This piece was originally submitted as a speech for the Class of 2021’s Commencement. Before last March, I had never seen someone open a trash can with their elbows. For whatever reason, that is the detail I visualize when I recall my first impression of what would soon explode into the COVID-19 ...
This piece was originally submitted as a speech for the Class of 2021’s Commencement. Hello, my fellow graduates, friends, families, and honored guests. My name is Wassa Bagayoko, and it is my distinct honor and deep pleasure to address you this morning. I would like to start this address with ...
This piece was originally submitted as a speech for the Class of 2021’s Commencement. I did not first move into Brown during a pandemic, but I might as well have. As most of us have found ourselves during the past 14 months, in that moment in September 2017, taking my very first steps on College ...
Standing on the threshold of graduation, the path ahead seems rife with uncertainty. In our years at Brown, we’ve spent our time building ourselves into a community that supports, challenges and encourages us. That’s a hard thing to let go of as we leave College Hill behind. Four years ago, I ...
When I got into Brown, I was sitting criss-cross on my high school’s hallway floor, next to my best friend. I’d stepped away from the classroom with her to check my admission status. When I opened the page and saw I’d gotten in, my shellshocked scream was almost as much about my excitement to ...
This piece was originally submitted as a speech for the Class of 2021's Commencement. Welcome, fellow graduates, parents, faculty, friends and alumni, and the person here because they thought this was a free vaccine line. I see you. As a member of the Band — yeah, those sickos who wake you up ...
In high school, I once joked that I didn’t find out I was Black until my first day of sixth grade. That is, of course, an exaggeration; my parents and my parents’ parents are Black, and I have never dissociated myself from my identity. The kernel of truth at the core of my joke was that my Blackness, ...
The age-old adage states that college is where you find yourself and your people. At 18, I wished fervently to “find myself” falling in love with math, championing the resolution of some low-level environmental issue, graduating with straight A’s in my STEM and humanities courses alike, striking ...
When I first arrived on Brown’s campus the day of first-year move-in, I wasn’t all that different from any of my peers chaotically flooding the University gates. Like many of those around me, there was a large pit in the bottom of my stomach, which lodged itself there to remind me of my fear that ...
Every year, The Herald's Commencement Magazine collects the memories and reflections of the senior class. This year, that collection is inevitably shaped by the grief and loss COVID-19 has caused. Since last March, many Herald articles have sought to document the major, disparate hardships created by ...
Over the past two years, identity politics have trickled into the curricula of university settings worldwide. At face value, such movements appear well-intentioned. Expanding avenues of learning beyond the Western canon is an extremely important and necessary means to better appreciate and engage ...
In 2007, Brown drew national attention for promising to account for its role in the transatlantic slave trade. One of these promises brought forth the Fund for the Education of the Children of Providence, a $10 million endowment for the Providence Public School District that Brown intended to fill through ...
As vaccines become much more widespread, we’re all ready to leave the horrors of the pandemic behind us. But there have been some silver linings. Looking forward as an institution, we ought to preserve the culture of understanding and accommodation that we were forced to develop in the face of the ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has been defined by one ultimate feeling: loneliness. Whether through isolation, quarantining or social distancing, public health over the last year has depended on minimizing contact with others as much as possible to slow the spread of the virus. These circumstances have had ...
On March 16, 2021, after a year in which the United States saw anti-Asian hate crimes rise nearly 150 percent, a white gunman murdered six Asian women in three Asian-owned spas after allegedly saying that he would “kill all Asians.” Just two days later, the United States and China entered dangerous ...
As a senior graduating from Brown this May, I have been receiving emails since September of last year about the Senior Class Gift and Senior Class Gift Committee. It struck me as odd that although I had not yet walked out the Van Wickle Gates, I was already being asked for money. But the more I looked ...
Recently, Rutgers University announced that, religious and medical exemptions aside, it will require students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before returning to campus in the fall. Even with the end of the pandemic in sight, Rutgers has not taken for granted that its health situation on campus will ...
“Welcome to Settle for Biden, the page where we recognize that Biden is bad but Trump is way worse. Now is not the time to be petty; now is the time to defeat Donald Trump and his dangerous agenda,” reads the caption under the first Instagram post of the account formerly known as @settleforbiden ...
In the past several years, it has been fashionable to gawk in horror at China’s “social credit system,” an all-encompassing integration of surveillance, finance and state. Writing for The Triple Helix, Brown’s student publication focused on science and society, Priya Bhanot '23 called China’s ...
I am not the target audience for this. I found this thought echoing around my head as I read Andrew Reed's March 12 column "Steven Pinker Wants to Repair Campus Culture." The piece has a pretty veneer and frames itself as hopeful, but concerned. I am not convinced its true purpose is quite so positive. The ...
Solutions by The State News
