Get Herald RSSOne evening recently, reading WorldNetDaily.com (home to works by Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter) in an effort to make myself angry about something, I read Ellis Washington, a professor at Savannah State University, ask "How did the eight so-called "Ivy League" schools... go from being training grounds for Christian missionaries and ministers and respected citadels of higher education to what they are now - propaganda factories for every leftist, perverted, radical, tyrannical, failed ideology known to mankind?"
Of course some extreme conservative miscreants, in lamenting a past that never existed, like to implicitly and explicitly remind us that the Ivy League universities were founded as great religious institutions. One need not be an strong student of history to know that such a claim is only marginally correct.
But then I read Washington ask, "Did you know that America's oldest and most venerated colleges and universities like Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth were founded by the Puritans?" and proceed to give a fake history about the demise Puritanism.
Puritanism is something that I know better than most. I am a history concentrator, and I have spent much of my time at Brown studying Puritanism in England and North America.
Puritanism, as I define it, is a broad term for an exceptional and dynamic mind-set and world-view that extended into the political, social, religious, moral, economic and - as relevant to what I wish to demonstrate - educational realms. No other intellectual tradition in the pre-modern and modern world has had such a progressive and revolutionary impact. And our own Baptist - meaning very radical Puritan - Brown University can claim a part of this tradition.
Puritanism roughly traces back to the question in the 16th century of how far to take the English Reformation. Puritans, again roughly, came to mean those who wanted to bring "pure" religion closer to the people. Calvinist predestination theology also demanded constant self-reflection, entailing a heightened moral awareness. Puritanism helped spark the English Revolution and temporarily overthrow monarchy.
This Puritan tradition came to North America and is famously expressed in John Winthrop's City upon a Hill sermon: "We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body."
Things should be starting to sound familiar now.
Brown likes rebellion. Brown likes advocating on behalf of "the people." Brown sure likes community; as our great drinking song reminds me: "I'm a Brown man born, and a Brown man bred, and when I die, I'll be a Brown man dead."
Indeed, Brown does not really have a code of rules; we have the Principles of the Brown Community which sets out the ideals of the way we live, work and behave. And Brown really likes self-reflection, most recently in the notable forms of our Slavery and Justice Report and Task Force on Undergraduate Education.
Brown students live in a constant state of knowing that we are morally "good," but we can constantly become morally "better" - which is both satisfying and frustrating. Indeed, sometimes we can fall into a bit of moral paranoia, like witch hunter Cotton Mather, whenever something has even the slightest potential to threaten the New Curriculum. Still, everything is done with a clear personal conception of what's right and what's wrong.
Continuing with my history primer, Puritan theology became less and less relevant during the 17th century as denominational pluralism and Enlightenment thought expanded.
Nonetheless, this Puritan world-view remained pervasive and was a critical component of sparking the American Revolution. It came as no coincidence, after all, that the American Revolution began in Boston, with Rhode Island (the dumping ground for the most radical Puritans) rebelling like hell even before then.
The anti-hierarchical element of Puritanism also entailed a radical notion of equality. The abolitionist movement and our whole array of modern civil rights movements rightly trace back to this Puritan world-view.
It should thus be no surprise that Brown, with its historical roots in the most Puritan of American Puritan thought, is a 21st century center of progressive thought and tolerance.
Despite my occasional jabs at our Ivy counterparts, I believe that the other Ivies can obviously claim a part of the great American Puritan tradition as well - thus the occasional incorrect stereotyping of us in the collective. I would not dare to make a claim along the lines that we "have history on our side," just as few would dare to claim we have "God on our side."
But history does explain Brown's current political temperament and world-view, and one key is looking at our role in the Puritan past. By no means is Brown today a perversion of our past, or an erasure of our religious roots, or a diversion from the purposes of our founding. Let us not allow others to steal our past and retell it as lies.
Graham Anderson '10 is known for Cotton Mather-style paranoia.
