Two years after the Corporation approved several recommendations of the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, major initiatives are making incremental progress toward completion.
Among responses that arose from the nationally scrutinized committee's work, the University promised to endow a $10 million fund to aid local public schools, create a slave trade memorial and establish or expand an academic center to study slavery and its legacy.
Though most of the committee's cornerstone recommendations remain far from full implementation, the University expects that its responses will have passed several milestones by the end of the semester.
A commission tasked with brainstorming the memorial issued its report Monday, and the fund may make its first grants within the next month. A fellowship program for graduate students committed to serving local public schools - one aspect of Brown's response that got off the ground quickly - will graduate its first class in May.
But even as the University makes steady progress, much work remains to be done on the committee's ambitious agenda.
Providence schools fund
To date, the University has only raised about $1.5 million of a proposed $10 million fund that would make regular grants to Providence's public schools. President Ruth Simmons told the Brown University Community Council Tuesday that the money raised so far has come from Corporation members.
Still, a first round of grants from the fund to schools will be announced "by the end of April," according to Vice President for Public Affairs and University Relations Marisa Quinn. "The exact grantees have not been decided" but broad categories for funding have been identified, she said.
"There may be some funds available immediately," Quinn said, but "the bulk of funds" will be for the 2009-2010 school year. Quinn said she did not know how much money the grants would total.
Simmons said at the BUCC meeting that the University has encountered "a good deal of difficulty" in awarding the first round of grants. The University "invited the superintendent to submit proposals for funding," but "the proposals did not match up with what the fund was trying to do," she said.
"The fund could easily be confused with replacing existing funding as opposed to enriching the education at the public schools," Simmons said. "The bias - if I may call it that - is really towards a classroom and the students," not administrative programs, she said.
"The first round of grants is intended to clarify what the fund can support," she said.
Slave trade memorial
In response to the slavery and justice committee's recommendation to construct a public memorial to the history of the slave trade in Rhode Island, Simmons convened a commission of 10 members of the Brown, Providence and Rhode Island communities, with a range of expertise including public art displays, the local black experience and slavery's history. That commission issued its report Monday.
The commission's report includes six recommendations for memorials. It recommends that Brown's Public Art Committee commission a memorial, that the University continue to sponsor public events focused on slavery's legacy and "that a prize be created to recognize research on this subject."
The report called for action from the city and state and recommended that the University also "memorialize Native American heritage at Brown and in this region."
The report "affirmed what the steering committee initially recommended," Quinn said.
It did not "recommend any particular timeline," Quinn said. The University's Public Art Committee, which will now have the responsibility to plan a memorial, will largely determine the pace of the project, she said.
Quinn said the commission's recommendations were not intended to be met by a single memorial. She also said the final result "could be some concrete memorial" or a less material means of commemorating slavery's legacy, such as a traveling exhibit.
Studying slavery
The academic portion of Brown's "slavery and justice" agenda remains amorphous.
The Slavery and Justice report recommended that the University either create a new academic center for the study of slavery and justice or significantly expand an existing program.
Provost David Kertzer '69 P'95 P'98 told the BUCC this week that the University faced the question of how to deal not only with the history of slavery, but with the contemporary legacy of slavery and its "ethical, moral (and) social" implications.
"Rather than decide all those questions in advance," Kertzer said, "we have begun a search ... to find a faculty leader who's a world expert in the history of slavery." A search is also on for two additional faculty with some specialty relating to slavery and its legacy, he said.
The Herald reported last November that Department of History Chair Kenneth Sacks and Department of Africana Studies Chair Barrymore Bogues, who are involved with planning Brown's academic response to the Report, were developing a major lecture series on the topic for this semester.
It is unclear if the lecture series is moving ahead as planned. Sacks referred questions about the lecture series to Bogues, who said he was unavailable for an interview before press time.
Other progress
In response to the slavery and justice committee's report, the University established the Urban Education Fellows program, which will graduate its inaugural class this year. Urban education fellows will have their tuition waived after three years working in Providence public schools or education organizations.
Kertzer told the BUCC that the University expects eight fellows for the 2009-2010 academic years. The fellowship is open to those earning Master of Arts in Teaching and Urban Education Policy degrees.
Kertzer also said the University would encourage collaboration between Brown and Tougaloo College students by using "smart classrooms" equipped with technology that allows students at the two campuses to interact. "We've already pioneered one or two classes that have done this," Kertzer said.
Brown has paid for the installation of the "smart classrooms" on Tougaloo's campus.
Kertzer said the University was investing in communications technology partly because "relatively few students are actually going to be able" to participate in physical exchanges.
