It's been almost one year since President Ruth Simmons established the University's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice and almost eight months since Brown Alumni Monthly reported on it.
But the national media has just caught on. The Providence Journal was the first major newspaper to cover the story, on March 4, followed by a front-page story in the New York Times March 14.
Reactions to the coverage have revealed a culture clash between the slow-moving, reflective world of academia and the fast-paced, deadline-driven cycle of journalism. At the committee's first event, a Thursday panel featuring five professors, Committee Chair and Professor of American Civilization James Campbell expressed frustration with media coverage of the committee, which he said has focused primarily on the "sexy" issue of reparations.
The committee is embarking on what amounts to a two-year research project on the politically charged issue of the University's - and the nation's - legacy of slavery. It is slated to publish recommendations in the spring of 2006 about how Brown can come to terms with its historical ties to the slave trade.
While acknowledging the committee is "in the position to make an intervention in a national debate," Campbell told The Herald last week that the media will have to wait to find out exactly what that intervention will be. "Part of the reason we're spending the next two years is because we don't know enough - we as individuals and we as a society," he said.
In the wake of the Times story about the committee, news stories and columns appeared last week in the Boston Globe, the Guardian of London, USA Today, the Indianapolis Star, the Anchorage Daily News and dozens of other newspapers. Fox News, the Associated Press, the "Today Show," local television news stations and several conservative radio talk shows also reported on the committee's work.
Professors, students and administrators involved with the committee say they are not surprised by the attention their work has received from the international media, although some say they are disappointed by the tenor of the coverage, which has tended to focus on the hot-button issue of whether the University will pay financial reparations to the descendants of slaves.
At the panel Thursday, tensions between the media and participants came to a boil. At one point during the question and answer session, British journalist Joanna Walters, reporting for the Guardian, became so frustrated with the speakers' negative characterizations of the press that she prefaced her question with a request for mercy.
"It's very easy to blame the media," she told the panel. "But you let the cat out of the bag, and it's a hot issue."
At the event, Campbell voiced particular frustration with the New York Times' story, which ends by quoting Simmons as saying, "If the committee comes back and says, 'Oh it's been lovely and we've learned a lot,' but there's nothing in particular that they think Brown can do or should do, I will be very disappointed."
Campbell told the audience he feared the Times' framing of Simmons' statement has led people to believe that she is pushing the committee toward advocating financial reparations.
"One of the unfortunate conclusions that some have drawn from the oversimplified press coverage that we've had so far is that the committee's conclusions are somehow predetermined and, worse still, that somehow President Simmons is trying to pressure us to reach some conclusion or other," Campbell told The Herald before the event. "I genuinely have not the slightest inkling of what she thinks about the question of slave reparations."
But despite Campbell's criticism of the Times' coverage, he told a group of reporters after the event that the University consciously chose to stonewall news outlets other than the Times until the paper printed its March 14 front-page story.
In an interview with The Herald last week, Campbell, himself a former journalist, said he wasn't surprised at the media's rush to frame the issue around reparations. American society has trouble dealing with complex issues and tends to polarize quickly on matters of race, he said.
"The committee is going to learn about the range of different approaches to questions of historical injustice," Campbell said. "Monetary reparations seem to be the model in which discussions in the United States today are framed, but if you look across the world and you look across time, there are a variety of different ways that societies have attempted to confront legacies of historical injustice and move forward. ... We should learn from those."
A number of news stories, including an Associated Press report distributed around the country, have recalled the reparations-related controversy that erupted at Brown in March 2001, when conservative provocateur David Horowitz placed an anti-reparations advertisement in The Herald. Three days after the ad appeared, The Herald's press run was stolen by student activists, and campus and nationwide discussions on free speech ensued.
Campbell said the Horowitz incident was "truly lamentable" and informed his early interest in the committee.
"One of the things the Horowitz ad suggested to us was that rather than leave this history to lie there and an occasional cinder to burst into flames, that we should take it on and discuss it without fear," he said.
"We now have said to the country that we want to have an open, searching discussion, and we will take seriously the opinions of people across the political spectrum," he said.
Professor of Political Science Darrell West, whose work looks at the intersection of politics and the mass media, said that while the media might oversimplify the issue, coverage of the committee will benefit the University. Both the Boston Globe and USA Today published columns calling Simmons courageous for addressing the issue of slavery.
"It's hard for the media to grasp all of the complexities of the slavery issue 150 years after the fact," West said. "But it's easy to grasp onto reparations as the representation of that issue.
"I think the news coverage has been pretty positive," he added. "I think Brown is getting a lot of credit for tackling this subject."
Seth Magaziner '06, one of three undergraduate members of the committee, was interviewed last week by the "Today Show" and the Boston Globe. He agreed with Campbell that the Times' article is too "narrowly focused," but he said he thinks media coverage generally has been positive.
"I knew from the start that this was important and somewhat unprecedented," Magaziner said. "I thought that the media had become bored with the (reparations issue), so I was a little surprised, but pleasantly surprised overall."
