Last spring, after nearly two decades, the University quietly retired its first-year reading program. The program required that first-year students come to campus having read an assigned text that they would discuss as part of New Student Orientation. In the five years leading up to the end of the First Readings program, the text of choice was the Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.
The Slavery and Justice report, which detailed the history of Brown’s involvement with slavery, is not something that can be swept under the rug — it is an essential piece of history that all Brunonians should know about. The 2006 report, which was one of the first of its kind, led the way for dozens of other schools to consider their own histories. Although the University cited “mixed levels of engagement” as one of the motivators behind retiring the program, failing to replace this required reading and discussion for first-years with anything else is a betrayal of the historical reckoning Brown sought to undertake. Brown cannot educate students to “serve the community, the nation and the world” if it forgets its dark past. The University must find other ways to reintegrate the Slavery and Justice report back into the first-year curriculum.
Even though I am part of the first cohort of students since 2019 to enter Brown without being required to read the Slavery and Justice report, I have already felt the effects of its absence. In HIST 1970F: “Early American and Atlantic Money,” I learned about the relationship between colonial finance and the transatlantic slave trade. As part of the course, I visited the John Carter Brown Library, which holds a vast collection of colonial American manuscripts, many originally donated by the Brown family itself. When inspecting a 250-year-old personal finance table from another prominent Rhode Island family, one name kept recurring: Sally.
People said the name casually, as though it should be universally known what “Sally” meant. But even when I learned that the name was referring to a slave ship, I did not understand how it was connected to Brown’s history. The answer I got was startling — Sally was a slave ship the Brown brothers chartered to the West African coast in 1764, the same year the University was founded. I would have already known this had I read the Slavery and Justice report.
Former University President Ruth J. Simmons commissioned the Slavery and Justice report in 2003. She organized a committee of faculty, administrators and students to survey how the University has profited from the slave trade and share these findings with the Brown community. In the committee’s final report, they uncovered the story of one of the enslaved men who built University Hall, the illicit slave trading of long-time University Treasurer John Brown and the Brown brothers’ chartering of the Sally. The findings were extensive, and the committee’s success in pushing the University to reckon with its history was a tipping point for Brown and the higher education landscape at large. After the report was released, many other schools followed suit, releasing their own reports detailing their involvement with the slave trade. And in 2012, the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice was established at the recommendation of the committee.
The entirety of this history is now condensed into just one tab in one of the three modules of the 1stYear@Brown virtual onboarding workshop. Brown’s history with slavery is outlined at the bottom of a subtab titled “Brown’s Timeline: A history of sustained excellence.” Not even a full section within the module is dedicated to studying this history — faculty member and alumni reflections on the report are now sandwiched between University fun facts and an overview of the Open Curriculum. Even if a student took the time to delve into this history by reading the report linked in the module, first-year students are deprived of the opportunity to discuss the report’s findings and its significance. Through the first-year reading program, students had this chance. In the committee’s mission statement, a primary goal of the report is to foster continued discussion about racial injustice. In retiring the program, Brown has turned its back on this mission.
Burying the Slavery and Justice report must be understood within the broader national political context. The change occurred amid a federal crackdown on diversity initiatives in higher education, the reinstallation of confederate monuments and Trump administration attempts to undercut the work of the National Museum of African American History and Culture by forcibly controlling the institution’s exhibitions. If terminating the program was a way to appease the Trump administration, then the issue is even more concerning, as it relinquishes academic freedom in the face of government pressure. In taking the Slavery and Justice report off the first-year curriculum, Brown has set a sad precedent. Just as the University’s report led dozens of schools to confront racist histories, its retirement might push other schools and institutions to abandon discussions about critical histories and methods of modern-day acknowledgement of the past, such as the ever-tumultuous debate surrounding reparations.
Without a robust system in place for students to learn about Brown’s history with slavery, the University is abandoning Simmons’s mission “to teach us about ourselves.” If administrators argue that the old system of discussion during first-year orientation didn’t work, Brown should find ways to reintegrate the Slavery and Justice report back into the first-year curriculum. The University could reinstate the mandatory reading program, offer lectures and mini discussions on the topic or work with student filmmakers to make a documentary about its findings.
Current students are Brown’s history and future. To create Brunonians who can make positive change in the world today, Brown must re-commit to remembering its past.
Clara Murray ’29 can be reached at clara_murray@brown.edu. Please send responses to this op-ed to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
