It shouldn’t be too much to ask for the people who teach, learn and work on this campus to have a say in decisions that affect our day-to-day lives. Instead, we are usurped by the peculiar institution that is the Brown University Corporation: a body that largely consists of wealthy benefactors with little experience in higher education. When they parachute into campus three times each year to make the University’s most consequential decisions, they bar the students, faculty and staff who live here from even observing their deliberations — much less participating in them.
This is why the Undergraduate Council of Students has released a referendum asking for broad democratic reform at Brown, including the election of students to sit on the Brown University Corporation. The referendum is an attempt to rectify the long history of disenfranchisement of student voices within the University, and to bring University employees into decision-making spaces. The University’s most significant decisions are made through processes that are anything but responsive and responsible. Every member of our campus community who wants to make change — by achieving fair workplace conditions, increasing funding to CAPS or divesting from unspeakable violence — must submit to the unrepresentative and largely self-appointed Corporation. I hope all students will vote yes on the referendum. Here’s why.
Student advocates don’t fail because they lack strategy or strength. They fail because university structures are designed to shut them down. There are a variety of areas in which the entities that govern Brown are not responsive to students’ desires and do not reflect the values that Brown says it espouses. I have heard several voices on campus, including The Herald’s own Tasawwar Rahman ’26, cite the existence of University committees to claim that shared governance is alive and well at Brown.
But it turns out that many of the committees actually do very little, and students who applied to them come away disheartened. The Student Conduct Board doesn’t actually review student conduct violations; it only considered a single case last year. President Paxson herself conceded that discussions by the Brown University Community Council will “necessarily be performative rather than productive, at least as currently structured.”
While I’m glad Rahman had a positive experience on the University Resources Committee, nearly half of its designated faculty seats are currently vacant because many faculty don’t feel they have actual power on the committee. As far back as 2007, some faculty committee members suspected that “budget decisions are reached by administrators on the committee in advance of the general meetings,” and that the rise in administrative committees make it “appear as if faculty input is solicited but in practice removes essential faculty participation in decisions affecting academic operations.” After all, the number of administrators on the URC equals the number of students and faculty combined.
The ad hoc Gift and Grants Review Committee examined a single grant in 14 months, and the formal committee established in March has yet to meet. And the institutional sustainability committees no longer operate. The list goes on. Meanwhile, major decisions affecting students, faculty and staff are made in spaces where we have no voice. Sometimes, Corporation committees suggest decisions. More often, senior administrators have a tendency to coordinate with one another, or they act unilaterally. Students, faculty and staff must work incredibly hard to achieve even a sliver of university power.
This is one of the reasons pro-divestment students are so upset. While President Paxson called the divestment process “deliberate, inclusive, fair and participatory,” the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management’s charter virtually bans the committee from recommending that the University divest from anything. This is highly suspect, considering that ACURM was established by President Paxson in the wake of its predecessor committee’s recommendation just four years ago in favor of divestment.
But the death of shared governance at Brown extends far beyond performative committees. Students have long favored greater fairness and inclusiveness in admissions, but we have no formal voice in admissions policy. So students are forced to agitate. Three-quarters of Brown’s Black students walked out of class in 1968 to demand more Black admitted students, among other forms of representation. Students were forced to demonstrate again in 1975, when the University refused to follow through on promises it made to the demonstrators seven years earlier.
Students continue to rally for admissions equity: An undergraduate referendum to consider banning legacy admissions passed in 2018 with 81% of the vote, and another referendum in favor of a test-optional policy passed with 74% of the vote in 2021. Administrators refused to act responsibly. Then, this fall, Black freshman enrollment dropped by 40% and Latine enrollment by 29%. Administrators insist nothing is amiss: The Dean of Admissions claimed that Brown will admit “increasingly diverse incoming classes.” But how Brown plans to do that is entirely unclear, and many of our peer schools have managed to keep admissions diversity stable. Despite students’ best efforts, we have been sidelined by senior administrators and Corporation members who seem to insist on maintaining policies that make Brown less diverse.
We must envision a more fair and participatory University. We can already see students exercising leadership in spaces where senior administrators have abdicated responsibility. In the Computer Science department, teaching assistants were expected to perform the “role of professors” without receiving fair pay. Poor treatment persisted despite student advocacy, and once again students stepped up where senior administrators failed: They took it upon themselves to organize a supermajority of computer science TAs into what became the Teaching Assistant Labor Union.
Instead of publicly acknowledging the way it was treating its student workers and taking action to right wrongs, University administrators refused to recognize the union. The University published an FAQ website that defended its clearly insufficient TA protection policies while making no mention of TA experiences. Students persisted and continued to be the ethical leaders this university sorely needs. On Wednesday, with 94% of its membership voting in favor, TALO ratified its first long-term contract with the University, earning pay raises and workplace protections.
Finally, remember that community members have taken major issue with the imbalance in administrative power for decades. “Considerable faculty dissatisfaction with the administration of the university” in the late 1960s resulted in more faculty power: the creation of what we now know as the Faculty Executive Committee, which is the steering committee for faculty governance.
In 2001, Russell Carey penned a “Short History of Governance at Brown University” in which he discovered broad community frustration in the lack of “transparent” and “collegial” decision-making. “What kind of democratic institution does Brown University want to be?” Carey asked. “What representative structures will address and resolve the concerns listed above and over the past thirty years in a meaningful and consistently satisfactory manner?”
More than two decades later, senior administrators and the Corporation continue to act largely independently of those of us who call Brown home. They’re not accountable to students who have chosen to learn here, the faculty who dedicate their careers to teaching us, and the workers who create the conditions for campus life. Students are not asking for a complete takeover of the Corporation, nor control over our endowment. We are asking for a University that respects and responds to our community — not one that casts us aside.
