In President Obama's recent State of the Union address, we heard repeated appeals to renew America's long-term competitiveness and to "win the future" against emerging rivals like India and China. Similarly, in the decade following Ruth Simmons' hiring as President in 2001, Brown has seen a heightened emphasis on becoming more competitive with other schools in the fight to attract the best students in the country and from around the world.
After inheriting a stalled and stagnant campus, the Simmons administration quickly initiated a raft of reforms under the Plan for Academic Enrichment. Many of them were incredibly beneficial, ranging from need-blind admissions for domestic, non-transfer students, to impressive increases in fundraising and faculty hiring.
But with the huge changes the school has seen comes a significant risk of losing the educational culture and university-college model that make Brown so attractive in the first place. In many cases, Brown's leadership seems to be taking its cues more from trying to copy Harvard, Yale and Princeton — the "HYP(e)" schools for short — than from trying to improve Brown's unique culture. Just take how the recent tenure reform debate was sparked by the fact that Brown has a considerably higher rate of tenure approval than other Ivy League schools, and how a principal argument for establishing the new school of engineering was "well, all the other Ivy League schools have one."
Now, I don't mean to suggest here that Simmons has some agenda to undermine the New Curriculum and the university-college model. Far from it — although Simon Liebling's columns such as "Brown, Inc." do have significant merit. Rather, the risk is that in the rush to make improvements, Brown's culture will be overlooked through neglect and die a slow "death by a thousand cuts." By the time we realize a shift has happened, it will already be too late.
Brown has long had an emphasis on the liberal arts rather than professional or vocational training. In 1946, then-president Henry Wriston lauded the University's inclusion of engineering within the liberal arts college rather than "segregating it in a separate school." Similarly, Wriston noted how Brown had eliminated previous experiments with programs in medicine, agriculture, business and forestry because they were found to be "fundamentally incompatible" with Brown's commitment to liberal arts learning.
Today, of course, it is no secret that Brown has a rapidly expanding medical school, which soon will be geographically separated from the main campus and is in the process of de-emphasizing the Program in Liberal Medical Education that kept it unique and relevant to the liberal arts. Add to that the new school of engineering (everyone else was doing it!) and rumors of a future School of Community Health, and we see a subtle yet fundamental transformation away from Brown's university-college identity.
In the midst of these changes, we seem to have lost sight of the best way for Brown to compete — by staking out a position that is uniquely "Brown" rather than becoming an also-ran "Yale Jr."
For the subset of present and future students who are looking for a self-directed liberal arts education at a school with a strong focus on undergraduates and the resources of a university (as I once was), I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Brown is the best choice in the world. There are plenty of great options for pre-professionals, but if you try to think of other true university-colleges, it's hard to get much further than perhaps Wesleyan or Dartmouth.
If Brown abandons its unique focus and model, it would leave a gaping void in the college landscape. By instead competing with ourselves to be the best Brown University possible, we will be de facto competitive with both colleges and universities by offering the best of both worlds.
With so much change, we are at a tenuous crossroads. But there are steps we can take to preserve our educational culture while still improving the school.
First, let's make sure that we aren't promoting the segmenting of the University into many schools without good reason. Liberal education thrives at the intersection of many different disciplines, so we should be wary of putting up barriers to interdisciplinary contact by breaking up the University.
Second, we must create incentives for professors to engage in undergraduate teaching and especially advising over exclusively prioritizing their research. Students come to Brown looking for undergraduate excellence, and faculty members must be here for the same reason. The New Curriculum, with its characteristic freedom and resulting reliance on strong advising, dies without a faculty deeply committed to undergraduates.
Finally and most importantly, we need vigilance, energy and passion from the student body regarding the University's governance and future. We should promote and be proud — not suspicious — of our differences from other schools. We cannot expect faculty and administration to maintain the New Curriculum and a culture that most benefits undergraduate students — we must fight for that ourselves.
Kurt Walters '11 was ecstatic to see a page labeled "The university college" in the bookstore's Brown promo pamphlet. Here's looking at you, Brown PR team.
