As Brown University is an internationally acclaimed institution, we the students graduate with a number of opportunities and privileges not afforded to the majority of the world's population. The diploma, possibly the most ponderous of these privileges, is not easy to conceptualize sharing with a large group of people for obvious reasons. Although realistically we cannot hope to share a lot of our privilege with the world without a great deal of high-level systematic change, we can work to concretely and practically "spread the wealth" to the Providence community.
If we think about our education in the way it was originally conceived — a way to better understand the world around us and subsequently enter it as agents of positive change — we can much more easily envision the various paths to sharing this privilege. In theory, the accumulation and analysis of different bodies of knowledge leads to this understanding. If we cannot open up our school and classrooms to the community right away, I would argue that an easy first step would be to share some basic resources that we have in abundance — namely, our books.
The sharing of our libraries could be useful for community members in many ways, first of which is the access it would afford to materials not easily found otherwise. Second, it would give community members a quiet and comfortable space to do work. Finally, on a less academic note, it would offer a new way for the Providence citizenry to engage with an otherwise insular community. Now instead of walking in and out of the Brown University bubble, community members might actually feel like our campus is a part of their city.
It is important to recognize that this idea is not without precedent. At Cornell University, public school teachers from Ithaca are allowed full library access for the lofty sum of $0.00. At Columbia University, there is a program in place whereby books can be loaned if they cannot be found at the public institutions in New York City. Perhaps even more impressively, the "Open Collections Program" at Harvard University is a large-scale effort to digitize selections from their libraries and make them available to anyone with an Internet connection. Additionally, New York University has a whole library, "The Tamiment Library," open to the public and completely free of charge.
Amidst all of these various attempts at other universities, I have been unable to unearth information about any programs at Brown University to share our libraries with the community. As it stands, Brown will allow an individual with "special research needs" to use our libraries for $400.00 per year, but this is seemingly the only program we have.
Rather than framing this as a critique of Brown, I would like to pose it as an easy and well-supported first step towards sharing some of our privilege and connecting with the community.
In this vein, I propose that this program start by opening the libraries to middle school students, high school students and teachers in the city of Providence. In this way, our vast academic resources could begin to be shared with the people in our community who need them the most. An increase in relations between Brown and the Providence community could also open the door for a lot of other great sharing to occur. I envision homework help sessions, talking groups and a general push to create a system where students at Brown regularly plug into Providence in a variety of ways.
Before moving forward, it is important to situate this proposal in a larger framework and explain why this sort of thing is even important. Quoth our mission statement, "The mission of Brown University is to serve the community, the nation, and the world by discovering, communicating, and preserving knowledge and understanding in a spirit of free inquiry ...". In order to fully serve our community, we must not only discover and preserve knowledge, but also communicate it. I can think of no better starting point to more effectively work towards this goal than opening up academic spaces to the community around us, and in turn hope that this creates a better running dialogue and open discourse between Brown and Providence. Who knows, maybe when all is said and done, this could be the start of a much bigger shift in the pursuit of symbiosis and equality.
Chris Norris-LeBlanc '13 is from Rhode Island, and can be contacted at chris.norris.leblanc (at) gmail.com.
