that modeled the potential components of a Brown student’s happiness, it would include a portion on the academic experience (A), social experience (S), overall health (H), future prospects for after graduation (F). And it would look something like this:

) + H(

increase in academic and social activities with my role as a co-head of The Herald’s business staff.

Senior year mirrored freshman year with maximization around the Social components of the utility function as well as electiveclasses such as Persuasive Communication and Mande.

This is the general maximization path of my four years at Brown, and for me, this resulted in a very high level of happiness and satisfaction. Yet, if I asked 15 different students to chart their path, none would have the same pattern of maximization and composition of their happiness across the same four years. Their individual utility functions may touch on variables that I didn’t maximize, such as research or thesis, and could even

exercise + Ratty cereal bar + beer, wine, vodka, tequila

) + F(

job + graduate school + salary + satisfaction

include an entirely different set of variables all together.

Attempting to model a universal Brown experience does exactly what Brown attempts not to do — normalize student life. There is not one prescribed path to get the Brown experience “correct.”

My hope is that when we walk out through the Van Wickle Gates, each of us can reflect positively on our time at Brown with as few regrets as I have.

Claire Kiely was general manager of The Herald in 2010. In the fall, she will start work at Bain & Company in New York.

)

Commencement 2011

Proud songsters Ben Hyman

T

o the rain gods: Why? When the Class of 2011 had gotten used to warm, blueskied Providence springtimes, why bid us farewell with a chilly, rainsoaked April and an even more depressing May? — More depressing, that is, because we were even more painfully aware of what we were missing.

It’s probably for the best that our senior spring was so drab.

For me, at least, it felt like Brown was letting us down easy, driving in that wedge of resentment that comes before the breakup. Had it been a gorgeous, lounge-onthe-Main-Green-type spring, how much more reluctant would I be to march out through the gates this Commencement weekend?

Obviously, when it comes to the things that will keep me tied to this place, the weather is the least of it. Simply put, I love Brown. I love the faculty’s combination of fierce intelligence and commitment to teaching. I love the way the Main Green looks like something out of a Gainsborough painting, even on the rainiest days. Most of all, I love the ambition and maturity and kindness of the students I’ve been lucky enough to spend the last four years with here.

Those 17- and 18-year-olds we were when we applied to this school: Did we know what we were getting ourselves into? Through the New Curriculum, Brown presents its students with a daunting challenge, the responsibility to form our own educations out of an overwhelming variety of options. We are encouraged to invent interdisciplinary combinations, design our own courses and, with the help of the S/NC option, study subjects outside our comfort zones. The New Curriculum isn’t a program, but rather an aspiration, an ideal.

Perhaps because it has become

obsessed with building and rebuilding things recently, the University likes to say we are the “architects of our own educations.”

But, as a musician, I think composition is an equally appropriate metaphor. Like architects, composers weave together different themes and materials to create a coherent whole. Both architects and composers will pay attention to form, structure and ornamentation, and the designs they produce on the page (or, increasingly, on the screen) will not be complete until they are, respectively, built and performed.

The first crucial difference is repetition. The architect’s creation, the building, will stand until it rots. It will be strong, and though over time the building’s many occupants may put it to different uses, it’s not really in the nature of buildings to move around or be reproduced.

The composer’s song is different. You hope its first performance won’t be its last. It can still be repeated, endlessly. A song is less a space that we move in, and more something that comes alive through us as we sing it, or hum it, or listen and press “repeat.” In a similar way, we will spend the rest of our lives singing the educations we composed for ourselves at Brown. Because our learning will inform our actions, our education will never simply exist, but will constantly be coming into being.

The other difference is time.

Whether they fade out or stop brutally, songs end. Temporality is the mystery of music, the thing that gives the sound value. Whereas buildings outlast the people who build them, the song’s performance will die, as we will. In that sense, Commencement is one of our first tastes of the finite, and the knowledge of its approach

works wonders on our sense of time. When people say “College is the best four years of your life” it’s not as if it’s true, but rather that the brevity of college makes it feel true.

As you can see, Commencement has made me a little morbid, and since lately I’ve been thinking a lot about death and time (and, come to think of it, rain), I’ve gone back to Thomas Hardy’s poetry. I’ve been rereading one of the last poems he published before his death, “Proud Songsters”: The thrushes sing as the sun is going, And the finches whistle in ones and pairs, And as it gets dark loud nightingales In bushes Pipe, as they can when April wears, As if all Time were theirs.

These are brand-new birds of twelve months’ growing, Which a year ago, or less than twain, No finches were, nor nightingales, Nor thrushes, But only particles of grain.

And earth, and air, and rain.

Not so long ago, we were just particles, but Brown formed us and taught us to sing our knowledge in the world. To all the proud songsters of the Class of 2011, I wish you the best of luck. Do great things. Sing as if all Time were yours. For the moment, at least, it is.

Ben Hyman was senior editor of The Herald in fall 2010.

45

46

The Brown Daily Herald

SEnior COLUMNS

Learning to swim Chaz Kelsh

F

or the last four years, I have had the privilege of telling friends and family back home that I went to school with the happiest students in America. Of the many things that have been great about Brown, that has been by far the best, and I think it’s something we take for granted. We’re beyond lucky to have been part of such a vibrant, excited community, and it can be difficult while here to maintain that perspective.

It’s also easy to forget — or to deny — that most of us are eventually going to have to enter the real world. After leaving College Hill, many of us will work in an office, and our employers are likely to ask us to wake up at a singledigit hour. We’ll have to pay bills and make sure there’s money in the bank to cover them. When we go places, we won’t recognize the majority of people around us from that section freshman year.

We’ll have to provide for our own gustatory needs, and when the oven decides to make that difficult, we’ll have to get the name of a good repairman. In short, we’ll need to quickly develop a host of real-world skills.

Rather than call for Brown to help educate us in these areas, though, I would suggest that we as Brown students already have opportunities available to us that help develop the kind of problemsolving skills that will be important for life after Brown. Brown is doing a terrific job at lots of things — not least educating us in academic disciplines — and

it’s unfair and unrealistic to expect the University to also impart these practical skills, especially because they’re better learned on the ground.

It’s tough to imagine how such training would work, anyway.

Would ECON 0820: “Principles of a Balanced Checkbook” be mandatory S/NC? And what would be the final project in LITR 1790: “Effective Email Habits”? These kinds of things are better taught in a trial-by-fire situation.

Fortunately, there are already plenty of ways for us to gain practical training. Every studentmanaged extracurricular — yes, that happens to include The Brown Daily Herald — puts students in the kind of sink-or-swim situation that is preparation for the brutality of the real world.

In the case of The Herald, those situations are commonplace. What questions should I ask in this interview? If I ask the wrong ones, the newspaper won’t have a story about this.

How can The Herald grow revenue in a world that’s moving away from print journalism? If we don’t, there might not be a Herald someday. These kinds of questions — and finding and applying their answers — make great training for the real world.

There are plenty of other ways for students to get these experiences, too, through other extracurriculars, student employment and some independent research.

Even studying abroad takes you outside your comfort zone and forces you to fend for yourself to

some degree. All of these things build skills that will come in very handy, and we should take advantage of them while we have the chance.

The education that Brown does provide us is incredibly valuable, and nothing I write here is intended to disparage it. I’ve learned invaluable critical thinking skills, honed my writing, and gained plenty of subject-area knowledge that will help me both in my job and in the rest of my life. And taking a breadth of classes across all disciplines, as Brown allows us to do, definitely helps us on the road to the happiest students title. There is incredible value to a liberal arts degree.

For me, running The Herald was also much more than a practical experience. It was by far the most fulfilling part of my Brown experience. I made the closest friends I’ve ever had, learned skills I never could have learned in a classroom and laughed much more than could possibly be healthy. Even when the going got tough, it was still engaging and challenging in a new and different way. It’s exactly that feeling, I think, that drives Brown students to be the happiest in the nation.

We should keep it that way.

Chaz Kelsh was managing editor of The Herald in 2010. In the fall, he will start work at Bain & Company in Boston.

Commencement 2011

47

You are what you do Emmy Liss

“

S

o, Emmy, what do you do at Brown?”

I have been asked this question countless times. Once the first-semester freshman year question of “Where are you from?” gets tiring, and people realize the “What are you studying?” question is not quite relevant or permanent, the inquiry about what you do takes precedence. And here I was, a second-semester senior, and I suddenly found myself faltering.

When I first arrived at Brown as an overeager freshman, I was desperate to find something to do.

The stereotype of an overachieving high school student, I had participated in every extracurricular activity imaginable. And so, at the freshman activities fair, I picked up stacks of flyers and signed up for countless email lists. I attended introductory meetings and talked to upperclassmen. And then, one day, while trying to fill in the crossword puzzle, I noticed an ad in The Herald for an info session. No experience was required, which was good — I had next to none — and the meeting was that night. So I added it to my planner, amid the thirteen other things I was determined to try out, and I went.

I was instantly impressed by the people I met and the organization itself, and promptly took on my first article. I wrote throughout the semester, but remained unsure of how much to commit myself. I was scared to so quickly wed myself to one activity, and so I kept trying out several of the groups I had discovered at the fair. Jumping from meeting to meeting, I felt like I was back in high school with a schedule full of different commitments. I was back to playing activity roulette.

Midway through the fall, I had

coffee with an older Herald editor.

She asked if I had aspirations of rising through the paper’s ranks, and I found myself without a clear answer. I liked being a part of the group, but wasn’t that a big time commitment? What about all those other things I could be doing? She told me I would never feel like I was part of an organization until I became deeply involved. And if I had even the slightest inclination that The Herald was an activity I enjoyed and wanted to spend more time on, I should give it a shot.

Taking her advice, I went from an only partially committed, occasional writer to a round-theclock reporter. After a few weeks of production nights, last-minute articles, Herald social events and just coming to the office for no reason at all, something clicked. The more time I spent at The Herald, the more I wanted to be there. At the end of freshman year, I unsubscribed from about fifteen listservs and never looked back.

The Herald was my activity, but it also became my identity at Brown. In a class of 1,500 and an undergraduate body of 6,000, it is impossible to know everyone.

And so we carve out little niches for ourselves, and identify everyone else by theirs. For better or for worse, we assume everything based on the team you play for, the house you live in or the newspaper you edit. College can be scary and lonely, and so we find and build communities we can rely upon.

When I returned from studying abroad in the fall of junior year, I was overwhelmed by the degree to which my friends and my life at Brown had evolved. My semester away had been a perfect change, but the readjustment to life on College Hill was far more difficult than I expected. And yet, when I

returned to the Herald office, the transition suddenly became easier.

These were my people, and this was my home.

This column may be my personal love letter to The Herald, but it is not a recruitment pitch.

(If you’ve come to an activities fair in the last three years, I’ve probably already given you one.) This is a more broad-reaching directive.

Go find an activity you love so much you can stay there till 2 a.m.

Look for the people you want to work with for five days straight, and then spend the whole weekend with. Spend your time wisely and make it count. Rather than spreading yourself thinly across the entire University, concentrate on what matters most to you.

Not everyone has to agree with the activities you pick, and your friends may never understand why you choose to be proofreading at midnight on a Thursday. Craft your own identity and discover the people you want to share it with.

My position on The Herald’s editorial board ended in December, and for the last six months, I’ve been without the activity I came to use as my identity. At first it was strange and unnerving, but the truth is, certain things stick with you forever. Even as a secondsemester senior, quickly moving away from my undergraduate career, I realized I could still answer a simple question about who I am at Brown and what I do: “I was a Herald editor.”

Emmy Liss was deputy managing editor of The Herald in 2010. In the fall, she will start work at McKinsey & Company in New York.

48

The Brown Daily Herald

FInal thoughts from The Herald’s senior survey

This is the best place on earth • Brown is the s— • 4-year-long orgasm • four years well-spent • I don’t want to leave • The Open Curriculum is the best part of Brown — don’t let it die • I don’t want to grow up • Part of me is very sad to be leaving because I feel that there are many aspects of the Brown experience that I did not participate in fully • I never realized until I was filling out this survey just how much of the “typical college experience” I skipped by never going to class drunk or having sex in the library • I think the Brown bubble has insulated a lot of people • I met so many amazing people and I like to think most people who met me feel I fall into that category for them • I am happy with what I’ve learned about myself at Brown • You can only go to Spats so many times in a week • It’s been so real • I feel like I’ve just climbed Mt. Everest after breaking out of Alcatraz • I’ll miss the comfortableness and expressiveness of Brown • I love Brown, but it wasn’t the place for me, so to speak • I wish I could do it all again • Life only goes downhill after • I want more • Will miss college. Will not miss Brown • Nerds are the coolest part of Brown • In Deo Speramus • All these people reminding me it’s the end, and I’d rather think of it as the beginning • If only we could relocate Brown to SoCal • Wish I had one more year • Ever true • I’ll even miss the SciLi • Where am I going to get laid free and easy after college? • I wish I didn’t have to have final thoughts • Brown should hook up its seniors with jobs • F—, this made me sad • Brown was a massive disappointment in some ways, but was still probably the best 4 years of my life • The small size of the endowment seemed to put a damper on opportunities for student activities • This school allows you to Rock and Roll • Thank you Josiah • I think these years have set us up for even better years • People are lying on this survey • work doesn’t sound like fun • I hope my little brother has a better time at Brown than I did • Good Stuff • I really don’t know how people can stay at Brown for four years • I transferred here, and I am pretty darn glad I did • The Brown experience has very little to do with school and academics and a whole lot to do with the wonderful people in this community • When and where is the last one of these naked parties, and why was I the only one not to see the naked donut run? • I’ve had my ups and downs, but senior year has been a blast • Every year here was so different • I came to Brown before the financial crisis hit, and I wish that my family had some of my tuition money now • The key is finding the secrets — whether they be classes, rooftops, or funding sources • Four years went by in a flash • Ruth hugged me once. It made my life • Work like an engineer, party like a frat brother • This place is amazing but it could be so much better • I wish more people were into dating than this stupid effing hook-up scene • I can’t wait to get my diploma • haven’t thought all semester • reinstate the donkey mural on the side of the SciLi • Chicken Finger Friday kept me at Brown • The people are the best part • The name on the degree is the only thing that I found truly invaluable about Brown, but what a name • D— this place is awesome • I used to be frustrated that people at Brown weren’t as “politically/socially active” but I think I’m fine with that now • “Don’t ever look back, don’t ever look back.” • There is a sad lack of school spirit but most know it and accept it as normal • Brown is the most amazing thing that could have happened to me • The general atmosphere hasn’t changed but the weather’s gotten worse • I learned that I can question anything and I can dare to do anything as long as I think I can • Not everyone is looking to hook up with you so don’t go into it with that mind set • Why couldn’t my Brown degree get me a job? • It has been an amazing 4 years. • Time’s up

class of 2011 by the numbers Libraries

data from dining services, health services and the university library

Health services

Total number of items checked out by the class of 2011:

90,035 Mean number of items checked out by each student: Median: 35.5 Mode: 2

56

Number of students who checked out 100+ items: 258 Number of those who checked out 400+ items: 8 Number of students who checked out 10 or fewer items: 330 Number of those who checked out zero: 20 Most checked out by a student: 962 Items not returned as of May 19: 3,645 Number of students with items not returned as of May 19: 647

16,172 office visits 2,120 flu shots 9,716 lab tests 828 X-rays

Dining SERVICES 37,000 cups of coffee at the Blue Room 22,000 iced coffees at the Blue Room 100,500 slices of pizza at the Gate 49,300 spicy chicken sandwiches at Jo’s