It all started in 2006, when President Ruth Simmons listed increasing Brown’s international profile as one of the top priorities for the next academic year.

About 75 students gathered on the Main Green Monday afternoon to protest the Athletics Review Committee’s recommendations to cut four varsity teams, and some protestors continued to express dismay over the proposal to President Ruth Simmons during her open hours later in the day.

In most courses — even at Brown — it would have come as a bit of a shock for an instructor to announce that for the first 60 minutes of a seminar, no one was allowed to speak or leave the room.

When Charlie Wood ’10 wants to withdraw his monthly paycheck, he leaves home at 4:30 a.m. and spends five hours traveling through southeastern Africa in the back of a pickup truck alongside 20 to 30 people, produce for a local market, a few chickens and a goat. Once he makes it to the closest city ­— Nampula — he stops at the bank, turns around and starts the whole process over again.

After a fraternity initiation event at Yale last month sparked public protest from women’s groups on campus and across New England, the university has created a new task force to review sexual misconduct policies. Pledges to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity were seen chanting, “No means yes, yes means anal,” the Yale Daily News first reported Oct. 14.

Voters in Arizona last week approved a ban on affirmative action in public colleges and universities.

Twitter was supposed to revolutionize communication. But Brown has largely steered clear of Twitter-mania — relatively few professors use it as a tool to interact with their students or to promote individual research.

A professor at the University of South Carolina at Columbia is offering an upper-level course this spring devoted to studying the societal factors that led to Lady Gaga’s popularity.

Starting this fall, travelers in Providence will be able to get to T. F. Green Airport with only a $2.50 train ticket, providing an alternative to pricey taxi services and crowded shuttles.

Police found a drug lab producing the hallucinogenic dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, inside a freshman dorm at Georgetown University this weekend, the Washington Post reported.