My first year at Brown was confusing. I arrived wide-eyed and disoriented by a mess of opportunities: clubs, parties, frats, sororities, classes, jobs. Each one told the same story: Happiness is contingent on achieving some material goal — getting into a competitive club, obtaining an override for ...
In one of the earliest stories of the Hebrew Bible, God asks Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” Feigning ignorance, Cain responds, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” But Cain did know what had happened — he and his brother had fought in jealousy, and Cain had killed him. It was ...
As a Jewish Brown alum and a practicing attorney, I feel compelled to respond to Professor Katharina Galor’s erroneous analysis of the University’s settlement with the federal government. Galor’s reading disregards federal regulatory interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that ...
As a Jewish-Israeli scholar, I feel compelled to voice my moral and political dissent from the agreement that Brown University signed with the federal government on July 30. While I recognize the extraordinary pressure our leadership faced, I cannot remain silent about the implications of what has been ...
I read with great regret the faculty’s decision last spring to eliminate the option of course performance reports, starting in the 2025–26 academic year.
We write today with sincere disappointment and disgust at the news that Brown has voluntarily reached a deal with the Trump administration to restore federal research funding and thereby open the University to federal compliance reviews.
On July 30, Brown announced an agreement with the Trump administration to end three spurious investigations into the University and reclaim over $50 million in unpaid federal research grants. In President Trump’s preferred parlance, they ‘made a deal.’ But a deal is a voluntary agreement ...
On Wednesday, July 30, President Christina Paxson P’19 PMD’20 announced the University had come to an agreement with the Trump administration. She struck a reassuring tone: “The agreement preserves the integrity of Brown’s academic foundation, and it enables us as a community to move forward ...
As another academic year comes to a close, it seems like only yesterday that I mailed my annual letter to incoming Brunonians. Maybe you remember receiving or reading it? Now, I send a final grateful goodbye through the pages of The Herald. Though in my retirement, the situation on College Hill will ...
As an alum, I have watched with growing concern as Brown clings to outdated admissions practices that undermine its mission and tarnish its legacy. Over the years, I have written to President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 and published three op-eds in The Herald with suggestions for making the ...
During the holiday of Passover, Jews around the world retell the Exodus story — the Israelites’ passage from bondage in Egypt to freedom, from narrow places of fear and intimidation to a more expansive world. As Michael Walzer taught in his book “Exodus and Revolution,” Passover serves as a ...
Earlier this month, the Trump administration broke news about plans to freeze $510 million of Brown’s federal funding. The threatened cuts are nothing short of extortion, an attempt to use the power of federal research dollars to force universities like Brown into policy changes that would destroy ...
Brown faculty must reject or revise the recent “Draft Statement on University Values” to ensure that it includes strong, explicit protections for shared community governance in every aspect of University operations.
Brown is just the latest major university to be threatened with the loss of federal funds by the Trump administration. But while the White House has not yet formally frozen Brown’s federal funding nor presented the University with a list of demands as conditions of restoring that funding, we can be ...
I first began giving tours of Brown as an impressionable first-year. On the second stop of the tour outside University Hall, I would gather my modest crowd of overachieving high schoolers and their anxious parents to extol the virtues of Brown’s unique curricular system. After responding to a host ...
About a year ago, I received a text from Brown’s Southeast Asian Studies Initiative about an upcoming course, taught by SEASI and Filipino Alliance ally Grace Talusan: ENGL 1050Y: “Traces of Empire: Writing Filipino and American Experiences.” The title alone lingered with me — an invitation ...
Earlier this week, inspired by a Harvard Crimson op-ed, I sent a letter to President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 and Provost Francis Doyle with recommendations on how Brown might help our country’s academic institutions escape the Trump administration’s encroaching darkness.
Last week, Rasha Alawieh, an assistant professor of medicine at Brown, was deported from the United States at Boston Logan International Airport despite holding a valid H-1B visa. Her deportation was on the heels of the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident of the United States who, as of ...
I am deeply concerned by the relentless — and also maybe clueless — use of antisemitic tropes that continues to pervade campus protests. This includes Thursday’s rally protesting the arrest and detainment of Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. Considering the overt use of these antisemitic elements, ...
A few weeks ago, I had the extraordinary opportunity to discuss my work — the role of faith and struggle in democratic politics — with a group of students at the University of San Diego. Despite being in sunny California, we found ourselves drawn to the troubling question: What will we do when our ...
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