Welcome to Brown, home of one the most accomplished and diverse student bodies in the world. You have some big shoes to fill — we all love President Ruth Simmons. But here are a few places that you can make a positive impact on our school, picking up where Simmons left off.
First, I urge you to continue Brown's culture of not caring about national college rankings. While most students here do, in fact, have Brown's ranking memorized, the school as a whole takes steps to make it clear that rankings are not important. And they really aren't. There have been numerous studies that indicate that quality of education at a school is not significantly linked to its numerical ranking.
Rankings tend to favor large, research-focused universities, which Brown is not. We don't want to become a university that focuses on its graduate students. Brown has always been a university-college, and we like it that way.
With that said, if there are ways to improve our national esteem without harming the soul of Brown, please enact them. For example, Brown could definitely use some work on its grading system. The current system, which does not append minuses and pluses to letter grades, is flawed. Though the point of omitting the plus and minus is to emphasize learning over grades, the reality is that this oversimplifies the levels of performance in a class.
In organic chemistry, for example, a student who achieves an 85 percent average will receive the same grade as one who gets a 100 percent on every test. Both students get an A in the class, despite considerably different achievements. One of the things that hurts Brown in national rankings is the perception we "don't have grades." Though this is false, we could remedy the situation by having a slightly more traditional grading scheme.
Brown's grade inflation, recently rated worst in the country, also hurts the image of our school. We must work to combat perceptions that Brown is academically easy. Anyone who has actually taken a class at Brown knows that we work just as hard as students at peer schools.
Second, encourage Brown students to accept that financial success is okay. Too often, The Herald's opinions columns feature debates about whether venture capitalism for profit is ethical ("The essence of America," Feb. 21) or how guilty we should feel about our financial privilege here on College Hill ("Should Brown give more money to Providence?" Mar. 2). Brown students should realize that it is acceptable to reap the rewards of hard work and innovation.
That's not to say that we must encourage all graduates to focus on making as much money as possible without ever considering giving back to the community. Rather, it's an issue of trust. Brown's next president should trust that the people who graduate from this University, people who have chosen to be educated here, understand the importance of giving back. Simmons has done a good job of placing equal value on careers of service, like teaching, and careers of investment and big business. Brown is a unique place where recruiters from Bain Capital walk by flyers for the Peace Corps, each of them fighting for our students.
Finally, the next leader of the University should promote an atmosphere of doing, rather than preaching. Too often in academia we focus on abstract ideals and miss out on opportunities to actually perform hands-on work. This is a real problem.
For example, all service-oriented student groups must classify themselves as "Category S," a category that does not receive funding from the University. In contrast, all other categories of groups are entitled to eventually receive money. For full disclosure, I am the president and founder of a service group. The theory behind this policy is that Brown students' activity fees shouldn't be spent on groups who do the majority of their work off-campus. In contrast, other groups stay on campus and thus are entitled to money.
This policy subsidizes empty words and pointless pursuits, while it penalizes actual grassroots volunteerism. A group entirely devoted to making snow angels could receive $200 in University funding, while a group that picks up trash downtown, making a real, tangible difference, can receive nothing.
The new president must demand that Brown students get their hands dirty. Rather than forming a group that reads books on urban poor, form one that works face-to-face with the urban poor that live down the street.
As the president of this institution, you will have the power to do tremendous good. I encourage you to harness the energy and potential of Brown's world-class faculty and students to move the University ahead into a new era of excellence.
Garret Johnson '14 was pushing for Gail McCarthy of the Sharpe Refectory for president but concedes that Christina Paxson is a great choice, too.
