Friday, October 8th, 2021

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2021

VOLUME CLVI, ISSUE XXIV

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UNIVERSITY NEWS

‘Missing middle’: recruiting underrepresented middle-income students Powell, Locke discuss barriers to middleincome students in admissions process WILL KUBZANSKY SENIOR STAFF WRITER Provost Richard Locke P’18 found himself in a familiar conversation with a middle-income family last month. A student at a public magnet school in Boston and his mom, a social worker, told him that they weren’t considering applying to the University because of the price tag.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had conversations with people who are in this bracket,” Locke said. “And I’ll explain, ‘No, you should actually apply to us as opposed to whatever your flagship state school is, because your deal might be better here.’”

According to Locke, this repeated conversation reflects a broader problem inthe admission process. Dean of Admission Logan Powell agrees: The University struggles to attract, admit and enroll middle-income applicants compared to students in both high-income and low-income brackets. The absolute number of middle- and moderate-income applicants, accepted students and enrolled students, Locke said, is lower than any other income bracket.

Now, the University is looking to fill the gap.

Defining the missing middle A family making the United States median income, $67,521 in 2020, would almost certainly qualify for scholarships and grants that cover nearly the full cost of attending the University, Powell said.

Even families making up to $100,000 likely wouldn’t pay out of pocket either.

That’s not what Powell defines as middle-income (the Office of Admission uses the term moderate-income).

Instead, the University defines moderate-income students as those whose reported income and assets qualify them for some aid, but not enough to cover the full cost of attending the University, with family contributions ranging from roughly $10,000 to $30,000. How family contribution correlates to income varies, Powell said: Some wealthy families report no income, but their assets, such as stock holdings, allow them to pay full price, while other families that report “reasonable” incomes still receive aid.

The University doesn’t share data on income distribution among students.

But according to Locke, data from Landscape — a College Board tool created to contextualize applicants’ neighborhoods and high schools — shows a gap in the middle-income group compared to every other income bracket.

Outside evidence also suggests that the country’s wealthiest students are

over-represented at the University: A 2017 analysis co-authored by John Friedman, a professor of economics at the University, showed that 19% of students in the University’s class of 2013 came from families making roughly $630,000 or more a year.

And 31% of the class of 2025 comes from private schools — which just seven percent of American students attend.

From 2015 to 2019, the University enrolled 35 students from the Dalton School in New York, where tuition is $55,210 and 21% of students receive aid; they enrolled another 35 over the same timeframe from Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, where tuition is $42,600 and 20% of students receive aid.

Existing pipelines for low-income students, such as QuestBridge and the expectation that the University will cover nearly the full price of attendance, have steadily increased the number of students from that income bracket attending the University, Powell said.

But moderate-income students, Powell said, are harder to attract: If they think they can’t afford the cost of attendance, they might not apply at all. With fewer middle-income applicants, fewer middle-income students are admitted, according to Locke. And once admitted, he added, they enroll at a lower rate because they find better offers — usually from schools offering merit aid, or from flagship state universities offering in-state tuition.

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“Those students might be able to get a full ride at a Boston University or a Northeastern,” schools that offer merit-based aid, said Natasha Warikoo ’95, a sociology professor at Tufts University who researches racial and ethnic inequality in education.

Making sure that the student body is representative of the country, and by extension its socioeconomic diversity, matters, Locke said. The University wants students to learn from each other,

a goal limited by the disproportionate representation of high- and low-income students on campus.

“Students from moderate-income backgrounds are a large portion of America,” Powell added. “Their perspectives are really valuable here.”

According to Locke, other Ivy League provosts face a similar problem. Friedman’s research shows that

SEE APPLICANTS PAGE 3

UNIVERSITY NEWS

UNIVERSITY NEWS

Students call for end to legacy admissions

Students navigate RISD course cross-registration

National #LeaveYourLegacy initiative calls for donation boycott

Students describe schedule, communication, financial concerns

BY KATE DARIO SENIOR STAFF WRITER Students for Educational Equity is leading a campaign demanding that the University stop considering legacy status as a factor in the admissions process. The #LeaveYourLegacy initiative is part of a broader national effort led by EdMobilizer, an education nonprofit founded by Viet Andy Nguyen ’17 that advocates for first-generation, low-income and undocumented students.

SEE launched its campaign at Brown with a text and email banking meeting Sept. 28.

The national initiative aims to eliminate legacy preference through a donation boycott. EdMobilizer provides interested students and alums an email template addressed to Uni-

BY CANQI LI STAFF WRITER

MINDY JI / HERALD

versity leaders, including President Christina Paxson P’19, Dean of the College Rashid Zia ’01, Dean of Admission Logan Powell and members of the Corporation.

With various subject lines, including “Supporting Marginalized Students,” the templates state that the sender is a current student or alum and is voicing their support for the

campaign. “Legacy admissions preferences are an antiquated practice that benefits students that are more likely to be white, affluent and well-resourced. Until this is rectified, I will be refusing to donate in the future and will be organizing my friends and classmates as well,” it continues.

This work comes after the EdMobi-

Students at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design have historically been able to register for certain courses at the other school as part of a long-standing agreement between the two universities established in 1900. Still, barriers like schedule differences among classes at the two universities, difficulties finding courses and challenges communicating with professors have posed challenges for Brown students hoping to take RISD courses. The Herald spoke with students and administrators at Brown and RISD regarding the cross-registration process and the challenges some students have encountered.

“The anecdote that I have heard is

that in the early 1900s the president of Brown University was having lunch with the president of the Rhode Island School of Design on College Hill. Over lunch they crafted the idea of cross-registration and wrote an agreement on a napkin!” Michele Zager, assistant director and academic advisor of the Brown/ RISD Dual Degree Program, wrote in an email to The Herald. Despite the lengthy history of this agreement, some students have encountered difficulties in scheduling and registration with RISD courses, which have been amplified by the challenges of the pandemic.

Anne Wang ’24, who is currently taking a course through RISD, said that she was confused about the cross-registration process at the start of the fall semester.

“I wanted to take a RISD course (during) my time at Brown, because it’s so close, and they’re so collaborative.

I was just really confused about where the process began, because I feel that there is not a lot of guidance on where

SEE LEGACY PAGE 4

Metro

Metro

Commentary

RI signs legislation to compensate the wrongfully convicted.

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Johnson Brothers employees demand livable wages and comprehensive benefits.

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Rauschenbach ’23: Brown must respect its dining hall workers.

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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2021

METRO

New R.I. legislation provides compensation for wrongfully convicted Governor McKee signs bill, allows exonerees to petition for damages, compensation

BY ISHIITA GUPTA STAFF WRITER Less than a month ago, Rhode Island was one of only 14 states in the country that did not have laws to compensate wrongfully convicted prisoners. But on Sept. 16, Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee signed a bill that will provide compensation for exonerees when their innocence comes to light.

Under the bill, exonerees are entitled to petition the Rhode Island Superior Court for a $50,000 payment for each year spent in prison, or for $137 per day if they were incarcerated for less than a year. The bill also allows claimants to seek damage compensations for attorney fees, housing, transportation, subsistence, reintegrative services and mental and physical health care costs.

“It is hard to imagine the anger and suffering that one must face when wrongfully imprisoned,” McKee said in a Sept. 17 press release . “Wrongful imprisonment is an injustice, and as a state, we owe these individuals the compensation that they deserve. Although it can never give them back the time that they lost, we hope that it can help them to get back on the track to a successful life.”

The bill was spearheaded by State Representative Patricia A. Serpa, D-West Warwick, Warwick and Coventry.

Hearing about the experiences of an exoneree provided Serpa’s inspiration for shaping and passing the bill, she said. “Scott Hornoff contacted me four years ago. He was a Rhode Island man who was convicted for a crime that he did not commit in Warwick,” Serpa said.

“He spent six and a half years in prison for it anyway and was freed when the man who actually committed the murder came forward.” Hornoff was a constituent of Serpa’s district at the time and galvanized her to take up this cause.

“Scott introduced me to some people in the (New England) Innocence Project,” Serpa said. “We fashioned some legislation and modeled it after some in other states that offer compensation to people who have spent time in prison and (have been) wrongly convicted.”

In an email to The Herald Hornoff credited Serpa and Radha Natarajan, executive director at the New England Innocence Project, for their “tireless efforts” pushing the bill through.

“The New England Innocence Project testified in favor of the legislation over the last several legislative sessions and remained in close contact with the champion of this legislation, Representative Patricia Serpa, as well as the inspiration for it, Exoneree Scott Hornoff,” Natajaran wrote in an email to The Herald.

The new legislation has been passed unanimously by the R.I. House of Representatives for three years in a row, but was bottlenecked on the floor of the Senate until this year.

“I think the Senate had some concern that it might cause financial hardship to the state, … (that) the floodgates would open and there would be a number of people wanting to be compensated for the time that they’ve lost,” Serpa said.

The new legislation hopes to help exonerees re-enter society, but the effects of its passage are yet to be seen.

“The compensation statute is only as good as its accessibility to people for whom it was intended. In some states, the existence of a compensation law has been undermined by the difficult process it takes to qualify and access the funding,” wrote Natarajan. “From experiences in other jurisdictions, we hope that this process in Rhode Island … does not lead to further trauma by requiring exonerees to re-litigate their innocence.”

Hornoff believes the bill still has room for improvement, like amending it so that crucial assistance to exonorees will be provided by the Rhode Island Department of Health and Human Services rather than the prison’s probation and parole department and increasing the payout to exonorees to better reflect today’s cost of living. “But I’m unsure when that will be possible,” he wrote.

Additionally, Hornoff said that the Sen-

COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

“It is hard to imagine the anger and suffering that one must face when wrongfully imprisoned,” Governor McKee said after signing the bill.

ate amended the bill with “wording that will bar exonerees who had ineffective assistance of counsel at trial.”

“They should not have added that amendment,” he said.

Serpa hopes that the clarity of the legislation will allow exonerees to receive their compensation easily once they’re released from prison — and that since the process of exoneration in Rhode Island is thorough, those who are released from jail should have little difficulty with their petition.

In certain cases — including Hornoff’s — it may cost R.I. taxpayers more to keep the wrongfully convicted in the prison system than it would to pay the

compensation entitled to them under the new bill, according to Serpa. Hornoff was one of a few cases in the state so far who have qualified for compensation under the new bill.

Serpa believes that compensation is the least that the state can do. For her, justice is due to any person who was wrongfully convicted, imprisoned, then released into the state with just “a brown paper bag with (their) belongings, no job training, no healthcare.”

It took multiple legislative sessions for the bill to finally make it to McKee’s desk. “I was not going to throw down the gauntlet and concede defeat,” Serpa said.

“It’s never too late to do the right thing.”

METRO

Local workers seek contract with beverage distributor Johnson Brothers After unioninizng, workers advocate for improved wages, working conditions

BY JACK WALKER UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR In pursuit of a contract with Johnson Brothers Rhode Island, a local beverage distribution branch, distribution workers and delivery drivers across the state spent the hot summer months picketing outside factories and businesses using the company. Together, the workers pursued a contract that would provide increased wages, better work conditions and other benefits aligned with industry standards. Yet even as this past September came to a close, some protest organizers were worried about the lack of progress made, stating that the company had by and large overlooked their demands.

In September 2020, JBRI delivery drivers unanimously voted to unionize with Teamsters Local 251, a local labor rights organization that “represents over 6,300 workers in a wide variety of industries throughout Rhode Island and parts of southern Massachusetts,” according to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters website.

“From that point on, we began to negotiate the first-time collective bargaining agreement,” said Matt Maini, Teamsters’ business agent representative for beverage parcel and construction divisions.

The main goal of the union’s bargaining since its inception has been a contract encompassing improvements to JBRI employees current benefits and

working conditions.

“Union workers, ... when they work under a contract, tend to be more productive workers (and) tend to be longterm committed to their companies,” Maini explained. “So we’re hoping that we can give these workers dignity or respect on the job, which is a union contract.”

Specific contract demands include a procedure for grievance arbitration within the company, vacation and sick time, increased wages, affordable health care and a pension for employees, who, Maini added , generally work between 12 and 15 hours per day.

But despite solidarity among JBRI workers in pursuit of a contract, Maini stated that JBRI was not receptive to the union’s demands.

“We were not able to come to terms or get an agreement because (JBRI) had no intentions of ever signing a contract with the union,” Maini explained. JBRI proposed a five-cent hourly wage increase to their normal raises and “rejected improvements to healthcare coverage and retirement security,” according to the Teamsters Local 251 website.

As a result, on May 26, 2021, workers affiliated with the union walked off of the job in a work stoppage, refusing to return to their positions until the company would participate in contract negotiations according to the workers’ needs.

According to Maini, JBRI workers currently receive an average pay of $15 per hour, which he said is significantly lower than similar companies in the state whose starting rate is near $23 an hour. In addition, workers pay up to $20,300 annually as a healthcare deductible for their families, which takes

away a significant portion of their earnings and further necessitates company support in increasing wages and providing accessible healthcare, Maini said.

The union is “hoping that they can have affordable health care because healthcare is a right, it’s not a privilege,” Maini added.

Steve Brantner, Johnson Brothers’ communications director, wrote in an email to The Herald that the company does not comment on active negotiations.

“Basically, we want (JBRI) to get to industry standards when it comes to everything,” Charles Reid, a delivery driver for JBRI, told The Herald during an Aug. 29 protest at a Smithfield, Rhode Island restaurant using JBRI as a drink distributor. “We’re tired of not having good healthcare, bad working conditions, … we just want industry standards. That’s all we want.”

Along with several other JBRI delivery drivers, Reid has gone to businesses throughout Rhode Island to picket their usage of the beverage distributor and hand out flyers outlining their grievances with JBRI. “We’re going around to let people know what JBRI actually does to people who work for them,” Reid explained.

Historically, this has included not supporting the needs of delivery drivers and hiring “scabs,” new delivery drivers who are typically from out of state and not members of the Teamsters Local 251 union, Reid explained. “We just basically inform the public about that.”

“We go to stores who take deliveries and accept deliveries and ... remind their customers that this store is aiding and helping a corporation who is not willing to sit down and discuss affordable health care or issues for workers,”

Maini noted.

As of Sept. 18, the union had gone to 239 businesses across the state that use JBRI as a distributor, where they protested outside and attempted to discuss the distributor’s treatment of its workers with business owners. Pickets had also followed scab drivers to delivery sites and picketed there, Maini added.

According to Maini, small businesses tend to be receptive to the workers’ protesting and demands, whereas larger companies and chain stores tend to be less so.

“We remain committed to bargaining in good faith with Teamsters Local 251 and to successfully negotiate a contract,” Brantner wrote. “We also remain committed to providing fair and competitive wages and benefits­— and continuing to make our company a great place to work with strong family values,” Brantner added, “just as we have for the past 34 years in Rhode Island.”

According to Maini, as of September, there has been little progress on

CLAIRE LIU / HERALD

securing a satisfactory contract for JBRI workers. “The company met with us” in mid-September, and there is “still no movement. The company is basically just going through the motions” Maini said. “Surface bargaining, bargaining in bad faith … basically meeting just to meet, but they’re not actually doing anything.”

Spending so much effort protesting for the needs of delivery drivers “is frustrating, but nothing worth it comes easy,” Reid said. “You have to work for what you want and fight for what you believe in. And we believe in this wholeheartedly.”

“We believe that every worker should be treated fairly,” Reid added.

“We believe that fair wages, fair healthcare is very important in the workplace, fair working conditions, and that’s what we’re out here fighting for and will continue to fight for until this is over.”

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2021

APPLICANTS FROM PAGE 1 qualified middle-income students are historically less likely to attend “Ivyplus” institutions than their low- and high-income peers.

“It’s very important that everybody has a fair shot, and feels like they have a fair shot,” Friedman said.

Finding the missing middle The problem, Powell said, begins at the outset of their application process when “highly qualified” middle-income students just aren’t applying as often as their peers from other income brackets.

To remedy this, the Office of Admission has created “heat maps” indicating where most of the University’s current middle-income students apply from. That data is overlaid with where middle-income students live across the country. The goal, Powell explained, is to figure out where more prospective applicants may live — both from the areas that provide applicants to the University and the areas that rarely do.

The maps, which go down to the ZIP code and individual school level, show that most of the University’s middle-income students come from the same places as most of its other applicants: the Boston-to-D.C. corridor, hubs in the Midwest and Sun Belt and up and down the Pacific coast.

And they also show areas from which the University receives few applicants, but where high numbers of qualified moderate-income students reside, such as Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin. The maps, when taken together, may indicate regions where the University wants to strenghten its efforts, Powell said.

The Office of Admission has also begun preliminary conversations with research groups to help them identify potential moderate-income applicants, Powell said.

All of these efforts to locate students serve to spread a message: The University is an attractive and affordable option for middle-income families who might have otherwise ruled out Brown and the possibility of affording it. To do that, it needs to improve its physical and virtual presence among students, parents and counselors in those targeted regions, Powell said, in addition to asking schools to share

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information about the University and its aid packages.

“We need to get out there and communicate to these middle-income communities that you can come to Brown,” Locke said. “We never had good information about our financial aid packages.”

When they apply, middle-income applicants are equally competitive as the rest of the pool, Locke said — despite the fact that they’re accepted at a lower rate.

But to make sure that middle-income students who are accepted end up matriculating, Powell and Locke stressed the importance of improving the University’s aid packages.

Both noted the progress of the last decade — the implementation of the Brown Promise, which eliminated loans from the University’s aid packages, as well as a new method of calculating a family’s “asset base” that lessens the extent to which assets such as home equity factor into students’ financial aid calculations.

“The last thing we want is for a student to turn us down because they feel like they can’t afford it, or because they’ve gotten a more generous needbased financial aid offer at another institution,” Powell said.

As of 2021, the University listed the average net family contribution for students receiving scholarship and grant awards at $28,000; at Harvard, the average parent contribution is $12,000.

An institution has “a certain amount of financial aid” to allocate to students, Warikoo said. “Unless you can increase that, and your competitors are using more financial aid to attract those high-achieving students, it’s hard to say what would solve the problem.”

The BrownTogether campaign, which includes an effort to increase the endowment for financial aid, will help fund more competitive aid packages, Locke said, as has the University’s middle/moderate family income financial aid initiative. But he admitted that aid can still improve — and that the financial deficits forced upon the University by the COVID-19 pandemic have only added to the challenge.

“We’re working on it,” he said.

“We really are focused on trying to

strengthen our financial aid budget.

It just takes time.”

The University has also made efforts to consider how to bolster equity in admission: In fall 2019, the University convened an ad-hoc committee following the “Varsity Blues” admission scandal to evaluate how to strengthen Brown’s own admission policies to avoid a similar outcome and increase socioeconomic diversity on College Hill. The first part of the committee’s work focused on ensuring that a similar scandal couldn’t occur at the University — but another focused on making sure the University was accessible to students from all economic backgrounds.

That group’s work concluded in March 2020, Locke said. Its “number one” recommendation to President Christina Paxson P’19 was that the University offer more financial aid.

But the University never publicly released the committee’s full report of recommendations, as was the original plan when the committee was convened. According to Senior Vice President for Communications Cass Cliatt, the changing conditions throughout 2020 led to a decision to only use the recommendations to internally “inform strategies and planning for admissions in the months and years ahead.”

“The University’s executive leadership reached the decision that releasing the work of the committee, after all that time, might not align with the current realities and lived experiences of our students,” she wrote in an email to The Herald.

Filling the missing middle in other ways Increased financial aid funding and communication might not be the only solutions to filling in the missing middle, according to outside experts.

Friedman noted that the University can only control one aspect of this process: the students to whom it offers admission.

“One of the most direct ways to change these issues is to change who we admit,” Friedman said.

The problem, Warikoo added, is systemic. Institutions like the University, she said, were designed for “elites” — and when it decided to ex-

pand opportunity, it saw the world in “black-and-white.”

“If you’re poor, (they’re) going to give you a full ride,” she said. “But most people in the country are neither poor nor rich. They’re in the middle, by definition. There was less attention to that middle ground.”

“Brown’s efforts began with a focus on the families with the greatest financial need and have expanded since then,” Powell responded in an email to The Herald, citing the office’s need-blind financial aid policy, its commitment to enrolling more Pell Grant-eligible students and the Brown Promise.

Universities also have a “delicate calculus” between their commitment to financial aid and hitting revenue benchmarks, said Adam Rabinowitz MPA’16, communications manager for the American Talent Initiative, an organization that focuses on expanding access to higher education for lower-income students.

“If you are bringing in more and more low-income students, you need to account for that elsewhere,” he said. That may result in less aid for middle-income students — and more students who pay full price.

To avoid that fate, Warikoo said, universities should engage in “creative thinking.”

“Do we need all the fancy facilities we have?” she said. “Do we need to be spending all this money on labs, or can we move some of this money over to financial aid?”

The University’s report on financial sustainability, released last week, made suggestions in that vein, calling for cuts to marginal expenses that it said would save millions .

One “way out,” Warikoo added, is by expanding enrollment, allowing more students of all financial backgrounds to be accepted.

But Locke said that a sizable expansion of the student body is likely off the table, citing both the intimate “look and feel” of the University as well as balancing graduate and undergraduate populations.

Still, the financial sustainability report — which Locke spearheaded — called for the expansion of the student body by 5% to 10% through “careful enrollment management” and more

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students taking part in study away and experiential learning programs in order to accommodate a larger student body.

Large-scale federal interventions, such as increasing Pell Grants or wiping out student loan debt, would also make a serious impact in extending access to elite universities, Rabinowitz said.

“I think we’re at a pivotal moment,” Locke said. “Major research universities are being called upon by our society to connect the knowledge we generate to the big issues of our time — and to enhance accessibility of higher education.”

That, he said, looks like large-scale investment in public universities at a broader level and expanding access to higher education to new communities. It also means considering the University’s role locally, such as how it interacts with community colleges and public schools in the Providence area.

Impacts of filling the missing middle Assuming the University holds its student body at a relatively constant size, Warikoo said that admitting more middle-income students would come at the expense of other applicants.

“Of course it’s a zero-sum game,” she said. “There’s a certain number of spots.”

But Locke pushed back against that characterization. “I think that’s a false framing,” he said of the idea that more middle-income students would mean fewer students from other income backgrounds. “We really accept the best students from all income brackets.”

Rabinowitz pointed out that admitting more students on financial aid would require more financial resources for students of all income brackets: To him, expanding income diversity on campus means “expanding the tent.”

The University, Powell emphasized, looks at applicants one at a time.

“When we conduct our review, we’re not comparing one student to another,” he said. “It’s not ever a situation where two applications are on the table. We are not making decisions solely on the basis of socioeconomic background.

That’s a commitment we’ve had for a long time.”

“How do we get the best and brightest to apply and be in our pool?” Locke added. “That’s who we accept.”

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LEGACY FROM PAGE 1 lizer’s 2018 #FullDisclosure campaign, which demanded more transparency from universities about how much weight legacy status has in admission.

That spring, the undergraduate student body voted in favor of a referendum asking that the University disclose all information and data about the role legacy status plays in admissions, The Herald previously reported.

SEE shared various infographics on their social media pages supporting their position, citing research from Harvard and the Century Foundation.

According to these posts, legacy admission does not lead to greater alumni donations or more robust financial aid funding at elite universities, legacies are overwhelmingly white and wealthy and are 3.13 times more likely to be accepted than non-legacies.

University Spokesperson Brian Clark wrote in an email to The Herald that 10 percent of the class of 2025 are children of Brown alums. He added that 15 percent are first-generation students, and 48 percent are students of color.

For SEE members involved in this effort, ending legacy preference in the admission process is a crucial step in making the University a more equitable and accessible place.

Zoe Fuad ’22.5, SEE co-president, sees legacy admissions as a continuation of the University’s discriminatory past. “Brown has always been a predominantly white, wealthy institution from its very inception ... and as we try to sort of move away from that model of education, and as we try to diversify, it’s clearly inequitable to be giving preference to children of the alumni who come from those generations,” she said. “We’re not going to dismantle inequity if we keep giving preference to the descendants of those who benefited from inequity in the first place.”

SEE member Luka Callicotte ’23 said that legacy preference perpetuates racism. “Point blank, legacy admissions is a structure of white supremacy, and it continues white hegemony in the Brown community,” they said.

Other students not involved with

SEE shared their enthusiasm for the campaign and agreed that legacy preference is unfair.

Carlos Tejada ’22, co-president of the Afro-Latinx Alliance, hopes that stopping the consideration of legacy status in the admission process will “level the playing field” and allow for more students of diverse backgrounds to attend the University. But he said he suspected the strength of the administration’s resolve in continuing to consider legacy status stems from the financial potential of legacy families as donors.

“So when thinking of it as what’s going to make you more money, is it going to be the rich legacies or the poor Black kids?” he asked. “So we see that (the University) only really cares about maintaining the business before maintaining the education system.”

Some legacy students themselves voiced their support for eliminating the practice.

“There’s no reason why the students that are qualified but don’t have parental connections here shouldn’t get in. I think that that kind of undermines the promise of a meritocracy,” Peter Zubiago ’22 said. He added that, although his father attended the University, he didn’t think his legacy status impacted his admission decision significantly because his family has never donated to the University.

Nell Salzman ’22 supports the campaign as she believes it promotes diversity and “feels weird” about being a legacy herself. She shared that last weekend, when her parents came to visit, they discussed the effort. “We just talked about how strange it feels that this is part of college admissions and how wrong it is,” she said. “People should be judged for other things and looked at holistically instead of based on what their parents did.”

Other stakeholders on campus support maintaining the practice and counter the notion that legacy admissions makes Brown a less accessible place.

Powell said that recruiting more first-generation and low-income students does not contradict taking legacy status into consideration. “This is not zero-sum,” he said. “Any policy that

Brown University has regarding legacy applicants has nothing to do with our policies regarding the admission and recruitment of first-gen and low-income students.”

He explained that continuing legacy admission maintains connections with alums. “We want to keep that alumni relationship strong, while continuing to emphasize that we are an office of admission that focuses on academic excellence and diversity of perspective.

But those two things don’t need to be mutually exclusive,” he said. “It’s not so much what we have to lose — we are always focused on ways we can continue to gain.”

A University response sent in reply to a message in support of the SEE campaign that was shared with The Herald echoed this point. “The consideration of legacy status is a very, very small consideration compared to other attributes, and it’s important to note that any trade-off in admission is actually not between first-gen and low-income applicants vs. legacy applicants. Rather, it’s between equally-well-qualified applicants (often from the same high school) whose parent went to Brown versus those whose parent attended another highly selective university,” according to the message.

“In these cases, we feel it’s appropriate to tilt toward the applicant whose parent went to Brown. Legacy applicants are far more likely than children whose parents went to other Ivies and selective schools to accept Brown offers of admission, and it builds strength in the alumni community and alumni loyalty,” it continues. “One of the several clear and direct benefits of this loyalty is the robust fundraising for financial aid that unquestionably benefits low- and moderate-income students.”

Betty Vaughan P’23 described herself as “the opposite of a legacy parent” and said she supports legacy admission because that money can help low-income families like her own. “The money that you get from legacy parents is going to help you to have students go to school on scholarship, and if I was in charge, I would make sure that money

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2021

was funneled to students who are struggling with paying their bill,” she said.

Fuad rebuked this claim, saying that multiple studies have disproved the notion that legacy admissions leads to increased fundraising for financial aid.

Powell pushed back against the popular notion that many legacies are less academically qualified than their non-legacy peers. “We don’t admit students who aren’t academically qualified, and certainly with legacy applicants, their academic credentials are, by and large, really stellar,” he said.

SEE contradicts this notion, sharing information from a 2020 Duke University analysis of legacies and athletes at Harvard, claiming that 75 percent of white legacies and athletes would not have gotten in without legacy preference.

Both Powell and Fuad said that the Admission Office does not have the power to unilaterally decide how legacy status factors into admission decisions.

“There are some larger institutional voices and constituencies who are involved in this dialogue. It’s not just an admission issue,” Powell said. “I think it’s important to point out that, number one, I, single handedly, don’t make the decision about what our legacy policy should be. It’s a conversation that’s informed by other conversations with senior leaders at the University.”

Fuad said that one of the primary challenges of the campaign right now is determining who in University leadership is capable of changing this policy and how it functions. She said that Powell is “clearly devoted to equity and access” but that the issue rests in how much power the Admission Office has in changing this policy.

She said that there is “a lot of obscurity” around Brown’s admissions policies, including the Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan’s goal to increase enrollment of underrepresented students by 50% and in the role of legacy in admission. She noted that while there is data from other elite universities depicting the advantage granted by legacy, the University has not disclosed this data.

“Though true that first generation students made up 15% of the Class of

CA L E N DA R

2025, I think it’s highly likely that the number of first-generation students that applied is much higher than the number of legacy students. In other words, for Brown to claim real equity, it needs to release the acceptance rates for legacy students versus those that are not. For reference, legacy students make up around 14 percent of Harvard’s undergraduate body, which equated to a 34 percent acceptance rate (5x higher than their non-legacy acceptance rate),” Fuad wrote in a follow-up email to The Herald.

Powell said he has not been in contact with any representative from SEE but that he would “welcome a dialogue with them.”

SEE hopes to increase attention for the #LeaveYourLegacy campaign on campus and among alums, Fuad said. She added that they aim to garner endorsements from affinity and student groups, student government organizations like the Undergraduate Council of Students and prominent donors.

Fuad said she hopes that this campaign will make Brown think more critically about its admissions process. For her, changing university admissions is “one of the most obvious ways of expanding opportunity and equity and dismantling these elitist hierarchies.”

-Additional reporting from Will Kubzansky

COVID -19 AT BROWN LAST 7 DAYS*

OCTOBER Completed Tests

People Tested

S

M

Tu

W

Th

F

S

15,091

11,419

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Confirmed Positives

Positivity Rates

9

0.1 %

10

11

12

13

14

15

16 SINCE AUGUST 24, 2020*

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

Completed Tests

People Tested

541,742

17,984

Total Cases

Prevalence

794

4.4 %

*AS OF OCT 7.

post-

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2021

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

OCT 8 — VOL 28 — ISSUE 3

FEATURE

5

See Full Issue: ISSUU.COM/POSTMAGAZINEBDH

NARRATIVE

To the Bride to be a look into my sister’s future through our pasts

by Marin Warshay I’m in the room with her. I know my mom is there too, but I can’t say for sure who else is. My mom and I are fluttering around my sister like the little birds that talk to Cinderella before the ball. I’m not sure what this room is, what it looks like, or if it’s even a room at all. But it doesn’t matter, because all eyes are on her today.

Gabrielle. No one calls her that. Only some greeting cards address her with this formality. But I know her thank-you notes will be signed Gabby, in her handwriting that I’ve always coveted. Letters stout and even, bubbly and curved; their shape suits her so well. She’s organized and driven as hell, but always in her own style...

ARTS & CULTURE

An ode to Zeta, Delta, and Xi

Walking a love letter

discovering a home in more than greek letters

by Victoria Yin illustrated by Lucid Clairvoyant

As I descend into the basement, familiar colorful murals surround me. In them, familiar Greek letters make appearances while cartoon Wile E. Coyotes and Road Runners eat spaghetti, re-enact the birth of Venus, and face each other as foosball figurines. I reach the bottom and begin making my way through the rooms. The game room smells like an old, decrepit basement, the pool and foosball tables look lonely, and the ancient black couch slouches into itself. The kitchen has spots on the floor. For nearly two years, these sacred spaces have been abandoned. Moisture crept in and pooled, dust settled into corners, and scarcely a breeze blew through the building.

Growing up, the only Greek letters I knew were symbols used in math class: Delta meant change of a quantity; theta represented the angle of a triangle; and alpha and beta were placeholder variables. I never thought much of it. During those years of my life, I was more concerned with the calamity that was questioning my identity. At the outset, I started wearing slacks and button-downs, men’s novelty t-shirts and oversized jackets. I cut all of my hair off. The internal joy I felt in this new appearance was overshadowed by the embarrassment I felt at school, where I was hyper-aware of the feminine role I refused to play...

by Lily Seltz It’s February in New York, junior year of high school, lunchtime. Outside it’s frigid and grey, and the locker hallway is warm, bustling, cacophonous. Lila looks over at me: “Want to take a lap?”

I say yes, so we put our backpacks down, grab our coats, and head outside. We walk the perimeter of the building: two short blocks and two long avenues, a quarter of a mile in all. And when we get back to the entrance we keep going, or maybe we turn around and walk the other way. As we go, we gossip, we give advice, we ask each other about our days, we talk through ideas for the English paper, giggle, ruminate, seethe.

We’re not there for the scenery. The walls of our high school are stacks of red brick, and we know them like we know our times tables. There’s no real reason to be out there, in the cold, moving briskly when we could be standing still. But we’ve done this a dozen times before and at this point it’s just what we do. It’s what everyone does...

“Oh no. I’m jiving. Oh no!”

LIFESTYLE “One time I was eating granola with oat milk, and I had to stop and think, ‘Wait, am I horse?’”

The Ultimate Playlist Roundup

by Olivia Cohen

Soups 1. Primordial 2. The Great American Melting Pot

7. Stone Soup

3. Panera Bread Bowl

8. Swimming pool

4. Bubble bath

9. Cereal

5. Tomato basil

post–

6. Maple syrup soup — the only way to eat pancakes

Want to be involved?

Email: olivia_howe@brown.edu!

10. Soy Vanilla Latte a.k.a Three Bean Soup

Picture this: You are walking back from a friend's apartment late at night. You're feeling fine; you're a little tired, but you had a nice time. You decide to listen to music for a few minutes as you make your way back to your dorm. You press shuffle on your favorite songs on Spotify (or Apple Music, if you're a barbarian), and the first song that comes on is "Ivy" by Frank Ocean. Before you know it, you're ugly crying. You have to stop and sit down on a bench to collect yourself. Several people stop and ask if you need help. (This is all hypothetical, of course.)

October 8, 2021 5

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | COMMENTARY

6

RISD FROM PAGE 1 to start,” she said.

Wang spent a significant amount of time looking into the process before finally receiving a link with instructions on how to cross-register from a friend’s Meiklejohn Peer Advisor.

Still, Wang noted that, even then, it was hard to actually secure a spot in RISD courses.

“Obviously, RISD prioritizes RISD students first, so a lot of classes already had people registered for it,” Wang said. “A lot of seats were less available.”

In addition, Wang noted that the registration period for the two universities were not entirely synchronized, which was stressful to navigate.

“The first day of classes was a Wednesday, my class met on Thursdays, but during this time period, my form had not been processed yet, so I didn’t know if I was officially registered for the class,” she said.

“I didn’t know (if) I should have attended it or not. I ended up emailing the professor.”

Alison Sherman, registrar at RISD, wrote in an email to The Herald that “since Brown and RISD have different academic calendars, and cross-registration is on a space-available basis, it can be difficult for students to access classes that are in high-demand ... Because RISD’s add/drop deadline for the semester is earlier than Brown’s, Brown students may have to decide on a RISD class before confirming their Brown schedule.”

“The calendar differences also mean that students have to account for additional living costs such as expenses for food when their Brown meal plan is not available,” Zager wrote.

RISD courses are modeled on their own unique instruction style, which differs from Brown’s. “RISD courses often are offered one day a week for up to five hours. This is a significant block of time to have to clear from a student’s Brown sched-

ule,” Lisa Mather, associate registrar for operations management at RISD, wrote in an email to The Herald.

Additionally, “RISD’s spring term does not begin until several weeks into Brown’s spring term,” Mather added. “Although students can and have generally made this work, they are both significant challenges.”

Still, “our office works with the RISD Registrar’s Office to make the process as easy to navigate as possible,” Mather wrote, emphasizing that students should reach out to the RISD registrar if they aim to take a course at the school.

Jia-Chen Jasmin Lin ’24 wrote in an email to The Herald that she inquired about taking a RISD course, but the professor for the course she was interested in explainedthat she would be unable to register because the class was reserved for illustration majors.

Class space and materials limit how many students can enroll in a given class, Zager wrote. In addition, higher-level RISD classes require students to have a background in a subject to keep up with its coursework, Zager noted.

“RISD students take two semesters, a total of six foundation level studios, prior to being able to enroll in major studios. Having the appropriate prior coursework or experience can be a factor in cross-registering,” Zager wrote. “Enrolling in a course is at the discretion of the RISD faculty member.”

These restrictions on cross registration “essentially means that for majors that are saturated, it is virtually impossible for Brown students to enroll or even be added onto the waiting list,” Wang said.

“I feel that the cross-registration system should reserve a limited seat for Brown students, otherwise, it is impossible to get in.”

Octavia Rowe ’24 said that some RISD courses come with additional fees associated with course instruction and materials that go beyond the Brown tuition. For Rowe, who is taking a clay composition class this semester, “the hard part” of taking

AREEZ KHAN / HERALD

Art supply costs pose annother barrier to registration. the course was “finding the money” needed to fulfill these costs.

While, upon her request, Brown covered the nearly $250 cost required for art supplies, Rowe was still required to pay an additional $100 instruction fee out of pocket.

In addition, Wang noted that it took a long time to get a RISD ID, which made it difficult to access buildings on the school’s campus. Wang said that she would like to see “better communication and (a better organization of ) instructions of where to even get started.”

“The Registrar at Brown and at RISD have worked hard to adjust the process for cross-registration over the past year and a half. Prior to the pandemic, the process was not online and involved the student physically getting signatures from multiple offices on a form,” Zager noted.

“The move to the online cross-registration process has really facilitated the ease of getting necessary approvals,” Zager added.

“The Brown and RISD Registrars coordinate closely.”

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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2021

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | COMMENTARY

7

Rauschenbach ’23: Brown must respect BDS workers

BY MATT RAUSCHENBACH OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Long lines might be the hallmark of the student dining experience at Brown. But these lines are a symptom of a deeper crisis: the shocking conditions facing our dining hall workers. As one of the nation’s wealthiest universities, these conditions are unacceptable. Furthermore, for an institution which ostensibly “is fortunate to have a strong community that believes deeply in caring for one another,” Brown’s failure to address the issues plaguing the workers that feed us is hypocritical and exploitative.

This hypocrisy is nothing new. Brown failed to apply the values they say they uphold to their dining staff when I wrote an op-ed on this same topic over a year ago. Though a recent Herald article, titled ‘We’re in desperate need of help,’ brought this topic back into light, that doesn’t mean the problem went away in the meantime.

I am disappointed that the outrageous working conditions have been largely off our radar until now — just as the lines have become long and we, as students, now find ourselves inconvenienced. A dining worker referred to by the pseudonym John in the recent Herald article said “the only time Brown ever listens to us is when the students get involved.” The University should have addressed these issues months ago.

University Hall and Brown Dining Services, are you listening now?

Let me pause here to express how grateful I am to the service workers that Brown employs.

Their tireless efforts make morning trips to the Ratty enjoyable, late-night visits to Jo’s memorable and the now-occasional visits to the Blue Room a core part of one’s time at Brown. Their efforts are even more impressive when consid-

ployees. This drastically reduced the size of the staff working in dining halls, and led to many of the problems we face today — long lines, lack of food options, an overworked and burnt out staff and a frustrated student body.

But this decision also contributed to racial and economic injustice. In April of 2020, after the pandemic forced us off campus, I wrote that “this is not just an issue of how much the Uni-

“Raise wages. Ensure legitimately safe conditions. And, finally, treat service workers with dignity and the respect they deserve.”

ering that they are overworked due to avoidable chronic understaffing.

Director of Dining Programs George Barboza explained that Brown’s difficulties in hiring new dining employees reflect national trends in the service industry. While this might be true, it is also true that at the start of the pandemic Brown decided to lay off many of its subcontracted em-

versity values its workers. Hourly workers on campus are overwhelmingly people of color. A large number of them are members of the Cape Verdean community, which was largely outpriced of the College Hill and Fox Point neighborhoods over the past 60 years. This is an issue of how much the University values racial justice.”

Much has changed over the last 18 months.

We all continue to live amongst a global pandemic. But it’s time for Brown University to affirm its reputation as a socially responsible institution and do the right thing.

The University ought to lay out a plan to provide basic resources to our dining hall workers in order to meet their needs, and communicate this plan transparently. This step would build trust between the University and its hourly employees and establish a safe and healthy environment for employees to work in and students to eat and live in.

Raise wages. Ensure legitimately safe conditions. And, finally, treat service workers with dignity and the respect they deserve. The understaffing problems and infrastructure conditions are embarrassing: Workers should not be forced to clean fryers with coat hangers. The University should take steps to ensure that they have the tools that they need. And they should ensure that the grill that leaks gas in the Ratty is not dangerous to workers and students.

The University should immediately begin to take steps to address these problems before contract negotiations begin next month.

Matt Rauschenbach ’23 can be reached at matthew_rauschenbach@brown.edu.

Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opeds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.

McGough ’23: America needs to reimagine property tax

BY JACKSON MCGOUGH STAFF COLUMNIST

No politician likes to talk about taxes. Some will pepper their platforms with promises to “tax the rich” or “cut corporate taxes,” but few really get into the nitty-gritty details of their ideal tax code.

It makes sense. After all, no one has ever been roused to vote by an accountant talking W-2s, and the average voter can sum up their preferences for tax policy in one word: “low.” It’s not sexy, but we need an in-depth tax talk. A government can only be as progressive as its tax code, and ours is deeply flawed.

One of the most pernicious but pervasive problems is property taxation. Sometimes justified as government-levied rents on land, property taxes make up about 30% of local government revenue nationwide, funding schools, roads and municipal services like police and firefighters. They fund essential government functions, but come with baggage that disproportionately harms low-income communities and cannot be ignored. Property taxes are by their very nature inequitable, harming low-income communities by levying a largely uniform tax on a wide range of income levels within a tax jurisdiction. While a wealthier property owner can shoulder the burden of property tax with little consequence, it makes little sense to levy the same sum on someone living in a property of equal value yet making half the income.

Municipal governments love property taxes.

In fact, they are some of our oldest forms of taxation. They are also easy to administer, thanks to both a real estate market where everything has an assessed value and the fact that property cannot be hidden in an offshore bank account. Moreover, they are fairly stable year-to-year, always producing revenue even when the property changes hands or income and sales tax revenues drop.

Most importantly, local governments have great influence on the property tax base — raise income taxes and people will move, raise sales taxes and people will shop elsewhere, but property taxes are literally tied to the land.

They have their benefits, but property taxes are also widely regarded as regressive, meaning they are levied disproportionately on the lower classes. Since property taxes do not consider the financial background of the property owner, they are almost always levied more steeply against

low-income communities than other taxes. Two identical houses will be charged equal property taxes, regardless of who is living inside of them.

A government that raises its revenue in a regressive way can hardly compensate for the resultant ill-effects, no matter how progressive its social programs.

The regressivity of property taxes also serves to widen the wealth gap and create greater disparities in quality of living between low- and high-income communities. Low-income communities usually favor policies that keep taxes low, so unsurprisingly, their local governments keep levies small. Low revenue means budget cuts, which may be as innocuous as mowing the grass at the public soccer field less often or as harmful

of the development on that parcel is low, so too are the tax levies. Selling parking permits covers the entirety of those low taxes and then some, earning the owner a tidy profit and giving them no reason to develop the parcel into housing or commercial space. Even if an owner would like to build, property taxes can add undue burdens and suppress potential developments. No matter how much income the property generates, the owner is charged based on the market value of the land and the development on it. Therefore, an owner wanting to add housing on their lot will not do so unless there are scores of people waiting to rent. Waiting so long to build housing reduces the risk that property taxes will exceed revenues but drives up housing costs for everyone. Therefore,

“A government that raises its revenue in a regressive way can hardly compensate for the resultant ill-effects, no matter how progressive its social programs.”

as laying off local teachers. Cuts add up over time, making the community less attractive, lowering property values and holding the wealth of the community down. On the flip side, high-income communities tolerate high property taxes, can support high services and therefore retain higher property values. Property taxes thus perpetuate a system in which high-income individuals can live in communities that provide quality services whereas low-income people live in communities that can hardly afford the basics.

Property taxes have even more adverse effects, notably worsening the housing crisis. Since landlords recover from property tax expenses through rent, a tax hike is roughly equivalent to an increase in rent, allowing property-owning landlords to dodge the tax and pass it on to tenants.

Further, property taxes suppress housing supply by discouraging development of underused lots of land. For example, imagine a surface parking lot in an urban neighborhood. Since the value

thanks in part to property taxes, underutilized urban parcels become long-term investments for the wealthy while property values rise and the housing crisis worsens.

Economists broadly agree that property taxes serve a legitimate function — to allocate land efficiently by enforcing a public rent on it — but they are clearly broken in their current form. Changes need to be made to ensure the taxes are less regressive, which will, by extension, begin to alleviate the housing crisis. Implementing these changes, however, will require politicians to get into the weeds of taxation.

Politicians must first take steps to reduce property tax regressivity. Like income taxes, property tax rates should scale upward with the value of the property and with the number of properties the owner has. Major property tax-exempt organizations, like megachurches and our own Brown University, should pay their fair share to offset new property tax exemptions for low-value prop-

erties in low-income neighborhoods.

When it comes to spending property tax revenues equitably, states should start putting a percentage of property tax revenue in shared funds dedicated to redistributing in favor of property-poor jurisdictions. That will alleviate the tension between setting low rates for low-income residents and providing the services they need.

For schools, that means large, wealthy, suburban districts would be sending a portion of their revenues to lower-income rural and urban districts, thereby reducing the tax burden on low-income communities and making schools more equitable across district boundaries.

Another route would be to replace property taxes with a similar mechanism: the land value tax. Rather than taxing both the land and any buildings on it — which the current property tax regime does — a land value tax only taxes the land underneath. For landowners, that means there is no downside to developing a lot and building housing, as it would not raise their levies. In fact, some land value tax proposals suggest taxing the land itself at an exorbitantly high rate, outright forcing owners to build on the land or sell to someone who will. That means more housing, and less tax passed onto renters. Support for this change is widespread: Even conservative economist Milton Friedman called land value taxes “the least bad tax.”

Of course, no solution is perfect, and change requires uprooting centuries-old norms. Americans may hate property taxes, but they hate talking about taxes even more. But the conversation about reconceptualizing the current property tax structure is long overdue, and has critical consequences for low-income communities across America. Most importantly, we need leaders who want to talk about taxation, and who are not afraid to run on unsexy issues. American taxes are just as complicated as what we spend them on, but they do not get even half the attention of flashier issues. Once we start talking about taxes, and our politicians care to run on them, we will get a better system that benefits all.

Jackson McGough ’23 can be reached at jackson_mcgough@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2021

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

8

UNIVERSITY NEWS

Watson Senior Fellows engage students in study groups Practitioner-led groups headed by Tom Perez, Keith Harper, Kakenya Ntaiya

BY VICTOR CHANG STAFF WRITER This fall, students will gather biweekly in the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs to participate in Practitioner-Led Study Groups, where they will spend 90 minutes exploring various topics in-depth with the Watson Institute’s Senior Fellows.

The three study groups are “Leadership and Governance in Challenging Times,” led by former Democratic National Committee Chairman and current Maryland gubernatorial candidate Tom Perez ’83, “Promoting Human Rights in an Increasingly Challenging and Autocratic World,” led by former UN representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council Keith Harper and “Girls’ Education and Gender Equality,” led by nonprofit founder Kakenya Ntaiya.

Started in 2017, these study groups provide around 20 students per group a unique opportunity to engage with leaders who have years of real-world experience in advocacy and policy.

“The goals are to get students really excited about a topic ... and to see how, in a given important topic area, they can affect change in the world,” said Edward Steinfeld, director of the Watson Institute.

Perez echoed a similar sentiment.

“When I was at Brown, I had wonderful professors, and it was a remarkable experience,” Perez said. “At the same time, I didn’t have enough professors who had been in the trenches.” As a result, Perez explained that the goal of his study group is to “bridge that gap between theory and practice and to give people a sense of how we go about problem solving, especially in these challenging times.”

Ntaiya is the founder of Kakenya’s Dream, an organization dedicated to improving educational opportunities for girls in rural Kenya. “I think the biggest takeaway (from my study group) is that it’s not too late to do something you’re interested in,” Ntaiya said. “If you’re really passionate about something, you should really pursue that.”

Outside of holding study groups, Senior Fellows have a variety of other responsibilities, from participating in public events at the Watson Institute to holding office hours. Steinfeld noted that Senior Fellows can also help students network in their fields.

Joshua Neronha ’22 is a student liaison in Ambassador Harper’s study group and will assist Harper with planning the group’s structure and organization.

Neronha participated in former Senator Heidi Heitkamp’s study group in Spring 2020 and said he is excited to be involved in a group again this year.

One of the reasons Neronha enjoyed Heitkamp’s study group was because of her unique world-view. “The perspective we often get from our professors and our peers is not (that of) someone from a large, rural agricultural family in North America,” he said. “I’m from Rhode Island, so hearing about those perspectives is very interesting.” He added that, in the study group, students had the opportunity to hear Heitkamp speak very candidly about current events, like the Democratic primary.

“There are very few times in your life where you can click a link to fill out a Google form and meet some of the most influential people, whether in the field of human rights for Ambassador Harper or national politics for Tom Perez,” Neronha said. “If you’re interested, you should absolutely do this.”

COURTESY OF BROWN UNIVERSITY

Kakenya Ntaiya is the founder of Kakenya’s dream, a nonprofit dedicated to devoping education in rural Kenya.

COURTESY OF BROWN UNIVERSITY

Keith Harper is a former UN representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

COURTESY OF BROWN UNIVERSITY

Tom Perez ’83 is a former Democratic National Committee Chairman and the current Maryland gubernatorial candidate.

PHOTOGRAPHER’S NAME / HERALD

Caption