The University should create a center for the study of slavery-related issues, said faculty on a committee looking into making the study of slavery-related issues more central at Brown in a report recently submitted to the Provost and the President.
The recommendation is the latest in the University's ongoing effort to come to terms with its historic entanglements with slavery, a saga that began five years ago with President Ruth Simmons' nationally scrutinized decision to appoint the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.
That committee spent three years investigating Brown's history, and then issued a 107-page report outlining the University's ties to slavery and recommended that officials take action in response. Then, in February 2007, Brown's highest governing body responded to the report, endorsing 12 ways it could begin to make amends for its historical connection to slavery.
Just more than one year later, a step toward one of those proposals has been completed with the report to Simmons and Provost David Kertzer '69 P'95 P'98 from a committee established to investigate an initiative for teaching and research on slavery and justice.
The committee officially submitted its report on March 5, said Professor of Economics Glenn Loury, chair of the committee - a few months later than the committee had hoped when it began its work a year ago.
The Office of the Provost has not yet made the report public, but it's likely that the report will be released within the next couple of weeks, wrote Vincent Tompkins '85, deputy provost and member of the committee, in an e-mail to The Herald.
Loury said the committee suggested topics of focus for its proposed center, including "the interplay between the history and legacy of slavery" and "questions of justice."
"The center could start with the historical experience of slavery in the Americas and move out from that to do research on broader questions of massive disappearances, society-wide injustice," Loury said.
"In the Slavery and Justice report, slavery and the Atlantic slave trade represented crimes against humanity," said Professor of Africana Studies James Campbell, chair of the Slavery and Justice Committee and a member of the committee Loury chairs.
"Part of the recommendations we made in the original Slavery and Justice report is that any center should have that broad conceptual and comparative perspective," Campbell said.
But he added, "That doesn't reflect a desire to somehow dilute any prospective center's focus on slavery. The reason we're having this discussion is because of what happened in this country, specifically the country's long trafficking of Africans."
Loury said the report recommends the prospective center study the legacies of slavery in contemporary society and named such potential topics as "racial inequality" and "the massive racial disproportion in our prisons."
The report also suggested collaboration with departments like Africana Studies, Urban Studies and Ethnic Studies, Loury said.
"Some of the initiatives would involve new courses," said Associate Professor of Political Science Sharon Krause, another member of the committee.
Krause said the center would also hold conferences and symposiums. Loury said the center would involve faculty and students in research and would bring in outside scholars.
The creation of a center would integrate research and teaching on slavery-related issues into the University's life, Loury said.
"The creation of a new institute or a center was the best way to ensure an institutional presence in an ongoing way into the indefinite future," Loury said. "We recommend in the report that endowment funds be raised to support the basic activities of the center in perpetuity."
Loury said he anticipates fund raising will be necessary for the center's creation and support.
The committee will appear before the Academic Priorities Committee to present its proposal, Loury said. "Anything that happens has to go past (the APC)," he said. The APC, chaired by Kertzer, makes recommendations to Simmons about academic programs.
The APC meeting, which had originally been planned for March 18, was recently postponed, Loury wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. The committee will discuss the report after Simmons has reviewed it, Assistant Provost Shelley Stephenson wrote in an e-mail, adding that the meeting will be held in April at the soonest.
Slow progress on fund
A commitment to endow a $10- million Fund for the Education of the Children of Providence to assist Providence public schools made the biggest headlines of the initiatives approved by the Corporation last February, but most of the money for that project remains to be raised.
There is currently $300,000 in the endowment fund, Simmons wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.
"I have been raising funds for the endowment and have received favorable responses from a number of potential donors," Simmons wrote. "I expect additional gifts will be committed to the endowment before the end of the academic year."
The fund received $250,000 for immediate use from an anonymous donor in October, but none has been allocated to projects in Providence public schools yet, Assistant to the President Marisa Quinn said.
The committee in charge of the fund has asked the superintendent of the Providence public school district to consider spending priorities, Quinn said. But the superintendent has made no specific suggestions yet, she said. The committee itself, led by three alums, has met once since the announcement was made last year, and not all of the members could attend that meeting, Quinn said.
She added that the committee will meet in the next month or so to discuss criteria for reviewing projects and proposals.
A Mississippi connection
Among the other proposed responses to the Slavery and Justice report, the Corporation recommended strengthening the bond between Brown and Tougaloo College, a historically black college in Jackson, Miss. Brown has had a student exchange program with Tougaloo since 1964.
Valerie Wilson, director of the Brown-Tougaloo Partnership, said she has presented Simmons with a list of items that could accomplish this goal.
One is the installation of a "smart" classroom on Tougaloo's campus, Wilson said. Such a classroom could include technology that makes teaching easier, such as interactive electronic whiteboards. Wilson said the classroom would allow Brown and Tougaloo to share curricula and academic expertise at lower cost.
The classroom would also allow faculty from Brown and Tougaloo to co-teach courses, Wilson said.
The "smart" classroom installation could be accomplished sooner than other proposals Wilson has sent to Simmons, Wilson said. But not enough concrete decisions have been made to discuss funding for such a project, said Elizabeth McCurdy, program coordinator for the Brown-Tougaloo Partnership.
According to Wilson, another proposal is a research conference between Brown and Tougaloo about slavery-related issues examined from Tougaloo's perspective.
"The research conference has been agreed to in concept," Wilson said. She said the conference may be held at Tougaloo in spring 2009. Tougaloo administrators and faculty are scheduled to visit Brown next month to discuss the research conference and develop it further, Wilson said.
Other proposals that faculty and administrators will discuss in April include the participation of Tougaloo faculty as part of Brown's contingent in the Trilateral Reconnections project, Wilson said.
The Trilateral Reconnections project is a form of collaborative scholarship among Brown's Department of Africana Studies, the University of Cape Town in South Africa and the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Wilson said.
Another project underway is the re-enactment of the trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, McCurdy said.
In 1955, Bryant and Milam were tried for and acquitted of the
murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, galvanizing the Civil Rights movement. The transcripts from the trial were recently released, McCurdy said. She said the Brown-Tougaloo Partnership would like to stage re-enactments of the trial on both campuses.
"The format would be very interactive," McCurdy said. The staged productions would involve attendees as jurors and other participants in the trial, she said.
McCurdy said there is currently no timeline for the production but that Simmons has indicated support for this and other items suggested for strengthening Brown and Tougaloo's bond.
Waiving tuition to help R.I.
In addition to the Providence school fund, an effort at community outreach called for by the University's official Slavery and Justice response involved waiving tuition for 10 masters students in the Department of Education annually. That program will enroll its first students in the 2008-09 academic year, Quinn said.
Eight students will pursue masters degrees in teaching and two will pursue masters in urban education policy.
In exchange for the waived tuition, recipients will commit to three years of service in low-income schools in Rhode Island following graduation, said Kenneth Wong, chair of the Department of Education. Wong said the graduate program is in the process of admitting the first-ever group of fellows for the upcoming academic year, and it has already received nearly 40 applications for the 10 spots.
"We are quite pleased that there are that many applicants interested in working in Rhode Island and Providence for three years," Wong said.
Wong said the department is happy with the diversity and quality of the applicants, who must submit an additional essay explaining their passion for urban education or educational policy and why they are well-suited to work in Rhode Island after graduation.
While the program is a "significant investment on the part of Brown," Wong said, the potential payoff is significant, too.
"In three years, we'll have 30 of these people," Wong said. "In 10 years, we'll have 100 of these folks. A lot of these students and fellows are very committed to urban education improvement."
Wong said the program would help Brown expand its partnership with Rhode Island's low-income school districts.
"In order to make sure that our inner-city minority students have equal opportunities in the marketplace, we need to invest in public education," Wong said. "Education is such an important part of social mobility in the long run."
Considering commemoration
A 10-member committee for the public commemoration of slavery's history in Rhode Island, formed in response to another proposal of the Corporation, has met five or six times, Quinn said. A formal committee chair has not been named, Quinn said, but Simmons has been acting in that capacity.
She said the committee members have visited other museums and exhibits to see examples of historical commemoration, but they have not decided what form a memorial will take or where it will be located.
"The feeling, generally, is that this is a very complicated and complex arena," Quinn said.
She said the committee, which includes representatives from the University, city and state government officials and a former director of Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, will probably spend the next year reviewing their thoughts and feelings about the memorial.
Brown may approach Providence and the state of Rhode Island about undertaking a joint project in addition to an on-campus memorial, wrote Simmons.
"It is to be noted that a memorial might take the form of an annual event, a physical site or a ceremony rather than a monument," she wrote.
