Only two-thirds of Brown undergraduates identified Dan McKee as Rhode Island’s governor when asked to name the positions of some of the Ocean State’s elected officials in The Herald’s spring 2025 poll. Seventy-five percent correctly identified Mayor Brett Smiley and Senator Jack Reed with their job titles, while 80% could identify Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
The Herald provided a list of elected officials and asked respondents to match the name with their office. Around 900 undergraduates filled out the question, compared to a total 1,145 respondents to The Herald’s poll. All non-demographics questions on the poll were optional.
Mahir Rahman ’26, the president of Brown Dems, said that The Herald’s data indicated more political awareness than he expected. But he added that “there’s always work to be done.”
Low levels of civic engagement are a “structural issue” because “school systems in the country don’t really promote it,” Rahman said. He added that students should be able to identify the representatives of both Rhode Island and their home state.
Austin Wilson, who oversees the Brown Votes initiative at the Swearer Center for Public Service as the manager of community-engaged learning, said that though the poll data didn’t shock him, it concerns him that not all students know their elected officials.
According to Wilson, the University makes an effort to engage students in state politics through institutions like the Swearer Center and the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy, but he added that Brown still faces challenges in engaging its entire student body.
Given recent federal actions, "it’s more important than ever that college students stay informed about the world and get involved in public service at all levels of government,” Whitehouse wrote in a statement to The Herald in response to polling data.
The University and its students are “an essential part of Providence, and what happens in Providence impacts Brown students,” Chip Unruh, press secretary for Reed, wrote to The Herald.
“Whether they are temporary or long-term residents of Providence, students benefit from understanding how local policies and decisions impact their daily lives,” wrote Anthony Vega, the press secretary for Mayor Smiley, in a statement to The Herald.
McKee’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Brown Dems members have recently started a tabling initiative where they give out cookies to students who “can answer questions about who their congressional leaders are.”
As members of “an institution like Brown … you need to understand how the politics of that connects to the local community” and “know how (your) role impacts what’s going on in Providence and Rhode Island,” Rahman said.
Engagement with politics starts with voting, Wilson said. But he encouraged students to get actively involved with local politics, noting that Brown students “have a really unique opportunity living here in that you're literally right down the street from the State House… you can see what policy making looks like in action.”
Brown Political Union President Logan Tullai ’25 said that “Mayor Smiley and Senators Reed and Whitehouse have all been very active on Brown’s campus,” explaining the relatively high familiarity with them in the campus poll.
The students who could not identify their elected officials in the poll are not the types of people who are “going to come to an event with the mayor,” Wilson noted. He thinks the school needs other avenues of connecting students with local politics, but does not have “a clear answer to what those would look like.”
Our civic engagement is “a responsibility, but also an exciting opportunity for students” to connect with the local community, Wilson said.
