I admit that after reading a recent column by Simon Liebling '12 ("The Simmons legacy," Sept. 29), I had to wonder if Liebling and I go to different schools. Apparently, Liebling attends a university brimming with wealthy elites that churns out top-notch research while leaving undergraduates floundering in massive lectures, embarks on wasteful and unnecessary construction projects and is filled with students who no longer care for anything but their lucrative postgraduate careers. Setting aside the question of why Liebling would have chosen to spend four years and upwards of $200,000 at such a miserable institution, I wanted to describe the much happier University I have been fortunate enough to attend.
Upon applying to my University as a wide-eyed high school senior, I was pleased to note that under the tenure of its president, Ruth Simmons, the school had only a few years earlier moved to need-blind admissions. My University's commitment to evaluate me without consideration of my financial need — and to meet 100 percent of that need — not only assured me that if admitted, I would be able to attend, but also convinced me of the value that the school placed on socioeconomic diversity.
What's more, after being accepted by my University, I learned of a new policy that meant that no one with a family income under $100,000 would be expected to take out any student loans. This policy helped me and countless classmates, and even amid a historic recession, my University's commitment to financial aid has remained strong and unequivocal. While Liebling's university has "prospective students priced out of Brown" banging at the gates, mine raised financial aid to offset the strain of its tuition increases: Though the cost of attendance rose by 3.5 percent this year, the financial aid budget increased at more than double that rate to ensure that the added burden was shouldered only by those who could afford it.
Once I set foot on campus, I enrolled in a fantastic first-year seminar, one of 74 offered — up from 23 when Simmons started the program in 2002. While students at Liebling's university faced an undergraduate education that was "shunted to the sidelines," first-years at my University enjoyed the many benefits of Simmons' groundbreaking Plan for Academic Enrichment. Compared to their pre-Simmons peers, recent undergraduates at my university were showered with more professors and more and smaller courses than ever before. Future generations stand to reap the rewards of the University's increased attention to undergraduate advising, with Faculty Advising Fellow events, Advising Central and similar initiatives offering even more ways for undergraduate students to seek and build productive relationships with faculty members.
Other differences abound between Liebling's school and mine. While Liebling's University administration "rammed through" changes to the tenure system, mine adopted those changes after a one-and-a-half-year process that reached out to the various relevant stakeholders and culminated with an overwhelming vote of approval by the faculty. While his university set out on a massive construction campaign simply because it liked sparkly new buildings, mine transformed an aging and decrepit Faunce House into a vibrant campus center, centralized previously disparate student resources in a renovated J. Walter Wilson and built a pedestrian walkway to finally unify Pembroke with the main campus.
And while the president of my University also took a salary cut that was bound to be, in Liebling's words, "symbolic" — even working for free, she could hardly make a dent in the University's $834 million budget — her actions signified, as symbols do, the administration's seriousness about maintaining the school's fiscal sustainability in a responsible fashion. That it did. Despite the bleak financial climate, the Boldly Brown fundraising initiative shattered its $1.4 billion goal. And in deciding how to cut costs, the University did everything in its power to shield students from the effects of the recession. Yes, some employees were laid off — and provided with career counseling and outplacement services. No, this was not an outrageous result of the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
I admit that all is not sunshine and granola at my University. In recent years, we have seen a worrisome trend toward expanded professional, revenue-driven graduate programs. The planned online degrees to debut next fall are particularly troubling in this regard. While an expanded mission need not necessarily come at the cost of our existing strengths, Brown's role as a primarily undergraduate teaching University is surely threatened whenever more time and resources are directed toward programs outside this core mission. Yet it is important to keep these concerns in perspective: While such changes definitely present a serious challenge for Brown going forward, they come only after tremendous investment in our undergraduate education.
The next president will play a key role in deciding to what extent Brown is able to maintain its institutional integrity in the face of pressing challenges from all fronts. How well they do this remains to be seen. But one thing I do know: If our next president can do as much for the school in the next 10 years as Simmons has in the last 10, I'll be the first to put his or her face on a shirt.
Reuben Henriques '12 holds this Ruth to be self-evident. He can be reached at Reuben_Henriques@brown.edu.
