Daniel Moraff '14 wrote an op-ed article complaining, essentially, that the Brown Corporation is rich ("The horrifying makeup of the Brown Corporation," Oct. 17). To be more specific, he is outraged that half of the members of the Corporation come from the financial services industry.
"When the Corporation seems to embody the worst of the corporate world ... it shouldn't surprise us." No. Stop. Stop right there. This statement alone unmistakably indicates that the author is upper-middle class and white. Moraff literally has absolutely no conception of "the worst of the corporate world." All he does have is an overpowering sense of liberal guilt, so much so that it has driven his thought process straight off the cliff of sanity.
The Toronto-based gold-mining company Barrick Gold allegedly burned 130 homes near one of its operations in Papua New Guinea, manipulated land titles elsewhere, was complicit in a toxic chemical spill and is associated with operations that led to a 56 percent to 70 percent reduction in the sizes of nearby glaciers. NewsCorp hacked the phones of seemingly everybody in Britain. French oil company Tonal uses slave labor. Those are literally just three companies. Calm down.
Brown is a private organization, with private funding and the right to self-determination. Anyone who thinks that students, faculty and workers - without your demonized 52 wealthy Corporation trustees and fellows - could maintain the operation and quality of conscientious and balanced education that Brown currently provides has departed from the plane of reality.
More importantly, there are procedures governing election to Brown's boards. If those procedures are followed, then Moraff lacks grounds for complaint. We guess he is upset that the Corporation does not look like he wants it to look. Hmm. Okay. Moraff is neither an owner nor a shareholder of the Corporation - what makes him think he is owed any say at all in the composition of its boards? His privileged and entitled attitude is as arrogant as it is unwarranted.
Construction of new, modern buildings? This is an investment in the future of the University. There are no monuments to opulence being built while professors' pay is cut, no funding to social justice-oriented student groups being slashed while stainless steel is applied to every visible surface. Moraff might ambiguously disagree with how some of this money is used, but guess what? It's not his money to spend. These decisions belong to the donors who pay for the buildings.
Oh and by the way, his tuition does not buy him a stake in the Corporation. Our tuition money is not a gift or charitable donation. It is payment for a product that we willingly purchase. Spending $300 on iPhones does not give us the right to tell Apple how to spend its profits. We are not part of the University - we are its customers. We are sorry if this is not as emotionally satisfying as lofty rhetoric about Brown being a community in which we are all equals. But it is an accurate description.
Focus on the sciences? If Brown were truly profit-minded, it would build a business school, not renovate our crumbling science buildings. Moraff must be unaware that scientists very rarely become rich alumni - meanwhile, they contribute to the technological progress of our entire society in a concrete fashion. Moraff cannot have spent much time in Barus and Holley. The entire laboratory and office area was built 60 years ago, and the HVAC and electrical systems are practically medieval.
We are not justified in criticizing the backgrounds of the members of the Corporation based on our assumption that they, like many extremely wealthy people in the world, are not sensitive to the needs of historically or currently oppressed minorities. Those assumptions are biased, prejudiced solely on the basis of peoples' net worth. Affluence may be correlated with corporate heartlessness, irresponsibility and insensitivity to the needs of others who exist in a different socioeconomic class, but there are many examples otherwise.
In other words, one can criticize the decisions made and priorities set by the Corporation for Brown and its students. One can also interpret a pattern in the above, showing some sort of concrete causation between their extreme affluence and the poor leadership you view them to be exhibiting. One can then criticize their backgrounds, after having logically shown the connection. But one cannot rationally or reasonably criticize their affluence without specific complaints and a mechanism for those complaints to be connected to wealth or corporatism.
If Moraff believes that Brown is "educating a bunch of good corporate employees" and that "the University is run mainly as a tool of corporate America," he can leave. Really. Moraff enrolled at Brown voluntarily, super-totally-evil corporate structure and all. What upsets us is that he lacks any appreciation for enjoying the privilege of attending probably the single most liberal, conscientious, tolerant, social justice-oriented institution of higher education in the entire world, and the people he thoughtlessly slanders give hugely of their own time and money - both of which could be used to make more money, were they the plutocrats he smears them as - to allow it to exist.
Ethan Currens '10 MA'11 and Bradley Silverman '13 just discovered politics and are, like, super outraged about bankers and corporations and stuff.
