FROM THE COLLEGE GREEN

Dean of Admission Logan Powell sent this letter July 17 to members of the Corporation of Brown University, its governing body:

Dear Members of the Corporation,

It was wonderful to see so many of you in person recently as we celebrated the conclusion of another academic year. Our work continues unabated, even as we fete our recent graduates.

I am writing to share a brief overview of our year in the Office of College Admission, as well as a look ahead. The Class of 2026 is an inspiring group, selected from among our most competitive applicant pool to date. Below are some admission statistics of note:

• Brown received a total of 50,649 applications for first-year admission this year - a 9% increase from last year that makes this the largest applicant pool in University’s history by more than 4,000 students

• Our Regular Decision admit rate was 3.6%, with an overall admit rate of 5%

• 69% percent of students admitted chose to accept their place on College Hill, the highest yield Brown has ever had

• The growth in yield was driven entirely by the Regular Decision process; the percentage of the class admitted through binding Early Decision was the same as last year

• This increase in yield is clearly the result of our enhanced support for financial aid; the yield for students receiving financial aid has increased by 6% over the last four years

• With the University’s recent expansion of financial aid resources, 49% percent of the Class of 2026 will receive financial aid

• We expect to enroll 1,700 students in the Class of 2026 and, as a result of our strong yield, we were not able to admit any students from the waitlist this year

• Students representing the first generation in their family to attend college will comprise 15% percent of the incoming class

• 10 Ukrainian students have chosen to attend Brown, placing the country among the top 6 represented within this year’s class

• International students represent 14% of the Class, an all time high

As we look toward the year ahead, I expect two major issues will have to be addressed:

The future of our test optional policy. We will continue to study the outcomes of test optional policies, as well as the predictive ability of standardized testing. You may have seen our peer institutions moving in different directions on this issue. Harvard announced a four year pause on required testing, while MIT reinstated their testing policy. When we make a decision on this policy, it will be grounded in Brown-specific data as well as our commitment to academic excellence and diversity of perspective.

The Supreme Court of the United States has decided to hear both Students For Fair Admission (SFFA) vs. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC Chapel Hill. The SFFA lawyers claim that the universities' admission policies, guided by the precedent established in University of California Regents vs. Bakke (1978), and affirmed most recently in 2003 (Grutter v. Bollinger) and 2016 (Fisher v. University of Texas), is discriminatory 0n the bases of race and national origin. In the 44 years since the Bakke decision, many colleges and universities have used race as “one of many factors” in a non-formulaic way to more fully contextualize the details of an application. If the Supreme Court overturns Bakke and Grutter, the impact on college admission policies cannot be overstated. The case will be heard this fall, with a ruling expected in June 2023. The Office of the General Counsel is collaborating with The Ivy Plus to file an amicus brief in support of Harvard.

As President Paxson has stated, our strategic thinking process will not be generic - it will be tailor-made to the unique strengths and history of Brown. Each admission cycle brings new and unexpected challenges, opportunities to further refine an already strong process, and many moments of joy. This year will be remembered as one of great success, transition to a new steady state of operations, and optimism for the year ahead.

I look forward to sharing additional updates as we turn our attention to the Class of 2027. Thank you, and best wishes for a healthy and enjoyable summer.

Ever True,
Logan Powell

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University], March 17, 2022 — At the request of U.S. President Joe Biden, Dr. Ashish K. Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, will serve as the next White House coronavirus response coordinator. In succeeding Jeffrey Zients, Jha will lead the response of the entire U.S. government to the COVID-19 pandemic, while also advancing the nation’s global health priorities and policies.

To assume the critical role in the nation’s pandemic response and advise Biden, Jha will take a short-term leave from the School of Public Health for the temporary special assignment. The appointment begins April 5, 2022.

Biden issued a statement announcing the appointment:

“Dr. Jha is one of the leading public health experts in America, and a well-known figure to many Americans from his wise and calming public presence,” Biden said. “And as we enter a new moment in the pandemic — executing on my National COVID-19 Preparedness Plan and managing the ongoing risks from COVID — Dr. Jha is the perfect person for the job.”

Brown University President Christina H. Paxson said Jha’s appointment brings a top scholar and highly regarded Brown academic leader to White House service, offering a prominent illustration of the ways in which the University can make a positive impact on domestic and global issues of significant consequence.

“Ashish will bring to President Biden and our nation what he has brought — and will bring back — to Brown: an unrivaled commitment to improving public health equitably, effectively, creatively, with heart and a commitment to science,” Paxson said. “The work he has begun at the School of Public Health will continue, with the strong team he has recruited and the full support of the University. And it will advance even further with the benefit of this experience in national and global leadership.”

In addition to his role as dean and public health scholar, Jha is a practicing physician with deep expertise in infectious diseases. He was appointed to lead the School of Public Health in February 2020, weeks before COVID-19 arrived in full force in the U.S., and he began as dean in September 2020.

He is a globally recognized expert on pandemic preparedness and response as well as on health policy research and practice. Over the past year, Jha has participated in Congressional hearings on the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, among others. Recently, he advised the White House on the President’s national COVID-19 preparedness plan.

Jha expressed enthusiasm about how he will build upon his work at Brown in role at the White House.

“Throughout this pandemic, we have worked at Brown to improve public understanding and information, and inform policy at every level of government here and around the globe,” Jha said. “I am honored to accept President Biden’s invitation to serve and continue that work. I do so confident that the work of the Brown School of Public Health will advance around critical issues including pandemic preparedness and key initiatives we have launched and are growing, to improve understanding and policy in key public health issues, and train the next generation of public health leaders.”

Since his start as dean, Jha has worked to strengthen and grow a public health school deeply engaged with solving the world’s most challenging health problems. Under his leadership, the school has launched a new fully online master of public health degree program and academic initiatives focused on long COVID, pandemic preparedness and health misinformation. The school created a Health Equity Scholars program to expand diversity among public health leaders, increased the number of tenure-track faculty from historically underrepresented groups and — backed by record-level SPH fundraising — brought to campus as faculty and new public health scholars and leaders from a diverse array of professional backgrounds.

Provost Richard M. Locke said Brown will build on that momentum during Jha’s time at the White House, continuing to cultivate and direct resources for faculty recruitment and retention, student financial aid, facilities and academic program development.

“Ashish Jha has built on a foundation of early progress from the School of Public Health’s first decade, growing its focus on tackling the most important issues in health policy and practice, devising new ways to expand the accessibility of Brown’s public health degrees and expanding the school’s reputation exponentially,” Locke said. “As he heads to the White House to play an important role in the continued challenge of COVID-19, we look forward to building further on that momentum before we welcome him back.”

https://www.brown.edu/news/2022-03-17/jha

Brown announced November 2 that it had already surpassed the $3 billion goal set in 2015 for its BrownTogether fundraising campaign, a year ahead of schedule. Earlier, the University spelled out how some of that largesse will be used to ease the financial burden of college on middle-income households, who will no longer be docked for owning their own homes. Details:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (Brown University), Oct. 25— Brown University will make significant investments to expand financial aid and improve college access, bolstered by the extraordinary performance of the University’s endowment and the success of its BrownTogether comprehensive fundraising campaign.

In a Monday, Oct. 25, letter to the Brown community following weekend meetings of the Corporation of Brown University, President Christina H. Paxson announced initiatives in three areas. Brown will (1) significantly increase scholarships for moderate-income students, and also reduce the summer earnings expectation for high-need students; (2) move toward need-blind admissions for international students; and (3) develop a program that prepares talented students from public schools in Providence for college.

With the new investments in financial aid, Brown will fully cover tuition for families earning $125,000 or less with typical assets. In addition, students of families making less than $60,000 a year with typical assets will receive scholarships that cover all expenses— tuition, room, board and books — and additional scholarship to help support other expenses. Making major investments in financial aid to lower the cost of a Brown education for moderate-income families will further reduce obstacles for exceptionally talented students to apply to the University.

“Brown has a longstanding commitment to matriculate talented students from all income backgrounds,” Paxson said. “The University is also committed to promoting educational achievement among children from our surrounding communities. The remarkable growth in Brown’s endowment and the success of the BrownTogether campaign provide an opportunity to build on these two commitments, ensuring that the University continues to attract the best and brightest students from all over the world, and expanding college-going in Rhode Island.”

Brown will work with community partners to develop an intensive college-preparation program for cohorts of students attending public schools in Providence where levels of college attainment are below state goals, Paxson said.

And becoming fully need-blind for international students in the coming years will significantly expand the University’s ability to attract and educate the most promising international students from all socioeconomic groups. While Brown has been need-blind for domestic students for almost 20 years, the University currently has a “need-aware” policy that considers a student’s financial need in admissions decisions for international undergraduates.

“Need-blind admissions for international students will have wide-ranging positive impacts for the University and the world,” said Provost Richard M. Locke, who has led multiple committees in assessing affordability and access in Brown admissions. “It will create new opportunities for students to learn from international peers who have distinct experiences and perspectives, while also providing a Brown education for talented young people who will go on to serve their communities locally, nationally and globally.”

The new initiatives build on two decades of significant efforts to make a Brown education more accessible.

Highlights of the three new aid and access initiatives

1. Increasing financial aid scholarships for moderate-income students and decreasing summer earnings expectations:

Starting with all students enrolled for the next academic year (2022-23), Brown will change the calculation of how much a family has to contribute to pay for their child’s education. The University will eliminate the consideration of a family’s home equity as an asset when calculating a student’s available financial resources, typically translating to thousands of additional dollars in a student’s scholarship aid. The resulting increased scholarships will cover full tuition for families earning $125,000 or less a year with typical assets.

Like all Ivy League institutions, Brown offers need-based financial aid — no merit scholarships — and the University currently includes a portion of home equity as an asset when making financial aid calculations.

2. Moving toward need-blind admission for international students:

Brown will aggressively grow its financial aid budget for international undergraduate students, with the goal of becoming fully need-blind for international students for the graduating Class of 2029 (who will begin at Brown in Fall 2025). Brown will join the ranks of five other colleges and universities nationally who are need-blind for international students.

Roughly half of the cost will be financed through the greater expected payout from strong performance of the University’s endowment, and half will come from a concerted fundraising effort. Brown plans to raise about $120 million in new endowment to enable the phase-in of need-blind international admissions over a four-year period.

3. Launching an intensive college-preparation program for Providence public schools:

The State of Rhode Island has set an ambitious goal to ensure that 70% of Rhode Islanders hold a college degree or certificate by 2025. According to data from Rhode Island Kids Count, Providence is home to approximately 18% of the state’s children, yet only 74% graduate from high school and, of these, only 54% enroll in college the year after graduating from high school.

“This academic year, we will plan a new initiative that will focus on preparing cohorts of students from Providence to enter selective four-year degree programs after high school graduation,” Paxson said. “This initiative will complement the Rhode Island Promise scholarship, which provides every Rhode Island student coming right out of high school with two years of college tuition-free at the Community College of Rhode Island.”

Brown will work with community partners to develop, fund and lead the college-preparation program for cohorts of students attending public schools in Providence, and the program could later be extended to other parts of Rhode island’s urban core, Paxson said. The initiative will become part of an “ecosystem of efforts” with other community programs, recognizing that early interventions prior to high school are essential for creating a successful college pipeline.

Financial performance enables ongoing commitment to access

In addition to new fundraising to raise endowed funds for the phase-in of need-blind international admissions, the three new initiatives will be supported by increases in the Brown endowment’s annual contributions to the operating budget.

The endowment generated a 51.5% return during Fiscal Year 2021, closing the year with an endowment market value of $6.9 billion. Because the endowment’s contribution to the operating budget is based on the endowment’s average market value over the previous three years, the current $194 million that the endowment’s investment returns contributed to the operating budget in Fiscal Year 2021 is expected to steadily increase in each of the coming years.

The annual payout rate ranges from 4.5% to 5.5% of the average market value, increasing the resources for the three new financial aid and access initiatives over time.

“The University has an enduring commitment to ensuring that talented young people can afford to come to Brown, regardless of their socioeconomic background,” Paxson said. “We are fortunate that strong financials provide us with a rare opportunity to make new investments in cultivating the next generation of leaders.”

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University], Feb. 28, 2022 — Students and recent graduates of Brown University earned more Fulbright scholarships than those from any other university in the nation during the 2021-22 academic year, according to data released by the U.S. State Department on Monday, Feb. 28.

Twenty-nine Brown undergraduates, graduate students and recent alumni were offered Fulbright awards for this year, with 27 of them accepting. Awarded by the U.S. State Department, the grants fund research or teaching abroad for up to one year.

Brown has ranked among the top student Fulbright producers in the U.S. throughout the last decade, and this year marks the fourth time the University has earned the highest spot on the list, in addition to 2016, 2017 and 2018. In 2019 and 2020, Brown earned the No. 2 rank.

Brown’s consistent placement among the top producers illustrates an intersection of the values that Brown and the Fulbright program share, including a focus on making a positive impact across the world, said Dean of the College Rashid Zia.

“We are immensely proud of our student Fulbright awardees,” Zia said. “Their accomplishments illustrate the transformative impact of a Brown education, in which students arrive with openness, generosity and a vision to confront pressing global challenges, and leave with the knowledge and relationships necessary to confidently execute that vision. Both as Fulbright fellows and beyond, their innovative teaching and research projects have equipped them to be collaborative, creative thinkers and doers, and we can’t wait to see how their work will impact the world.”

Fulbright students are selected for awards based on a variety of factors including the strength of the application, personal qualifications, academic record and the extent to which the candidate and their project will help to advance the Fulbright mission of mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.

Linda Dunleavy, associate dean of the College, said the Fellowships office supports students in the application process and devotes significant energy to encouraging them to consider Fulbright experiences after earning their Brown degrees.

"I'm proud of our creative, optimistic and brave students who embraced the promise of cultural exchange and mutual understanding across differences during a time when the world was turning inward in response to COVID-19," Dunleavy said. "It's exciting that so many Brown alums and graduate students are in countries around the world teaching, pursuing research, and studying as ambassadors of the U.S. and Brown University."

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program has promoted international peace through intellectual and cultural exchange since its founding in 1946. The program funds approximately 2,000 recent graduates and current graduate students annually to teach and conduct research in 140 countries around the world.

While applicants learn of the awards during the spring, the Fulbright programs publishes data each February on the top producers of Fulbright scholars and students.

Advancing career paths through cross-cultural exchange

Brown’s 2021-22 Fulbright winners are now midway through their year teaching or conducting research in 17 countries across Asia, Latin America, Europe and Africa. Teaching placements include elementary schools, high schools and universities, where awardees are providing classroom instruction and sharing cultural perspectives between the U.S. and their host countries. Research award recipients are pursuing projects in a wide range of academic fields — from political economics to flood management, genetics to law — on four continents.

For recent graduates, Fulbright fellowships provide opportunities to pursue projects that extend the courses of study they pursued while at Brown — all while serving as cultural ambassadors abroad.

Last fall, Class of 2021 graduate Rainbow Chen moved to the Netherlands, where she is advancing her career in education as an English teaching assistant at ROC Amsterdam. At the vocational school, Chen helps to teach English classes in which the students are primarily cooks, pastry chefs and people training to enter international hospitality or culinary industries.

“There’s really no equivalent of the school I work for in America,” Chen said. “I think that’s a really fulfilling part of my experience here that forces me to get out of my comfort zone and operate in a system that’s completely different from what I’m used to.”

Chen’s experiences at Brown — particularly work with the Swearer Center and Youth in Action, an after-school program in Providence that supports local students of color — have helped her to develop a teaching approach focused on encouraging students to share their own stories.

“I’ve been told very often that I’m bringing a lot of unique methods of education in ways that teachers here aren’t usually trained to do,” she said. “It’s allowed me to build stronger relationships with the students who realize that maybe these methods are better suited for them, or at least they feel more seen and more heard.”

The general openness of Brown students also had an impact on how Chen has approached her Fulbright experience. Coming to Brown from a non-traditional high school in Vermont was “almost like moving to another country,” she said, but learning about her peers and opening up to them was invaluable in creating lasting bonds, broadening social and professional horizons, and learning to navigate life as a global citizen; it’s how she approaches both meeting new people in the Netherlands and engaging with her students.

“I want to try to help influence and change the biases that we, as Americans, have earlier on so that less harm is done when my students get to my age and beyond,” she said. “I’m constantly checking myself, and I always want to be a better person. I want that for my students, too.”

The experience of moving to and working in the Netherlands hasn’t been without its challenges, especially with a recent significant spike in COVID-19 cases — the most the country has seen to date. But teaching at ROC Amsterdam is something Chen said she’ll value for the rest of her life. Her mentors emphasize mutually beneficial relationships, and Chen said the ones she’s formed with her students and fellow educators have brought her immense joy and warmth during the Netherlands’ sun-less winter months.

For her birthday, Chen’s colleagues and students staged a few surprises — cake, cards and a necklace featuring a charm of Amsterdam’s iconic canal homes that her students had picked out. Chen still holds onto those cards, including one in particular: “It says ‘Happy birthday to the best teacher assistant person ever,’ and ‘assistant’ was spelled incorrectly, but I just couldn’t bring myself to correct them,” she said. “I think that memory will always be a core part of who I am and my experience here. They value me a lot, and I value them a lot.”

Brown’s 2021-22 undergraduate and recent graduate Fulbright scholars include:

• Paul Abrams (Sweden)

• Sara Alavi (United Kingdom)

• Morgan Awner (Spain)

• Wassa Bagayoko (Cote d'Ivoire)

• Jane Bradley (Spain)

• Sarah Buchanan (Spain)

• Rainbow Chen (Netherlands)

• Ethan Franzblau (Austria)

• Mae Fullerton (Taiwan)

• Alexis Giff (Switzerland)

• Claire Heiden (Sri Lanka)

• Christien Hernandez (Spain)

• Christine Lee (South Korea)

• Hannah Lee (South Korea)

• Jenny Lee (Vietnam)

• Cynthia Lu (Spain)

• Dylan Majsiak (Mexico)

• Jessica Ojeda (Spain)

• Elizabeth Rolfes (Uzbekistan)

• Nikita Shah (India)

• Tara Srinivas (Spain)

• Sarah Van Horn (Brazil)

• Albin Wells (Netherlands)

• Jamila Wilkinson (Trinidad and Tobago)

Brown’s 2021-22 graduate and medical student Fulbright scholars are:

• Scarlett Bergam (South Africa)

• James Williams (United Kingdom)

• Stephanie Wong (Mexico)

https://www.brown.edu/news/2022-02-28/fulbright

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University], Dec. 9, 2021—A $25 million gift from life sciences entrepreneur and investor Pablo Legorreta and his wife, Almudena, will advance a plan to transform Brown University’s recently launched cancer center into a world-class cancer center located in Rhode Island.

The gift will rename the Cancer Center at Brown University as the Legorreta Cancer Center. It will also position the center to work toward National Cancer Institute designation, the highest federal rating a cancer center can achieve. NCI designation currently recognizes 71 centers across the nation that meet rigorous standards for state-of-the-art research focused on developing new approaches to preventing, diagnosing and treating cancer.

The $25 million investment in the center will enable its leaders to recruit world-class physician-scientists, leading investigators and other experts, launch pilot research projects, and build an infrastructure that includes the expertise, equipment and support to bring basic science discoveries, new technologies and other innovations to clinical therapies and interventions to patients facing cancer diagnoses.

Pablo Legorreta is the founder and chief executive officer of Royalty Pharma—the largest buyer of biopharmaceutical royalties and a leading funder of innovation across the biopharmaceutical research and development ecosystem—and a trustee of Brown’s governing body, the Corporation of Brown University.

“I’m a passionate believer in the ability of science to advance progress and facilitate change,” Pablo Legorreta said. “It’s a privilege to be able to support the Brown cancer center’s mission of advancing scientific research to find better ways to treat cancer and improve patient care.”

Brown launched the cancer center in 2020 to harness the cancer research, translational science and clinical trials happening at the University and its affiliated hospitals, and to encourage new collaborations with the potential to produce breakthroughs.

Dr. Wafik S. El-Deiry became inaugural director of the cancer center upon its 2020 launch and has worked to build new research collaborations across the medical school and its affiliated hospitals with a particular focus on developing novel insights on the types of cancer most prevalent in Rhode Island.

For example, El-Deiry said, Rhode Island has high rates of bladder, lung, prostate, breast and endometrial, brain and certain gastrointestinal cancers.

https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-12-09/legorreta

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University], November 12, 2021—At the age of 89, Manfred Steiner is finally what he always wanted to be: a physicist.

After successfully defending his dissertation this fall, Steiner will receive his Ph.D. from Brown University’s Department of Physics in February. For the Brown graduate student, it is the realization of a lifelong dream—albeit one that was temporarily interrupted by a 30-plus-year career in medicine.

“It’s an old dream that starts in my childhood,” Steiner said. “I always wanted to become a physicist.”

Now that he’s done it, he plans to continue working with his advisor, physics professor Brad Marston, to publish research based on his dissertation, titled “Corrections to the Geometrical Interpretation of Bosonization.

To say that Steiner’s path to a Ph.D. in physics was not a traditional one would be an understatement. As a young man, Steiner fled the chaos of his native Vienna as World War II ended and eventually made his way to the U.S.

“I knew physics was my true passion by the time I graduated high school,” he said. “But after the war, my uncle and my mother advised me to take up medicine because it would be a better choice in these turbulent after-war years.”

Although he excelled at and loved physics, Steiner followed his family’s advice.

“My uncle was a physician—an ear, nose and throat specialist—and he had taught in the United States for a while,” Steiner said. “He taught plastic surgery—showing people how to make noses smaller or how to straighten them out. My family’s advice was that medicine was the best path for me. So I reconciled myself, ‘they are older and wiser,’ and I followed their advice.”

Steiner proceeded to earn an M.D. in 1955 from the University of Vienna and soon after made his way to Washington, D.C., where he finished his initial training in internal medicine. He next began a traineeship in hematology at Tufts University under Dr. William Damashek, who the American Society of Hematology describes as “the preeminent American clinical hematologist of his time.” The traineeship included a three-year training in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry there in 1967.

Steiner moved to Rhode Island when he was offered a position as a hematologist in the newly established Program in Medicine at Brown University (now the Warren Alpert Medical School). In 1968, he was appointed an assistant professor of medicine, working primarily in research. He was promoted to full professor in 1978. In 1985 Steiner was appointed head of the hematology section of the medical school, a position he held until 1994.

When he was approaching retirement, an associate of Steiner’s became chief of hematology at the University of North Carolina, Greenville, and asked Steiner to join him to establish a research program in hematology. Steiner went on to direct that program until 2000, when he retired from medicine and returned to Rhode Island.

All the while, Steiner’s passion for physics never left him.

“Even when I was in medical school I went at times to lectures by a renowned physicist Walter Thirring,” Steiner said. “His lectures always fascinated me. I was captivated by quantum physics and wished I could go into more detail in this.”

That deep dive into quantum mechanics would have to wait, however. “You cannot do medicine halfway,” Steiner said. “You really have to dedicate your life to it.”

But throughout his long career in medicine, Steiner says he never stopped thinking about physics.

“Physics was always a part of me,” he said, “and when I retired from medicine and I was approaching age 70, I decided to enter the world of physics.”

Steiner started taking physics classes at MIT, but found the demands of commuting to Boston overwhelming, so he decided to transfer to the program in physics at Brown, where he had spent a good part of his academic life.

He found the Brown physics department a welcoming environment for a late-in-life learner. Teachers were “delighted to have me in class,” Steiner said, and his fellow students liked him and treated him well.

Steiner did not consciously set out to earn a third doctoral degree when he began his studies at Brown. “Originally I just wanted to take classes, doing something that helped my mind and was interesting to me,” Steiner said. But by Spring 2007, Steiner had completed enough classes to be admitted to the Graduate School as a Ph.D. degree candidate.

After admission to the Ph.D. program, Steiner continued his coursework at the graduate level and set out to look for a dissertation adviser. Initially, he considered nuclear physics, but thought it might take him away from his family, so he approached Brad Marston, a condensed matter theorist who also works on climate science. Marston says he did not work on nuclear theory, “so I gave Manfred a project that was the closest to high-energy physics that I did, which was bosonization.”

Marston recalls initially being uncertain when approached by a septuagenarian student about serving as a dissertation advisor. “To be honest, I was skeptical because people do not usually do physics, especially theoretical physics, at an advanced age,” Marston said. “But in a moment of weakness, I agreed and said ‘yes.’ I knew his story, and I was very sympathetic to his desire to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming a physicist.”

With that, Steiner began working on his dissertation with Marston advising. Throughout the process, Steiner says he made many new friends, especially the faculty who served on his dissertation committee, including professors Jim Valles and Antal Jevicki.

He also tackled a very difficult problem. In the everyday world there are two types of particles: fermions and bosons. Particles have an angular momentum, or “spin.” Particles with half-integer spins are fermions and particles with whole integer spins are bosons. While this might seem like a small difference, it has enormous consequences.

“Electrons are fermions and photons are bosons,” Marston said. “But there are certain circumstances under which you can characterize a fermion as a boson. That is what is known as bosonization, and there are certain advantages to doing that. Usually people do this for one-dimensional problems, but for years I had been working with people like the late Tony Houghton trying to extend this to higher dimensions, such as 2D or 3D metals. We had some success with this, but also discovered some limitations, so I gave Manfred the job of trying to move beyond those limitations. That was a challenging project. I did not give Manfred an easy project.”

Valles says he considers Steiner an inspirational figure.

“I remember meeting Manfred in the hallway when he was taking undergraduate classes,” Valles recalled. “He was unabashed about wanting to do physics and having wanted to do it all his life. His excitement about physics as someone who had such a stellar career in another field felt really affirming.”

Of his dissertation, Valles says Steiner “did an amazing job describing the march of physics in the context of bosonization. He believes in the human mind’s capacity to advance and create knowledge. Seeing him do it was incredibly inspiring, enabling and empowering to me as a physicist.”

Having successfully defended his thesis and completed all requirements for a Ph.D. in physics, Steiner says he’s ecstatic.

“It feels really good,” he said. “I am really on top of the world.” And despite this being his third doctoral degree, it’s particularly special to him. “This Ph.D. is the one that I most cherish because it’s the one that I was striving for my whole life.”

And Steiner is not prepared to rest on his laurels. He is currently reworking part of his dissertation for publication and plans to continue his theoretical physics work.

“Even though I am old, I would like to continue with physics,” he said. “And even after writing and publishing this paper, I want to continue my research.”

That perseverance is consistent with Steiner’s approach to life, and he believes he still has more to offer. “I always tried to keep my brain sharp,” he said. “Physics certainly helped me do that.”

Steiner admits he sometimes wonders how his life might have gone differently if he had not heeded his mother and uncle’s advice as a young man. “I do sometimes wonder how things might have gone differently,” he said. “I do not really regret it now. It was a good life and I made many great friends. It felt very good, particularly after I got my Ph.D. and worked in academic medicine. But physics always lurked in the background.”

When asked what those approaching retirement age should do, Steiner said everybody needs to make their own choices. But for him, the choice was clear.

“I could not imagine spending my life playing golf all the time,” Steiner said. “I wanted to do something that keeps my mind active. But it is a matter of whatever you want to do. If you have a dream, follow it. Sometimes that dream may never have been verbalized, it may be buried in the subconscious. It is important not to waste your older days. There is a lot of brainpower in older people and I think it can be of enormous benefit to younger generations. Older people have experience and many times history repeats itself.”

As for young people choosing between following a passion and taking a more conventional path in life?

“I think young people should follow their dreams whatever they are,” Steiner said. “They will always regret it if they do not follow their dreams.”

https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-11-12/steiner

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University], November 11, 2020—One year after Brown University launched a plan to double the number of U.S. military veterans enrolled as undergraduates by 2024, a new $20 million gift marks a major step toward the goal of providing full financial support to current and future generations of student veterans.

The generous gift from Joseph P. Healey — a U.S. Army veteran, son of a Brown alumna, parent to two Brown students and co-founder of investment management firm HealthCor—will create a permanent endowment for a scholarship for veterans. The gift will also establish another scholarship for students in Brown’s Resumed Undergraduate Education program, which has welcomed many military veterans to campus over the last decade.

Brown University President Christina H. Paxson announced the gift at the University’s annual Veterans Day ceremony on Wednesday, Nov. 11, held virtually this year given limits on gathering sizes because of the pandemic. [See full video, below.] Healey’s gift will be instrumental in supporting currently enrolled military veterans, she said, and inspiring many others to pursue undergraduate degrees at Brown.

“As the University has expanded military partnerships and more veterans have pursued undergraduate degrees at Brown, we have pledged to expand support for these exceptional students,” Paxson said. “In doing so, we honor the sacrifices they have made to uphold our freedoms and strengthen the academic experience of every member of our community, which benefits from the unique perspectives and experiences our student veterans contribute. This generous gift from Joe Healey and his family marks a major step toward fulfilling our promise.”

A $20 million gift from Joseph P. Healey — a U.S. Army veteran, son of a Brown alumna, parent to two Brown students and co-founder of investment management firm HealthCor — will create a permanent endowment for a scholarship for veterans.

Of the total $20 million gift, $10 million will fund the Elaine and Joseph Healey Scholarship for Veterans, creating a permanent endowment that will prove essential in the University’s effort to eliminate all out-of-pocket costs toward undergraduate tuition and fees for undergraduate student veterans for the long term.

The additional $10 million, a bequest, will establish a scholarship for students in Brown’s RUE program, which enrolls students who delayed their undergraduate study due to family commitments, financial concerns, health issues, military service, employment opportunities or compelling needs to explore other paths. In honor of Healey’s mother, a Brown alumna who earned her degree through the RUE program in 1980, the scholarship will provide support for RUE students, with preference given to student veterans.

Healey said during the Veterans Day ceremony that he hopes his gift provides student veterans the opportunity to receive a world-class education free from financial obligations that, for many, would be hard to meet.

“A Brown degree is a ticket that opens doors for the rest of your life,” Healey said. “To give veterans who have served our country a chance to attend Brown — the way that Brown gave that chance to my mom, and the military gave a chance to me — was a unique opportunity to return an investment that was made in my mother and in me.”

Healey’s gift follows multiple initiatives in recent years at Brown to recruit veterans and expand affiliations with Reserve Officers Training Corps programs, and comes one year into a five-year plan to double the number of student veterans enrolled as undergraduates. To achieve its enrollment goal, the University launched a number of actions in 2019 to support veterans, both during the application process and after they matriculate.

Beginning with the Class of 2024, Brown extended its need-blind admission policy to include prospective students who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces; made standardized test scores optional for all undergraduate applicants with U.S. military service; and strengthened recruiting through a partnership with Service to School, which counsels veterans on admission to highly selective colleges and graduate schools. The University also increased financial support for veterans, replacing all family contributions with scholarship aid and boosting Yellow Ribbon awards,which fully eliminated all out-of-pocket costs toward tuition and fees.

Taken together, these steps directly address key challenges that veterans encounter when returning to school after military service, said Kimberly Millette, program director for Brown’s Office Military-Affiliated Students.

“Some veterans come from low-income and first-generation households that typically have fewer financial resources available to make college attainable,” Millette said. “And after years spent completing their service commitments, they no longer have access to the support systems that high schools offer to college applicants. By removing obstacles to admission and relieving financial burden, Brown is demonstrating its commitment to increasing and supporting the student veteran community on campus.”

In benefiting U.S. military veterans and RUE students resuming study after interruptions to formal education, Healey’s gift will support programs and institutions that laid the foundations for his own professional successes.

Before he was a parent to two Brown undergraduates, he was the son of one. As a child, he participated in activities on campus while his mother—a RUE student who was raising Healey and his brother on her own—completed her bachelor’s degree. After graduating in 1980, his mother fielded a wealth of new professional opportunities.

“Brown gave my mom her chance at a second life,” Healey said.

When it was time for Healey to consider his own college education, military service offered a way to earn a bachelor’s degree despite limited financial resources. As a student at Boston University and member of the school’s U.S. Army ROTC chapter, Healey studied biomedical engineering.

After graduation, he served as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps, where he was stationed at the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., from 1988 to 1992. Healey spent his days helping Walter Reed’s world-class pathologists connect their medical equipment to PCs and online networks—a new venture in the late 1980s, when the Internet was in its early stages—and spent his nights attending graduate school at the University of Maryland, where he earned a master’s degree in technology management in 1993.

“The military is near and dear to me,” Healey said. “It gave me the chance to have an education I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.”

U.S. Marine Corps veteran Katie Yetter, a junior cognitive neuroscience concentrator at Brown and program coordinator in the Office of Military-Affiliated Students, said that with support from donors like Healey, the University is making clear that Brown can be an academic home for student veterans.

“Brown is showing the 18-year-old in boot camp who has a dream to go to college, like I did, that it is 100% possible for them to do it. They don't have to worry about how they're going to get the funding to pay for their education and whether it’s possible for a veteran to get accepted into a place like Brown.”

The student veteran community has already seen a positive impact. The Class of 2024—the first to be admitted with the new need-blind, test-optional policies for veterans in place—includes 15 veterans of the U.S. Armed Services, which is more than double that of the previous year, with nine applying through Brown’s new partnership with Service to School. The overall population of student veterans on campus increased this year by 24%, from 21 to 26 in total.

https://www.brown.edu/news/2020-11-11/veterans

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University], October 22 — Dr. Mukesh K. Jain, an accomplished academic and health care leader and a physician-scientist who specializes in cardiovascular medicine, has been appointed dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown University.

Jain serves currently as chief academic officer at University Hospitals health system in Cleveland and vice dean for medical sciences at Case Western Reserve University. In joining Brown, he will lead the Division of Biology and Medicine, which encompasses the Warren Alpert Medical School, four biological science departments, 14 clinical departments and two hybrid departments. He will also manage the medical school’s relationships with nine affiliated hospitals.

In his new role, Jain will serve as the strategic and academic leader of biological sciences programs, biomedical research and medical education at Brown. Key responsibilities include supporting expansion of research activity across the Division of Biology and Medicine, with a vision to advance Brown’s position in the top tier of medical schools and basic science and clinical departments. Integral to his role will be sustaining a culture of ongoing engagement with learners at every level, and promoting and enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion among all members of the community in the execution of education, research and clinical care missions.

Jain said that a range of factors piqued his interest in Brown, including the Warren Alpert Medical School’s reputation for outstanding contributions to science and medicine and track record in training top physicians.

“I hope to leverage my experiences in building robust basic and translational research programs that are aligned and integrated with excellence in clinical care to help the Warren Alpert Medical School and its clinical affiliates achieve even greater impact in advancing standard of care to improve human health,” he said. “And across all biomedical programs, I will work to ensure that Brown is recruiting and retaining the brightest from all backgrounds and is at the tip of the national spear in cultivating the next generation of physicians and scientists.”

As a biomedical researcher, Jain is internationally recognized for studies that established a central role for a family of genetic factors in cardiovascular biology, innate immunity and metabolism. He is the founding director of Case Western Reserve’s Cardiovascular Research Institute.

Among the priorities Jain will bring to Brown is advancing the medical school’s commitment to training physician-scientists — doctors who treat patients clinically and engage also in biomedical research. The Warren Alpert Medical School is home to a thriving M.D./Ph.D. program, which Jain said is a hallmark for any world-class medical school with a commitment to translational science.

Honors include election to the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and the Association of University Cardiologists. In 2017, Jain and five colleagues (including two Nobel laureates) founded the Physician-Scientist Support Foundation, a nonprofit that strives to build a sustainable and diverse physician-scientist workforce through financial and research support for fundamental discoveries that improve human health.

Jain earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Buffalo and his M.D. from the University of Buffalo School of Medicine. After finishing his residency in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, he completed fellowships in research and cardiovascular disease at Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Jain’s appointment follows a comprehensive search process led by a committee that included faculty, staff and administrators as well as student representatives from the Warren Alpert Medical School and Brown’s Graduate School. He will begin as dean effective March 1, 2022, serving as a member of the Provost’s Senior Academic Deans committee and of the President’s Cabinet.

Jain will succeed Dr. Jack A. Elias, Brown’s dean of medicine and biological sciences for eight years, who is transitioning to the role of senior advisor for health affairs and working with University leadership to advance the development of Brown’s relationships with Lifespan and Care New England as efforts toward an integrated academic health system continue.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University], January 28, 2021 — Brown University alumna Janet Yellen was sworn in Tuesday, Jan. 26, as U.S. treasury secretary, becoming the first woman in the 232-year history of the U.S. Department of the Treasury to hold the position. Yellen was sworn in by Vice President Kamala Harris and will serve as a direct advisor to President Joseph Biden and his cabinet on economic issues.

She is the first woman to have held each of the top economic positions in federal government, having previously served as chair of the Federal Reserve and chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.

After Biden confirmed Yellen’s nomination as treasury secretary on Nov. 30, she took to Twitter with a message about her priorities in her first-ever tweet:

“We face great challenges as a country right now,” she wrote. “To recover, we must restore the American dream — a society where each person can rise to their potential and dream even bigger for their children. As Treasury Secretary, I will work every day towards rebuilding that dream for all.”

Brown University President Christina H. Paxson, an economist, lauded her nomination as it was reported in the days before Biden’s announcement.

“We are very proud that a Brown alumna is expected to be nominated to lead the Treasury Department in the new administration,” Paxson said at the time. “As a distinguished economist with a long and strong record of public service, Janet Yellen is superbly qualified for this position.”

Yellen earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Brown in 1967 after studies at Pembroke College and was awarded an honorary degree at the University’s 230th Commencement in 1998.

At her U.S. Senate confirmation hearing testimony, held virtually on Jan. 19, Yellen stressed her intent to help Americans recover from financial losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic and rebuild the economy to make it more competitive and prosperous: “Without further action, we risk a longer, more painful recession now and longer-term scarring of the economy later,” she said.

The Senate confirmed Yellen by a vote of 84 to 15.

In 2017, Yellen was a featured speaker at the University’s 125 Years of Women at Brown Conference, where she outlined the crucial role of women in the U.S. economy and the barriers that continue to prevent many women from achieving full success and equality, to the detriment of the economy as a whole. After the address, Paxson bestowed upon Yellen the highest award a Brown president can give, the President’s Medal.

Paxson commended Yellen, “for your wise advancement and application of knowledge of markets, policymaking and economic behavior to the public good, and for the way you have in your life and work reflected the shared values of Brown University, the collaboration we encourage, the intellectual curiosity we foster and the impact we aspire to through our service.”

Yellen’s confirmation follows the appointment of Brown Class of 1986 Ph.D. graduate Maria Zuber as co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in the Biden administration.

https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-01-28/yellen

Brown University is at the nexus of generating scholarly research aimed at illuminating the often hidden structures and forces that shape our world, then transforming this knowledge into meaningful societal change. Prominent in this effort are Professor B. Anthony Bogues, director of the Center for the Center for the Study and Slavery and Justice, and Professor Tricia Rose, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. In January 2022 they took part in a special “virtual event” presented by Alumni Relations, with Provost Richard Locke serving at moderator.

You can watch it by way of this link:

https://alumni-friends.brown.edu/news/2022-02-07/empowering-change-recap

The transcript is below:

Provost Richard Locke:

Good evening and welcome. It's really great to see there's so much interest in the broader Brown community in this very important topic. My name is Richard Locke. I'm a professor of political science and international and public affairs at Brown and I serve as Provost. And I am thrilled to be here tonight to be able to host this really exciting event.

I'm really excited to be able to moderate this discussion between two of Brown's top academic leaders, Professor Tony Bogues, who serves as the director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, and professor Tricia Rose, who serves as the director for the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. They are two of the top scholars in their fields. They are excellent colleagues and wonderful friends.

And I'm also very excited to be able to share this event with over 1,500 alumni, parents, students, and friends who have registered for this event from around the world, including people from our most recent graduates to people who graduated from what we call the greatest generation. So let me talk to you a little bit about the two centers and then about the wonderful speakers that we have tonight, and then a bit about how we're going to structure this evening.

So let me start with the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. This was established in 1986 as one of the nation's earliest academic centers dedicated to research, scholarship, and academic exchanges on issues of race and ethnicity in this country. The center at Brown today is a vibrant intellectual home with a wide network of faculty, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates visitors who are all coming together to actually engage in a host of activities.

Some of them are exhibits, some of them are lecture series, informal gettogethers, dissertation workshops, doing incredibly exciting and cutting-edge research on what I see as one of the most pressing, if not the most pressing issue of our times, which is the study of race and ethnicity in this country, and how to use that study to combat racism.

The Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice was officially established in 2013, but I think many of you on this call will remember that it traces its origins to the steering committee on slavery and justice, which was appointed by President Ruth Simmons in 2003 and delivered its final report in 2006, and Professor Bogues was on that steering committee.

Now that final report recommended, among various things, that the university create a center that would focus on research and teaching, on issues related to slavery and other forms of historic and contemporary injustice, as well as struggles against them. And the center has done exactly that and has emerged as not only one of the country's leading centers in this field, but actually one of the world's leading centers in this field and collaborating with a network of other centers, museums, institutes, and universities doing this very, very important work.

Among the many exhibits and projects, visitors, et cetera, that take place of the center is also this wonderful walking tour of the slavery and its legacy that takes place here in Providence. And next time you are in Providence, I highly recommend this to you. We will chat out, if you haven't already received them, the links to both of these centers. I can't really do justice to the wealth of activity that's taking place at both of them.

As I said, both of these centers have emerged as leading centers of intellectual activity, not just at Brown, but in the country. And they are actually setting the path, intellectual path, policy path, action oriented path in this country for addressing these important issues, which as I said, are among the most important of our times. So now let me tell you a little bit about our speakers.

Tricia Rose currently serves as the Chancellor's Professor of Africana studies, as well as the associate dean of the faculty for special initiatives and of course, as the director for the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. She specializes in 20th century African American culture and politics, social thought, popular culture and gender issues.

She's an incredibly prolific author, numerous books, and many, many different articles. Among her most well known are Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy, and more recently, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop--and Why It Matters. She is currently working on a very, very important book on systemic racism in America.

Tony Bogues is the Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory, a professor of Africana studies and the director of course, of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. He is also a faculty fellow at the Watson Institute for International Public Affairs. Tony is a major figure in the field of Africana intellectual history and political theory and one of the leading intellectual historians of the Caribbean.

Professor Bogues is the author of four books and four edited volumes and has written numerous articles in the fields of intellectual history, political thought, literary and cultural studies, as well as Caribbean and African art. So it's really a pleasure to be able to convene these two wonderful colleagues and scholars of Brown and engage in a wonderful conversation with them.

The way that we're going to proceed is to start with a press presentation from Professor Bogues then that will be followed with a brief presentation from Professor Rose, and then we'll open it up to a question and answer discussion. Many of you have already sent in questions prior to the event as part of the registration so I'm going to kick off our Q&A session by reading of those. But then we will be collecting other questions through the chat and I'll be reading those. So with that, let me turn to Professor Bogues.

Professor Anthony Bogues:

Thank you very much, Provost Locke. First, I want to begin by thanking Mary Ward and her team for putting together this program, as well as to thank Provost Locke whose advocacy resulted in the program and also thanked my colleague, Professor Rose for agreeing to join us, join the program so that we can have a conversation. I want to make three points. They are primarily historical points.

And because they're historical points, they have critical consequences for our contemporary world and therefore, simultaneously may trouble how we think about the relationship between history and the present, where we think about history as only something in the past, rather than seeing history as part of a living presence of how the past is a presence within the present, acting as an element of structuration within our time.

So what are the three points? The first one is this: Racial slavery and European colonialism made the modern world. It did so in many ways, but I want to isolate a few. First is that it structured and made the modern world through the business of economics, that there was no issue or no matter and processes of accumulation that occurred in the making of the modern world from the 1500s onwards without that of Black labor.

The text of people like Eric Williams in 1944 to recent texts of people like Walter Johnson and Sven Beckert on the cotton kingdom illustrates how Black labor in the Americas was central to the processes of accumulation, to the creation of economic wealth that shapes the modern world. But this is not something that is new actually, although the historiography today seems to want to make it new.

From 1935, people like W. E. B. Du Bois in this book on Black Reconstruction made this point about the ways in which black labor, specifically speaking about America, was central to the process of capital and economic accumulation. All of this has deep implications. Firstly, that one, you can't think about the history of capitalism or its economic system without not thinking about what some colleagues have called racial capitalism.

But sometimes more important, I think that you cannot think about the contemporary configuration of economics, not economic life, without thinking about the relationship between class, race and gender obviously, and the ways in which poverty and the questions of inequality mark economic and social lives, and therefore that we need to trace back these marks to the historical consequences of racial slavery. So that's my first point, how racial slavery and European colonialism shape the modern world and continue to structure the worlds that we live in today.

My second point is this, that racism, we are not talking now specifically anti-Black racism, I'm just saying racism generally, racism was remade by racial slavery into anti-Black racism. And what do I mean here? We now have the historical evidence that there are racial orders in Western world, in the Mediterranean, in Liberia, in parts of Northern Africa and that these racial orders also included antisemitism.

But these racial orders were also constructed around issues of religion around issues of geographical difference, a certain kind of othering. But there were two things about these racial orders. First, they were not in perpetuity. In other words, the social structures in these societies were fluid so that people could move in and out of a certain kind of position that was initially made, determined by race.

And secondly, if a person was enslaved in this kind of society, he or she did not have... was not enslaved in perpetuity. And it means also that his or her progeny did not necessarily be slaves. What racial slavery did in Atlantic slave trade was that it transformed these racial orders from just being racial orders that were based either on religion or a different kind of othering into anti-Blackness.

And by transforming racial orders into anti-Blackness, what it did was the following: Firstly, it fixed upon Black people this position of inferiority and enslavement so that really what then happened is that you became to be Black meant to be a slave, to be enslaved meant that you were Black. Secondly, it also made the business of slavery one that was in perpetuity, which means that what then happened is that your offspring was always a slave.

And then thirdly, it created forms of white supremacy. And then this I think becomes really very distinctive, because what is important is that the creation of anti-black racism, not now just race, but an anti-black racial order is deeply connected to a global order so that the Colombian voyagers of 1492 therefore inaugurated a certain kind of work, inaugurated a world in which anti-blackness became one of the governing orders of the day.

What I'd also mentioned, the history of thought, is that things like natural history, when the processes of what some people have called regarding the processes of religion began to take place and the invention of the human as a figure begins to emerge in thought, is that this invention of the figure emerges in a context of racial slavery and colonialism.

And so in that particular context, the Black was not human and indigenous people were seen as natural man in a particular ladder of civilization of who was civilized and who could not be civilized. This basis therefore of the Black racism thus did something else; it made black people disposable and created various human classification schemes, which today still govern our thought and govern quite frankly, subliminally sometimes the ways we think about human beings.

All this means is that anti-blackness is not just simply an ideology, is not simply a cultural formation of significance, is not just about the sociological form, that it is quite frankly, a kind of philosophical anthropological frame for who is human and for who is not human. My third point: To confront this particular history of racial slavery is to confront the foundations of anti-black racism and to confront white supremacy.

But to do this, it also means that we have to confront a series of foundations or questions about America itself. For us therefore at the center, both our scholarly research, as well as our public humanities work is really about finding ways, creating platforms of critical interventions into the historical narratives which undergird our imaginaries of our history and of who we are as Americans.

What I hope to do is by puncturing these historical narratives is to make a difference, to make a difference by creating critical scholarship that actually will make a difference. That's the heart of what we try to do at the center. And therefore for us, the question of history is not now a history of the past but it's thinking about how in fact, the present itself carries within it forms of history that we need to begin to tackle and to confront if we want to transform the American society into something else. Thanks very much for listening to me, and I now turn over to my colleague Professor Rose.

Professor Tricia Rose:

Fantastic, Tony. Thank you very much. It's good to see you. And that's a wonderful sort of foundational presentation about the question of not only the past itself, but the past and the present and our understanding and willingness to confront it in a variety of ways and make the past in a sense, different based on our present choices. I'm really delighted to be here. I'm incredibly excited to see so many of you join this first event of its kind.

And I want to thank Mary and the entire office of alumni relations, also advancement, who've been part of this event. And of course my dear colleague and Provost, Rick Locke, who's been a great supporter of both of our centers and has worked tirelessly to really dramatically improve and complexify our understanding of these issues on campus in terms of policy and scholarship.

Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, as Professor Locke mentioned, begins in 1986, and it evolves over time in a variety of directions. Over the past decade, I have worked to do a number of things in the recent years to bring it to the center of sort of intellectual focus on campus. One is to really create a hub for intellectual engagement on race in America and the other is to provide public events and invite scholars who are experts, but who are also accessible and who address issues from the perspective and... from the location that people are currently engaged in.

So we use the present moment or the recent past, or relatively contemporary framings as a way into the history and also as a way into the present. It's been quite a journey along the way. And what I've discovered that I think is sort of at the heart of why this approach is so important is that we have been unbelievably capable as a nation of living in a relatively profound state of the denial about the significance of race in America.

We've been studying these issues for decades, I'm sure between Tony and myself, there's, I don't know, an entire lifetime of study that's gone on. And one of the things that really strikes me over the years is how powerful the myth-making is regarding the end of the significance of race. So you have multiple generations of the declining significance of race, the end of racial inequality in our narrative, in our scholarship, in our public politics.

And those myths that we live in a color blind society, that we've leveled the playing field when it comes to race in America, that we've been successful and we're in a sort of post-racial society are really powerful conceptions of how we function as a society. And they are very politically significant in that they shape the outcomes and choices and also our ability to see information as it is in front of us.

There's a wealth of information, not only in the form of data, but in a variety of formats that reveal that sure a tremendous amount of progress has been made and there are amazing things about the United States that are worth not only praising, but expanding, but the question of racial inequity, the question of racial hierarchy, the ways in which particularly groups that have been colonized by the US, in this case, people of African descent, indigenous people, Asian Americans in some circumstances, and also Latinx, particularly Chicanos but Latinx people in general, are incredibly important to understand the history of the country as a whole.

It's not a marginal one piece of the puzzle. It's in fact, at the heart of what we should call US sort of culture, history and practice. So by thinking about what we've been doing the last 40 or 50 years, one of the things we try to really focus on is just the power of these myths to obscure, and then to reveal how the reality itself is functioning, and then to invite a wide range of disciplines, scholars, students, graduate students to engage with those questions in an interdisciplinary way.

One of the implicit sort of subtexts of the role of a center like CSREA and I would dare say, also of CSSJ is that this kind of work, no matter how important it is among individual scholars has not been at the center of higher educational research on its own, right? It's been occasionally prioritized during crisis moments, but it hasn't been understood as significant to most disciplines, it hasn't been at the heart of most of the disciplines.

And when those issues come up, they're sort of relegated to a sort of temporary engagement, right? The notion of studying race has to be argued for over and over and over again. What centers do is allow us to hold the examination of race constant in the sense that everyone's trying to grapple with this critical issue from different disciplines, school of public health and epidemiology, history, sociology, political science, modern media and modern culture and media studies, so on and so forth.

What that means is we're able to bring a wide range of people together who are interested in an interdisciplinary analysis of the questions of race and in so doing, we're able to catapult the conversation much more quickly. And so it's been a profound, I think, impact that we've been able to have for those reasons. We're at a moment in this country where we yet again, can see how effective racial polarization is for political development and advancement and power graphs, that you can literally create a complete crisis out of nothing.

I think of the critical race theory of crisis, or as someone in the chat was asking about 1619, that these things become radically extreme in people's consciousness because of some people's agendas but the curriculum itself has never really lived up to those fantasies. And so we use race consistently and very effectively, differently over time, but consistently and effectively to produce a set of myths and reproduce a set of hierarchies.

And so the work we try to do is to bring everyone together to really challenge that practice and process and educate ourselves and each other about how important race is. And as I said, for many, many years, it's almost impossible for me to imagine a peaceful, just, multiracial democracy without an educated, open, critically engaged, populous on the question of race. So we think that the center of what we do is at the center of the future of the country, if not more than the country itself. So thank you very much. I'll stop there and look forward to further conversation on many things. Thank you again.

Provost Richard Locke:

Great. Thank you both Tricia and Tony for those really, really terrific presentations. We have a ton of questions that have been coming in. So some of them, I think, are related to both of you, some of them are to your distinctive centers. And I'm just going to sort of alternate across these questions. So let me start with one that came in from Charles who graduated in 2001. And the question was: “I note that the word “study” is in the title of both centers. How can study become action for change for truth and reconciliation?” So who wants to start?

Professor Tricia Rose:

Tony, you go ahead. You're muted.

Professor Anthony Bogues:

Yeah. Thanks for that question, Provost, and thanks for the question. I mean, I think there is somehow in our minds, we have split the question of study from action, that way on the one hand there's action over here and then the other hand there's study over here. So it's as if almost on the one hand, there are the intellectual ideas on this side of the room and then on the other hand are activists and people who try to make change.

I think that's a kind of false [inaudible 00:29:11]. And that what is really very important is something that is very simple, which is that you really don't act to change something, particularly an aspect of human society if you do not study and know about it. You can't change the way in which human behaviors have operated for hundreds of years, the way structures of a society are operating if you do not study and understand those structures.

And therefore, begin to understand what levers you can push, begin to understand who can you make alliances with, or how will those alliances, some alliances maybe temporary, some maybe permanent, who it is you want to develop and create solidarities with. And so that one of the things that we find that is important is that at the Center, is that the study of anti-black racism of racial slavery becomes very, very important almost as a form of action itself.

It is why, in fact, that some people have manufactured a crisis in this country, in the education system, around the so-called study of critical theory. Because what they are seeing is that you now have a possibility of people beginning to think about a different history of the country. And the thinking about a different history of the country also actually opens the possibilities for you to begin to think differently about what the present and the future might look like.

And so that there's a way in which history and the narratives of history and so on and the narratives about why structures are what they are, is really a part of a set of dominant ideas in a society. You have to study them, you have to develop new ideas, you have to have different alternative ideas and those ideas themselves become one foundation on one platform for you to begin to act. So I don't see study as separate at all from action. I think this is really very... The process is integral.

Professor Tricia Rose:

I agree entirely with that, but I want to focus on that question from a slightly different perspective, which is that the word study should be in most of the spaces on a campus, right? We are a higher educational institution, our job is to study, so that's first of all. But secondly, it's very important for a context of race to use the word “study” because it's one of the subjects about which people think their personal opinion and their experience is adequate to explain the situation in the world.

Very few of us would make a claim that without being a mathematician that we could understand elaborate circumstances related to mathematics, right? I have no capacity to make any claims about physics, I have no capacity to make any claims about any number of disciplines and forms of knowledge, but about race. And there are other categories that fit this description. Gender would be another one.

People feel very confident saying, well I don't see color or race doesn't affect me or whatever the story is because we come to this particular subject with mostly unconscious form of ideological development that hasn't been critically engaged with. So study is always important, but it's especially important for those kinds of spaces where we have, what one might call blind spots, learned blind spots.

Provost Richard Locke:

That's great. Thank you. A related question that I want to pose to both of you as well came in from Mark. And it said: “how do you envision everyday folk doing this work, not just academics, having access to the resources of both of your centers?” Maybe we'll start with Tricia and then ask Tony. Because I think both of you are so engaged with the communities and I think it's important for our audience to know about that.

Professor Tricia Rose:

Yeah. Yeah, and that's a wonderful question. There are a number of things we try to do. I tried to emphasize this in my opening comments about having a profound investment in accessible scholarship. I don't believe that most knowledge has to be framed so obscurely that everyday people who have other jobs besides reading for a living can't understand what's going on. I know some of the most brilliant people I know and study and admire can speak in very plain speech.

It may take a while for it to be articulated because of the linearity of that process, but it's nonetheless accessible. So one of the things we do in our commitment is that while we bring specialists to the campus and we focus on this issue, I prioritize bringing people who can speak what I would call across spaces, they're not speaking very specialized language because I think that is exclusionary fundamentally and makes it harder for everyday people to engage.

The other thing we do is try to focus on contemporary issues, issues that people are engaged with. And the third thing we do is we make all of our programs or 98% of them available via video after the fact. They're on our website, you go to our website at Brown CSREA, it's race\brown.edu, you will find hundreds and hundreds of videos of almost a hundred percent of our events. This is a profound catalog of amazing people who've come over the years, people you may know, people you may not, but that is a very important public resource that I've been very committed to making sure is part of our mission and vision.

Professor Anthony Bogues:

Thank you. One of the things that CSSJ does is that we begin from the position that the history that we are engaged with about racial slavery and its consequences in America is not simply an academic matter, it is a matter for the country, indeed some of us would argue for the world. And if it is, then the question that faces us is how do you then proceed? What kind of methods do you develop to engage people?

And so one of the ways we think about the Center doing this is that we think about the Center as what we call a research/public humanities center. And the public humanities for us has two aspects too. When we became a Center, one of the things we did was that we did an investigation as to where it is that people learned their history most in this country.

And we found out they did not learn it most from us who write historic books. We found out that they learned it most in museums. And so we thought, "Okay, if we are going to intervene in the historical narrative to try and change it, then one of the things we have to do is to work with museums to change their narratives and to help them create different kind of narratives that will transform how we think about America and the question of history of race and racial slavery in this country.

And so public humanities projects are really very important. They have two aspects to it. They have one aspect to it and so we work with various museums around the world to make sure that whatever narrative that they are doing about slavery also tells a certain story from the perspective of the enslaved, not just an institutional narrative.

And I would say we are co-curating with the National African American of History and Culture out of the Smithsonian at a large exhibition about slavery and the making of the world, which will be shown first in DC on September 24 and then travel the world to Brazil, South Africa, Dakar, the Caribbean, Belgium, and London and Liverpool.

And that to us is one way of making accessible the history and the story, but there's also something else that is important to us. In doing that, we began to realize if you're telling a story from the point of view of the enslaved, that you also need to develop another set of archives. So one of the things that we have been doing is working with the library, is that we are developing what I would call without any kind of modesty quite frankly, the best archive in the world of oral histories of people who were enslaved or who have memories of being enslaved, primarily women.

And I just had a meeting today with my colleagues from Brazil who are doing this, and they work with the museum on the National Historical Museum, as well as the Museum of Samba. And one of the things that came out in that discussion today as they were planning their work is not just talking about the lives of the enslaved, but that they were thinking about how music actually became a vehicle in Brazil for questions of freedom.

Now we know that for Black people all over the world. And so the thing was okay, how do we collect now, not just the oral history, but the actually popular musical forms that speak about slavery and that speak about colonialism and that not just that as a language, but also actually gives us a set of ideas about what the lives of people were. The second part of the public humanities, after that I will finish is what we call public engagement.

And for this, we are very specific. We think very hard about, okay, what? How do we transform the curriculum in high schools? That's something that we have given a lot of thought to. And so we have worked with Choices to produce a curriculum. And what I would say to you all is that the curriculum was produced in October of last year. By December of last year, we had 4,000 teachers across this country using that curriculum.

We were able to find funding so that people could get the curriculum free for another year. But that curriculum was also important. How did we do it? We did not just put a group of scholars in the room and say, "Okay, write it." What we did is we got a group of students and said, "Tell us what you want to learn or what you don't know."

Then we got a group of teachers because they're high school teachers and said, "Tell us how you would do this." Then we got the scholars and said, "Listen, this is what they have said, you write it." And then when we finished it, we went back to the students and teachers and said, "Okay, does this make sense or do we need to go back to the drawing board?"

It's a long process, but it is a process in which what we are being very careful with is listening and learning from everyday people about how to make knowledge not accessible, but also quite frankly, how to answer certain questions that we ourselves may not have. Because I would say to you that what is fascinating to me in all of these things as I go to them and listen keenly is that people put on the table questions that after years of study I may have known, or I may have just forgotten about, and I'm doing other things and I don't...

But that the everyday people have a particular set of questions which they think we should try and answer and that, therefore, for us, a certain kind of scholarship, what people call Engaged Scholarship, is really trying to think through making a difference so that we can move the needle a bit. And this becomes really important because without that, I don't think we'll be able to do the kind of educated citizenry that is implicit in teachers' remarks.

Provost Richard Locke:

Great. Thank you. And again, we chatted the links of both of these centers out at the beginning of this session. And I think what's so wonderful about both of these centers and I would hope Brown in general is a mission to connect the knowledge being generated to the great issues of our times and making sure that it's accessible way beyond College Hill. So please access these websites, look at the linkages.

It's really open knowledge to really make change. So now I'm going to shift a little and talk about some of the sort of hot button issues of our days because I know both of you have a lot to say about those. And I'm going to start with Tony. There were several questions that came in around reparations and how to think about reparations. And so from Jennifer, she asked: “what kinds of reparations for our slave holding past would you advocate?”

Professor Anthony Bogues:

For us at the center, the question of reparations is an important one, but we like to think of the question in a much broader context. When people think about reparations, immediately they think about, "Okay, what are the financial compensations that need to be paid out?" What we like to think about is the question of repair. What kind of historical repair and contemporary repair needs to happen, which may include financial compensation, but which include all sorts of other things.

And so therefore, the question of reparations for us is not defined by monetary and financial considerations, but is redefined by trying to find forms of policy in which questions of equality are addressed, trying to find questions of policy in which access to education, to quality education is addressed, trying to think about access of quality healthcare and trying to think about quite frankly, questions of dignity in a society in which anti-Black racism is one of the orders that govern the society.

In this year, our 10th anniversary celebrations, we plan to in May 5th and 6th actually have a two day conference on this question of reparations to intervene on this debate, to try and say to folks that the question of compensation is important, but that the question of composition cannot be seen separate and apart from the question of repair and some fundamental changes that need to happen in the society as well, and that if you become... just focus on the present composition, then you miss a whole host of other structural things that racial slavery and economic inequality stuff actually created and that one needs to pay attention to that.

And so in my final answer to that is that we therefore don't... we don't say for reparation, this is what you must be on the stand for, this is not what you must do. For us, I've said this openly at interviews: from the Center's position, we think that there needs to be a very hard conversation at Brown as to what does that mean and how in fact Brown can be involved in repair and reparative justice.

Provost Richard Locke:

Great. Thank you. And Tricia, there's a series of questions around the kind of recent surge of racism. And so Richard, class of 1966 asked: “what has caused this recent surge in racism?”

Professor Tricia Rose:

Well, a few things I think are important to identify. One is that I'm not sure it's entirely a surge in racism, but a more visible expression of a particular kind of racism. And this has, I think, a lot to do with the fact that Black Lives Matter as well as any number of other racial justice organizations have been working tirelessly to bring issues of significant systemic racism to the fore.

And that coupled with journalism and scholarship and documentary film have created, particularly at the end of the Obama era and moving into the Trump era, a whole body of work that really had begun to successfully challenge the sort of the normalization of a kind of what I call more liberal and quiet white supremacist framework that assumes whiteness as the proper norm even when it does it gently and kindly and that challenges the validity of any kind of effort to unseat that hierarchy.

And the success of these various movements, again, not just political movements in the streets, but journalism, scholarship and film and art have really provoked a profound response. And so there's this notion of a kind of backlash which is very common in every major historical moment where racial justice movements make some traction and have some success.

The other reasons I think are also about some other historical factors, just the highest level of significant economic inequality in the history of the world, and we are at the epicenter of that inequality. That means many white Americans are feeling that profound economic oppression and that normalization of economic hierarchy is being justified by claiming that it's Black and Brown people who are somehow creating this problem.

So that I think is fomenting this concern. And the third thing that I think is playing a very big role is the sense that the country is reaching a demographic tipping point and that whites will not be an easy majority in society forever in the United States, and that I think has also triggered this kind of response.

Provost Richard Locke:

Great. I want to just stay with you Tricia because there's also been a whole cluster of questions around critical race theory. And Brian asked if you could comment on the current controversy surrounding critical race theory in public schools: is it justified or just reactionary?

Professor Tricia Rose:

I mean, it's not only... I mean, I wish I could get to the question of whether it was justified. The first thing is that it's not even happening. I mean, that's actually the most staggering reality of the situation. The vast majority of public school education does a cursory examination of race periodically every once in a while.

Now, some schools have added novels by, say, Toni Morrison who was quoted as part of... But was cited in this, what I call most recent hysteria as somehow creating harm by educating... by having students read Beloved, right? That white students were being harmed by being confronted by a text or two in a classroom that tells some version in a novel, narrative novel form, the history of a certain kind of moment in slavery, a certain set of stories about enslavement.

So it's not a massive educational enterprise, but the fear that students and that many white parents have that their students and their children would have to be transformed by an alternative construction of race is profoundly threatening to them. There is no curricular movement in K-12, but any kind of inclusion forces the conversation, right? That's on quite different terms.

Any genuine form of inclusion intellectually in the classroom forces a very different kind of understanding of self. And I think people are picking up on that and it's being manipulated profoundly, which is again, not the first time. Multiculturalism and college education in the '80s faced very much the same thing. And so this is a common tactic to turn efforts to create a multiracial, more progressive society into a kind of dangerous radicalism that's harming students.

And I just want to remind our terrific alumni that there's no discussion about how the curriculum without an analysis of race and a historical confrontation with race harms not only white students, but Black and Brown students, right? There's only one student in this argument, and it's the victimized white student in this imagination. And that's a very powerful form of changing the lens around who's being harmed, why, when and how, and how do we benefit or not benefit from this.

So we should take this very seriously. Ideas are at the core of every political trajectory. As you know, when Tony was mentioning the false binary between action and thinking, right, not only is it fault, it's that ideas are what drive protests or squelch protests or redefine protests and create norms and upset norms. It really is, study is not... Study is kind of a way to deal with ideas, but it's ideas that are incredibly important.

Provost Richard Locke:

Great. Thank you for that. So given this moment, and I want to get back to Tony and the way you were sort of framing the whole reparations discussion. We have a series of questions asking us, so what can we do? What are the levers that we can pull to address these issues? And Martha asks: “what are the levers to expedite a shift to an anti-racist society when racism is so deeply encoded in our laws, our policy and our culture?”

Professor Anthony Bogues:

Yeah, that's a really great question. And there's no real one magic key. I know like people like to say, "Okay, what's the magic key that I can turn and come out on the other side and things be different?" I think that there are different things that can happen and that lay the ground for this.

Because in the end, the transformation and real lasting change only comes with movements and it doesn't come from anywhere else, and that those movements would be faculty, students, ordinary people, everyday people, and so on and so forth, both in and out of universities. And so one of the things that I say to folks is that one of the ways you might want to think about to start is to think about what levers you can pull, is how can you begin to understand what it is that we are facing? And let me say why I think this is important.

We live in a moment in which the truth is a slippery concept, in which there are alternative facts, and that what happens is if you take the case of critical race theory as one example that Tricia outlines so well is that people create fantasies based upon a set of alternative facts that they present and then suddenly these facts, these alternative facts and fantasies become material reality and truth itself.

And so I'm not sure that there's been a period like this in history. I mean, there's always been conspiracies and paranoia and kind of people saying strange things and so on and so forth, there's always been that. But to have it as mainstream, not on the fringe, to me means that you are at a moment in which you are going to have, if you want to make change, you are going to have to spend time trying to puncture what is alternative facts, trying to find ways in which you can begin to get at what are the foundations of what are being said.

Because if you don't, then what happens is that you actually just spin wheels. So it's not just to say, okay, let's have an anti-racist campaign and so on, that you can't just think about it in that sense. You have to think about, okay, what are the things that are framing the questions of race? How does white supremacy take on a kind added life of fantasy in America? Why does it do that and makes money doing that quite frankly? Right?

So how do you then begin to think about a set of campaigns, a set of educational programs in which what happens is that you do what I call puncture these alternative facts. And that is actually the most difficult thing I would want to argue because sometimes these alternative facts are fantasies, you cannot puncture a fantasy because it has no scientific foundation, it has no basis.

And so you have to build up a different kind of alternative plan to the different kind of alternative story about this country, about the history of this country, about the possibilities that then you can begin to talk... you can talk to people. Tricia is right, ideas matter. And even if the ideas are fantasists, they matter because it is what drives people.

Provost Richard Locke:

Excellent. Thank you, Tony. And we see this not just in the debates and issues around race and racism, we see it around democratic erosion, we see it around public health, we see it around climate change. This has really become, again, an endemic problem that I think we at Brown need to sort of figure out what is our role to contribute to this alternative narrative that can maybe crowd out these fantasies.

In our chat, we got a great question from Kristen and I'm going to ask Tony to address this. And she asked: “is there a country that has advanced far enough towards a peaceful multiracial society that should be studied and maybe could be a model for others?”

Professor Anthony Bogues:

I pause for two reasons. One, I am very wary of models because what you do is that you accumulate a set of typologies and so on and then you say, "This is a particular model," and then something happens and you say, "Oh, this is the exception to so and so." I'm not aware of models as a scholar. But I also don't... I cannot think of a particular... I'm also aware of models because countries have historical specificities.

And so that there's a historical specificity to America that we need to grapple with. There's a historical specificity of the United Kingdom, of France, of the Caribbeanm and so on. I mean, I've spent some time in Kiev in the last couple of weeks, and there is a deep historical specificity in the way people think about race and so on that you can't map another set of models and another set of histories on top of it.

So my answer to that is no. My answer to that question is no, but also this: that you have to spend time studying and grappling with the understanding of the historical specificity of where you are. You only make change when you understand that in the concrete. And to understand that in the concrete means understanding the structures and the social forces that are at playin a particular society. So I wouldn't ask people to go for models. I'd say spend time trying to understand where it is you are.

So returning then to the United States, let me ask Tricia. We have a question from Steven who asked, with dysfunction in Washington and states rights, is it possible to gain traction in addressing centuries-old racial inequities given the current moment that we're living in?

Professor Tricia Rose:

Yeah, well if you're Black or Brown and poor, there's really not a good decade that you can go to. If you don't like this one, not like there's a better one that's somewhere else. So I will say that's a fundamental reality. But this is a new condition, Steven is right. There's a particular climate that is going on. Here's what I think.

I think that what recent right-wing organizers have been very effective at doing is mobilizing the local. And they're mobilizing the local by flooding what were relatively neutral institutions with a very intense political focus. And that's basically, they're just skirting, right? They're using a kind of states’ rights logic, but they're reduced from state down to local to county level. And that's very powerful. And I think we should think about what potential that holds for everybody.

That is to say everyone has kids who go to school, everyone has kids who want to learn about different things. So let's be as aggressive about participating in these local institutions so that they don't become the voice of only one segment. And I'd say a relatively proportionately small, but noisy segment, but angry whites have shortened the life of success of many African American social justice moments and movements. Let's look at Boston and busing.

We look at educational integration, Brown versus Board of Education. It still hasn't really been functional. So I mean the level of resistance and the power of that resistance really shouldn't be underestimated and we have to figure out how to respond to it. It can't just be, we're going to wait it out. There's no waiting this out.

I think it's really important that we take it seriously. The federal government can do what it can do, but I don't think we can rely on it for everything. I think there are enough people of color around the country to also operate with a regional and states’... not states’ rights, but a state-framed politics.

Provost Richard Locke:

So let me continue on this line, Tricia, because there's a series of questions that have come in around what can we do given the moment, given what we're seeing in this kind of alternate fantasies narrative that Tony talked about, or even at the local county level. Pamela, the class of '91, asked what do you believe are the most important structural changes that we should be advocating for? And given the work that you've been doing these last couple years on systemic racism and the different pieces, I wonder if you could address that.

Professor Tricia Rose:

Yeah. Well, woo, that's one of those big questions I'm going to try to keep a small answer for. So the power of systemic racism is not so much finding its location like, is it in wealth, is it in education, is it in jobs and unemployment, is it in criminal justice, so on and so forth. But it's about the power of the ways in which these areas are connected to one on another and that discriminatory problematic forms of policy and practice reverberate across these areas to create something bigger and more difficult and painful than any one area could produce on its own.

So criminal justice and its effects require for it to be as powerfully discriminatory and affecting as it is. It requires municipal complicitness, right? Around fines and fees and misdemeanors and the use of economic terrorism and warfare on poor people to augment the criminalization, right? You have to have a certain kind of aggregation to target communities, so on and so forth.

So what's really important is for us to understand that this is a systemic set of practices and that the most important thing we can do is look for those connections. And if we can separate those connections so that injustice and criminal justice isn't so easily tethered to public schools where we have school resource officers populating schools and arresting young people with violent forms of arrest for incredibly marginal limited disciplinary infractions.

I'm not talking about people coming to school with weapons and tending harm, I'm talking about typical teenage nonsense. So what you want to do is say, okay, we don't want the school to prison pipeline to exist because this connects two forms of institutional discrimination in a powerful way. So that's the way I would encourage people to think about it.

Now, if your question is, what can we do, where can we go? I'd say wherever you want. Honestly, there's really nowhere. You could work on transportation. You can work on pollution and health discrepancies. You can work on unemployment, you can work on police profiling. You can work on... I mean, I can be here for a whole hour listing places to work. It's going to be about wanting to separate places so that the power of that driving force can be reduced so that to me is the most important way to handle that problem.

Provost Richard Locke:

Great. Thank you, that's really terrific. I'm going to turn to Tony. And Tony earlier in your remarks, you talked about Du Bois's fantastic book Black Reconstruction. And we have a question from Amanda that I think is related to that. And she asks: “can you please talk about forms of present day labor exploitation that are likely part of the legacy of slavery, farm workers, internationally contracted labor, slaughter house workers, factory workers in American territories, trafficked workers, maybe talk about how the legacy of slavery impacts all these other categories of workers?”

Professor Anthony Bogues:

Yeah, that's a really great question. I think that one of the things that we need to think about is that are ways in which enslaved labor became a form of labor in which then becomes, I'm going to use the word I don't like, becomes a model which people there then actually try to implement right across the board in many places in the world, not just in America, but in many places in the world.

And so that what you have is that if at the heart of enslaved labor is not just exploitation but is the business of a certain commodification of the person and a certain way in which that person is considered disposable, then what you have in whether it is the farm worker, whether it is the worker in certain kind of factories that produce things in what is called just in time, particularly women workers that produce for the Nordstroms and for the Macy's of the various departments, [inaudible] is that there's a certain understanding of disposability, the certain kind of way in which those workers should not be treated as human beings.

And so when you look at the ways in which these workers are treated, one of the things that you will see is that for them to do for say a free zone or any other form of labor like that to exist, then the part of the requirements and the contract that are signed by states and sometimes by countries is that these people, you cannot bring a trade union inside it and you cannot organize trade unions.

And trade unions are in my view, the basic kind of body that protects in not radical bodies to overturn capitalism, but they are kind of basic set of bodies or organizations that will allow some basic right so that the ways in which these workers are treated and particularly female workers, quite frankly, is that they are treated in ways that are drawn from an understanding that Black labor was disposable and could be treated in a certain way.

And I think that though, to think about this question of labor, and to think about disposable labor, to think about questions of exploitation of labor is something that is hidden in economic discourse and is hidden quite frankly, in the ways we think about questions of race and class in this country. And so one of the things to do, just to piggyback on something Tricia said, one of the things that I think is important in trying to make it possible for change, for some kind of change, is to think about how do you deal with the unorganized labor, particularly female laborers that are put in really onerous conditions of having to live in deep exploitative conditions.

So for me, I mean, there are students I know who I’ve encouraged to become trade union organizers, and a couple of them have. And that's because they say, "What do we do and I like this?" I said, "You do that." Because being a trade union organizer is extremely important in an economic system where labor is not at all considered in any shape or form as having any particular role to play.

Professor Tricia Rose:

Yeah. If I could just say one thing to add to this, Rick.

Provost Richard Locke:

Sure.

Professor Tricia Rose:

I think it's so important to realize that the mainstream public discourse, the space of ideas, television, streaming, mainstream news, while occasionally these issues are covered, the deep and horrible dark side of capitalism, right? What it does to everyday workers is almost completely written off of any public space whatsoever. There's no place to even hear or learn of these things unless you're doing a kind of radical consumption of materials.

And so there is a kind of, it's not just who owns the media, right? Which is a very narrow way of thinking about it. It's what stories and who's dominating the narrative center of our mediated culture. And that's, I think another place where people need to be very careful and active because it's not that what's being said there is perhaps untrue, it's what it's not saying that is so profoundly important.

And this is where we see juvenile detention centers with 12 year old kids in pants for a grownup terrified, incarcerated for ridiculous reasons, right? And we see obviously the labor exploitation that Tony's talking about. But you don't see it enough. If people did see it, things would change. That's why the George Floyd incident was so pivotal because while being black, you probably saw things like that in different places in those communities, you don't see that in the national imagination. That's why it's important for us to pay attention to the mediated spaces.

Provost Richard Locke:

Yeah, no, that's terrific. There was a question that came out in the chat about sort of how you do your work. And what's so wonderful and I think it's so wonderful about your work and so wonderfully evident in tonight's conversation is how you make these incredible connections and bring to light things that are often obscured, et cetera. And so we had a question from Elizabeth who wanted to know: “how do you collect your data, how difficult it is to collect the data, to do the kind of research that you do, and is it possible for those data to be more publicly available and shared?” So who wants to take that? Because I think that's a really wonderful question to get more people engaged in this work.

Professor Tricia Rose:

Tony, did you want me to go or?

Professor Anthony Bogues:

No, you can go too.

Professor Tricia Rose:

Okay. Well, I mean, there's so many different kinds of data, right? So certainly there's the traditional form of data, which is you can build spreadsheets, you can gather information and document it, and then you could spend a long time as I've been doing with this systemic racism project gathering a lot of this information. It's quite overwhelming because there's a lot more...

You'd think, "Oh, there's no evidence," there's just so much evidence you're just like, "This is obviously not about facts," which goes back to Tony's point about fictions and fantasies. But as a student of African American studies, it's really important to remember that data itself is a kind of organized, empirical approach to information, to fact, to truth, to knowledge that is very specific and has its own troubled legacy in that it works to obscure the ways data is being used to normalize the circumstances that are in front of us.

And there's a lot of great books on race and methodology. The disciplines of knowledge come of age, they grow up under colonization and enslavement and patriarchy and all the other things we might want to list. So they come with them with methodological flaws. So one of the things when you say, how do you collect your data, part of it is being super mindful about what's missing, what has to be missing? Right?

You think it's really not until the 1970s that a movement like history from below where you get workers' histories and labor histories and everyday people's history and incarcerated people's version of the police, as opposed to the police record, which is pretty much what academic disciplines produced. So when you say how do I gather my data, it's really about where you're listening, right?

And what you think has to be missing based on your sort of reading in a very broad way. So it's sort of over years, you begin to see, well, these things keep being left out, let's dig over there and look for connections that would otherwise be missing. I have a hundred answers to that question, but I'm going with that one tonight.

Provost Richard Locke:

Tony, how about you?

Professor Anthony Bogues:

I have a hundred answers as well so I'm trying to think which is the best one. I think that they... For me, it is really about trying to find the spaces of erasure in archives and then trying to think through alternative archives to deal with those erasures. And so that means that the first use for it is trying to find the archive of the ordinary, right? Which is then, what is it that everyday people do? Where do they do it?

And how can we begin to collect the things that they do, the practices that they're engaged in and then to theorize and write about those things. And that's a different kind of practice because it means what Tricia says, you're listening, but it also means having a different gaze on what it is that you are doing. And also quite frankly, recognizing that everything that you are doing is there is a way I put it to students, is that 20 years time, I hope one of you would come and say, "What the hell he was talking about? He didn't do this and he didn't do that."

So that there is a way in which there forward that even what I'm doing and positive set of ideas and ask people to look at certain things, that there may be other set of information, and I like to call it not data, but information and practices that people are engaged in that I would not have looked at and that a really great grad student may decide to look at and then turn over everything that I was doing. And that's the way in my view, the question of knowledge works. It is always expansive, it is always open to different voices and to different sets of archives that you need to pay attention to.

Provost Richard Locke:

That's great. So I have two last questions. There's a series of questions that came up about Brown and what are things like, how have things changed, asking about student attitudes, about engagement on campus on these issues. And I wonder since both of you have been at Brown certainly longer than I have if you wanted to address those questions.

Professor Tricia Rose:

Tony, why don't you go ahead first?

Professor Anthony Bogues:

Yeah. I usually begin by saying that the Brown student is a remarkable creature. And I don't say that just because one is trying to whip up support for Brown, but then in my experience both at the undergraduate and graduate level is that they are some remarkable students, that they are full of curiosity, that they are willing to think differently when you suggest certain things and that they are willing to be experimental in terms of trying to think about the world in which they inhabit and the world in which they will inhabit for the next 20, 30, 40 years.

And so certainly for the Center, what we do is that we open the Center for this kind of creativity so that we have undergraduate students will say, "We think that the question of the class for state is important." And then we say, "Okay, you think it's important, you organize your reading groups of and so on and so forth, and the way you want to do it and you do what you think is necessary."

Our graduate students say, "We need a space to begin to think about alternative forms of knowledge," and you say, "Okay, that's what you need to do, then that's fine." And we don't organize it, we don't tell them this is what you need to do and so on. And so I think that the way we think of it at the Center is how do you create spaces that would allow creativity, that would allow the experimental quality of Brown in terms of pedagogy and the way we think about knowledge and so on, how do you create a space for those kind of practices to be in house?

And I mean, it's difficult because sometimes quite frankly, some people make mistakes. But the way I like to look at it is that if you don't engage, you will not make any mistakes. And I certainly grew byt making lots of mistakes, right? And therefore I watch people making mistakes and if they want to talk about it, we talk about it. Or sometimes you may talk to them quietly to say you might want to think about it that way or that way. But the business of having this space to be able to do things and to think out the box when necessary is what we try to do particularly in relationship to graduate, undergraduates.

Professor Tricia Rose:

I'm going to emphasize the faculty because Tony and I, I mean, I don't want to repeat half of what Tony said except that Brown students are remarkable, and that's entirely true. And I was also a graduate student at Brown for those of you who may not know that so I've been on both sides of that situation. What CSREA aims to do is to create a critical and a challenging but embracing and supportive culture for scholars across the academic sort of developmental hierarchy.

So we have graduate student fellows, we have summer undergraduate research opportunities. We have a seminar that has graduate students, a few of each of these categories, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, junior professors, associate and full professors who work together to share work in progress across the disciplines. And we do this also with artists and what we call our practitioners seminar.

We bring in visiting professors from other places, and we've had an amazingly successful cultural climate that we've developed where faculty feel that they can share work in progress safely and know that everyone in the room, while they have 10 different disciplines, are thinking through a question about race or race and ethnicity, or Latinx identity or migration or home land, belonging, right, on racial terms.

So even if they're doing a different say ethnic or racial group, or a different set of issues, or one's on gender and sexuality and the other isn't, there's so much synergy intellectually that it creates more developed careers, creates better classes for students and it also allows us to create a research climate that allows us to recruit more diverse incredibly brilliant faculty.

So I think of CSREA as contributing to our success with the DAP in so far as we've been able to show faculty we want to recruit that there's a space for scholarship if you're in a small department and you might be the only one working on a race, it's not just going to be you over there all alone having a conversation with three people, but in fact, the Center will not only be bringing in speakers from elsewhere, but creating an intellectual community.

Ideas happen in community. They look like you do them alone in some disciplines, but you're always in conversation and you're always working with a body of ideas that are related to a group of people. So the more we can communicate, the better off we are. So that's been a very important part of how we do what we do.

Provost Richard Locke:

That's great. Quick last question. Rachel asks: “what feels most inspiring to each of you personally at this moment?”

Professor Tricia Rose:

Ooh, I'm going to need a second for that one. Rachel, I don't know. I think I would say Tony, did you have someone ready to go or do you want to-

Professor Anthony Bogues:

Oh, I'm thinking through.

Professor Tricia Rose:

Okay. All right. I'll stall for you, buddy. I'll stall. I think what inspires me are, I mean, I guess it's always the same thing. I'm in the right profession because young people are pretty extraordinary.

Now, they're not all perfect, they're not all the same, but an intellectually hungry, critically engaged, thoughtful student and whether they're at Brown or not, I guess it could be anywhere, is an amazing sort of entity in the world because they have all of this information, they have level of activity that you just don't have anymore at 50 or 60 because you're already 30 years behind the curve on whatever the latest thing is and they bring that to bear. And so when I see that, not just in activism, but in challenges in documentary film and in technology, when I see that energy making a difference in the world, I'm very inspired by that. I'm really inspired by that.

Professor Anthony Bogues:

I mean, I think that what really... What's inspirational is, and I'm thinking of... I think of a program that we run here in which kids from various high schools and they do courses in civil rights and then we carry them to the South to look at Civil Rights monuments and meet various figures and so on. And to me what the inspiration is to watch those kids come back to Brown and do various things that were not possible six months ago.

Professor Tricia Rose:

Right.

Professor Anthony Bogues:

So I'm thinking here particularly of a group of kids, Black and Brown kids who took this course and then went to the South and then came back and formed a reading group on Black literature without anybody asking them or telling them to do and leaving here one night at 8 o'clock and seeing them and said, "What are you all doing here?" And they said, "Oh prof, this is our reading group on Black literature." “And what are you reading?” And they give a reading list by themselves. And I just thought if Brown can do that, right, then that's the kind of... We all talk about making a difference, that's the kind of difference I think we have to [crosstalk 01:26:51].

Professor Tricia Rose:

Right, right.

Provost Richard Locke:

That's great. Well, we're coming to the end of our time and I'm sure that I speak for everyone on this call to say that both of you inspire me, inspire the rest of us, you and the work that you've done and just this wonderful open conversation that we've had this evening. Please everyone join me in thanking both Professor Bogues and Rose but also to thank Mary Ward from alumni relations and the advancement team that helped put this together.

This was just really, really a terrific... just a terrific evening of conversation and learning, et cetera. I want to thank everyone for taking the time this evening to be with us. I sincerely hope that we'll be able to see one another in person on campus, maybe even for the May alumni Reunion. Let's hope that the public health situation improves so that we can do that.

And please stay tuned to other programs. As you can see, what we're trying to do is really bring the very best of Brown out to the alumni and parent community and to engage you around the most important issues of our time. So thank you, stay safe and be well. Take care.

Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. Now in his 70s, he has become a leading spokesman on the right, often speaking out against “woke” culture he sees as prevalent on many campuses and other institutions.

The link below will take you to a YouTube interview of Professor Loury by Peter M. Robinson of the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank.

https://www.hoover.org/research/glenn-lourys-journey-chicagos-south-side-ivy-league-and-beyond

Following is a transcript of the interview:

Peter Robinson: Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson.

Born on the South Side of Chicago, Glenn Cartman Loury became a tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the age of 33. Four decades later, Dr. Loury holds a chair in social sciences and economics at Brown. Dr. Loury also hosts a weekly podcast on the Ricochet Network, The Glenn Show. Professor Loury, thank you.

Glenn Loury: My pleasure.

Peter Robinson: On The Glenn Show, you call yourself a woke buster. Now, what I want to know is what a chaired... this is really quite an august thing. You are a chaired professor at one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious universities. What do you do on calling yourself a woke buster?

Glenn Loury: Well, if the other side, so to speak, that is the woke side, weren't so crazy I could go on with my equations and my lectures and mind my own business. I'm trying to stay in touch with reality and maybe save the country.

Peter Robinson: Maybe save the country, modest ambitions. All right. You're a man who has traveled great distances. One of these journeys for want of a better term is socioeconomic. You grew up in a rough neighborhood in Chicago, you become a father while you're still in your teens. You take a job as a clerk in a printing plant, and that's where you start. Here's where you go: doctorate at MIT by age 27. MIT is not a easy place to get through. Tenured professor of economic by 33, chaired professor at Brown. We could devote the whole show to your life story, but what would you want people to know about how Glenn Loury made that particular journey? How did Glenn Loury get from here on the South Side of Chicago to a chaired professorship in Providence, Rhode Island?

Glenn Loury: Well, it's a long story, Peter. I don't think we have all day. I got a lot of help. I got inspiration from my father. Very good man, no longer with us. Self-made man who labored hard all of his life and rose to a high level in the Internal Revenue Service as a federal employee. I got wonderful support from teachers. I was fortunate enough at Northwestern University to have been recruited as a scholarship student, even though I was married with kids and working a full-time job. But they were looking for some promising prospects from the South Side of Chicago to bring into Northwestern in the early 1970s. And gosh, I discovered the whole world, intellectually speaking, at that university in the few years that I spent there. Got tremendous inspirational teachers at MIT. A great economics department now, but even a greater department then with Nobel Laureates to spare. And God given talent, if I may say so, that allowed me to take advantage of these opportunities. I worked my tail off. I kept my nose to the grindstone, finally, even though I had bounced around a little bit in my teens. And it has paid off.

Peter Robinson: All right. You granted you work hard, but only after expressing gratitude three or four times in a row, did you come to how hard you worked? I'll come back to that. That strikes me as a kind of fundamental piece of your outlook about life, Glenn, but we'll come back to that. A lecture you delivered in Richmond, 2005, you discussed the 1968 Kerner Commission, which issued a report on the riots during the long summer of 1967. The commission, as you note, blamed the riots on racism, failed social programs and a lack of economic opportunity. And this is what Glenn Loury said in 2005, speaking in Richmond: "To a significant extent, the Kerner Commission's recommendations were heeded. There is not one significant institution in American political or economic life which has been unaffected by the push for diversity and the emphasis on multiculturalism which now dominate discussions of race relations. Blacks wield vastly more political clout at all levels of government today than was the case four decades ago. Yet it is arguable that conditions are worse. The prisons of the nation overflow with young black men. Two-thirds of black babies are born to unwed mothers nationwide." Why? What went wrong? The Kerner Commission said reasonable things, the country responded, and you say it is arguable that conditions are worse.

Glenn Loury: It's a hard question that you're asking, I think, Peter. I think the vision of the anointed as our friend Thomas Sowell would say, the vision that we could solve this problem by expanding the Great Society, by enacting more anti-discrimination laws, by doubling down on affirmative action and so forth was— is—in error. This problem is a development problem. This is the way that I would put it now, not a bias problem. This is a issue of empowering and envisioning a confrontation with the consequences of our history that have left the African American population, large swaths of it, not performing in ways that allow us to take advantage of the opportunities that have been created. As my friend Shelby Steele is fond of saying, the problem before us now is not a problem of oppression. It's a problem of freedom. It's a problem of seizing opportunity. It's a problem of taking responsibility. I mean, let's just look at some of those statistics. Outsize rates of criminal participation of violence of the kinds of in uncivil behavior that get you locked up in prison. That's why the jails are overflowing with African Americans. Not because there's a conspiracy in the state legislature or in the several police departments to go around locking up black people. But because too many of our youngsters, of our young men are behaving in ways that end up leaving them in confrontation with the law and leaving them susceptible to imprisonment. In education, the skills development gap is reflected in test scores or the representation of African Americans in certain elite educational venues. The kind of circumstance that people want to invoke affirmative action to repair are to a large extent a result of the failure of public institutions of educational service delivery to deliver for their clients. But also a reflection of the patterns of behavior, of the allocation of time, of values, of communal norms, of the extent of parenting, of the emphasis on developing the intellectual potential of our population. Look at the family. You say two-thirds of kids are born to women who are not married, you should look at the abortion rate amongst African Americans, it's stratospheric. The gender relations between men and women, which is the central focus of how it is that societies reproduce themselves in a healthy fashion, is deeply, deeply troubled. So, whereas in 1968 it was a compelling argument to say “two nations, separate and unequal” —that's what the Kerner Commission said—white America must own up to its responsibilities. In 1968 that could have made a lot of sense. In the year 2021, the ball is in our court. I speak now about African Americans. This is basically a level playing field that we are dealing with right here in the freest, most prosperous, most dynamic society on the planet that millions of people are willing to risk everything just to get into. We are birthright citizens here, the ball is in our court.

Peter Robinson: Glenn, let me take you through events of the last couple of years. Honestly, I just made notes on events I'd like to hear you talk about. I just want to know how Glenn Loury thinks about certain events.

Glenn Loury: Okay.

Peter Robinson: Two quotations. Here's the first one from the We Believe page of the website for Black Lives Matter, "The impetus for our commitment was, and still is, the rampant and deliberate violence inflicted on us by the state." Here's the second quotation, this happens to be from an article in Newsweek about a year ago, but I could have chosen dozens of sources. Here's what Newsweek had, "On Sunday, May 30th, 2020, Chanel Hawk's store was one of dozens looted in Atlanta and many more across the US amid days of protests following the death of George Floyd. As a black business owner— black business owner—Hawk said she was shocked to learn looters targeted her store at a time when protestors were taking to the streets to call on the government to address systematic racism.” So what do I know? I'm just a white guy and a layman looking at this and I said, black lives matters. It sounds noble in some ways, it sounds aspirational, but what is happening in these cities? How do you think about that?

Glenn Loury: Well, [inaudible] violence against black people, I think is hysteria. I think it’s wild hyperbole. I think we have to keep the issue that they're talking about, which is that sometimes police acting badly or outside of their legitimate authority take black life. That does happen. It has happened in the country. We can tick off the examples. On the other hand, it's a country of 330 million people. There are tens of thousands of arrests that take place every day in this country. We're talking about a handful of incidents that become viral events on the social media, in which there can be some question about inappropriate behavior by police toward black people. But the metaphor that Al Sharpton invoked at George Floyd's funeral, America take your knee off of our neck, is fiction. It's a lie. It's not an apt description of the actual circumstance for a black person to fear going out of their door, that the police might somehow inappropriately treat them, it's like not going outside because you're afraid of being struck by lightning. So that's objectively an inaccurate characterization of the circumstance. And if you lay that alongside the actual threats to black life, which are sadly coming from the possibility of violent criminal victimization in the neighborhoods in which they live often by other black people, the hyperbole, the shtick that they've got going here, the narrative that they're pushing—I'm talking about black lives matter, I'm talking about anti-racist activists who take the unfortunate few incidents of police mistreatment of black people and use it as a general characterization of the circumstances of black people in the country—it is something that a woke buster like myself is willing to devote a little bit of time debunking.

Peter Robinson: Glenn, Chicago. Again, I'm just throwing things up to you to see how you think about them. But Chicago during the last 12 months, 790 people have been killed. 626 of them, almost 80% were black. I mean, isn't there an argument that... and this is a city where the superintendent of police is African American.

Glenn Loury: Yes, and the mayor.

Peter Robinson: And the mayor. I checked the statistics that about 30% of the city is African American and only about 20% of the police force. But the superintendent of police is African. Anyway, I think to myself, why aren't there protests calling for more police? Those neighborhoods—

Glenn Loury: Not only calling for more police and making public safety of black people in that city a primary issue, but condemning relentlessly the despicable behavior of a few people, which is making that city so unsafe for everybody else. Instead, too often, we find intellectuals and political leaders, some black, some white, all progressive, making excuses saying there's nothing to see here, turning away from the obvious failures within society that are manifest in this despicable behavior. I mean, think about it, taking a human life. Hundreds of times, a not small number of these victims are children. This is barbarism. This is unacceptable behavior. I don't think I am out of school simply to say condemn it. We're better than that. We African-Americans, where is the leadership who talk about African-American society saying of this issue, we're better than that? This is not us. This is not what a healthy African American community would produce. Condemn this behavior.

Peter Robinson: Glen, once again, that lecture that you gave in Richmond, I'm quoting you, "Liberals insist that these problems derive ultimately from the lack of economic opportunities. Conservatives like Charles Murray have argued that the problems are the unintended legacy of a welfare state. If the government would stop underwriting irresponsible behavior, poor people would be forced to discover self restraint." And then you write, "These polar positions have something very important in common. They both assume that economic factors lie behind the behavioral problems." What are you up to there?

Glenn Loury: “On being a Christian and an Economist” was my subtitle for that lecture. And what I'm up to is I'm an economist. And we do the things that we do. We have our theories about human behavior. We are basically in a mode of the idea that people respond to incentives as they do. And we want to get the prices right as we should. So we have a pretty deterministic and a pretty materialistic outlook on things left or right. But in those years I was a better Christian perhaps than I am now. I was on fire and it occurred to me, notwithstanding my training at MIT and not withstanding my positions in the universities that I've worked at, that there's more to human motivation than getting more, than greed, than satisfying want, than maximizing utility, than accumulating wealth. There's also something called right living. There's something called being comfortable with the way in which I am living my life. There is a spiritual dimension. What people believe, what they take to be significant, where they draw meaning in their lives is also a fundamental aspect of human culture and of human civilization. And I simply wanted to give voice to that idea, that everything's not about getting more or about what Charles Murray, whom I respect as a social scientist, says—that we had a war on poverty and poverty won. He says this in his book, Losing Ground, reflecting on the inadequate outcomes associated with the Great Society. He's right about that. He's right that the incentives of the welfare state often were poverty promoting as opposed to poverty alleviating. But that's not all that's going on when I look at two-thirds of kids being born to an African American woman being born to a woman without a husband. That's not all that's going on when I look at the rates of violence that we were just talking about a moment ago. There's space for appealing to people at the level of their spiritual responsibilities and urging them to look differently at how it is that they should live their lives. I say in that essay, what program could be more effective at encouraging parents to take responsibility for their children than persuading them that they're God's stewards in the lives of their children? A clever economist can come up with all kinds of schemes to motivate them financially. But if they embrace that idea that this is a precious responsibility, this is a sacred obligation, they're going to get the job done that we want them to get done.

Peter Robinson: I'm quoting you again, "Raising the issues of morality and values is vitally important. The family and the church are the natural sources of moral teaching. Indeed, the only sources." Okay. If we were a tent meeting, I'd have converted now listening to Preacher Loury. This is very moving and it feels to me right. You're saying true things about human beings. What is the government... if you say that it's church and family, those are organic, either they're there or they're not. I don't know how government puts the family back together. I certainly have no idea how any government program can reassert the centrality in African American life of the black church. So I guess what I'm saying is it's powerful and moving, and it sounds like the clarion sound of a trumpet, but there's a sense in which it could let everybody off the hook and say, well, it's the black church and the family. And if they're not there, there's really nothing we can do about it. Do you see what I mean?

Glenn Loury: No, I do see what you mean because the ability of the state through law and through policy to tell people how to live is limited because we're a pluralistic society. We don't have a state religion. We don't tell people what to believe at that level. So therefore given that what they believe is important to how they function and that the state can't dictate to people what to believe, there's a conclusion there, which is that there's a limit on what the estate can achieve in the face of this problem. And that if we really want to see this problem ultimately resolved we have to encourage the development of institutions from the ground up. We have to in our rhetoric and in our public leadership, extol the virtue of these institutions. So let me be very concrete education. Big city public school teachers unions basically control the flow of resources for the delivery of those services to youngsters. There's nothing written anywhere that says that the only model for educating young people is large public union-driven institutions delivering the services. You could have 1,000 flowers blooming, 10,000 flowers blooming, a million flowers blooming. They could be charter schools with some public funds going in. They could be parochial schools with a particular religious conviction that they might have. They could be home schooling. There could be 20 families getting together and deciding to pull their resources in a way to educate their children. I don't know all the possibilities that lie there. I do know that the entrepreneurial spirit and the convictions that people bring about their responsibilities to their children have unlimited potential. This is what I believe.

Peter Robinson: So there, the government just has to get out of the way …

Glenn Loury: It could provide some resources because people are paying taxes, but it would give parents the autonomy to redirect those resources in the ways that they saw were best.

Peter Robinson: Glenn, let me quote to you from a column that Tom Sowell, now 91 years old and still swinging. Tom Sowell just wrote a column, published a column this month.

Glenn Loury: Wow.

Peter Robinson: Yes.

Glenn Loury: I should be so lucky.

Peter Robinson: Well, you will be. At least there are those of us who are going to get on the phone and say, hey Loury, another book, please. A lot of us.

Glenn Loury: Okay.

Peter Robinson: All right, so here's Tom Sowell, "When school propaganda teaches black kids to hate white people, that is a danger to all Americans of every race. Low income minority students especially cannot afford the luxury of having their time wasted on ideological propaganda in the schools when they're not getting a decent education in mathematics or the English language. When they graduate and go on to higher education that could prepare them for professional careers, hating white people is not likely to do them nearly as much good as knowing math and English."

Glenn Loury: Oh, I couldn't agree more. He's absolutely right about that. The ideological temper of much of the educational establishment, which wants to spew its propaganda over our children, is a waste of time because we don't really have that luxury to indulge, given the serious impediments to African American children's participation in our society that comes about from their failure to get a decent education. But I would go further. We're Americans here, black people, African Americans. We're 10, 12% of a population of a dynamic, growing, constantly changing country. We need our fellow citizens onside with us on behalf of any program of any worth that we might want to pursue. Hating white people is madness in this country. I mean, it's simply a losing strategy. It is akin to a toddler throwing a tantrum when he doesn't get his way, it gets us nowhere. The intellectuals, the people who—I could name names, but it's not about personalities here—who throw this kind of stuff around, “whitey is your use your enemy,” are already living high on the hog of this society. They can afford to alienate their colleagues. But people who are dependent upon basic functioning of social institutions to further their effort at achieving prosperity, those black people, working class black people, lower class black people, people who are just barely holding on, need our fellow Americans onside. Alienating them gratuitously with this racist and its racism, this racist rhetoric, hating white people, hating people because of the color of their skin, blaming them for the sins of their fathers or the supposed sins of their fathers, it is not only a waste of time in the schools, it's a political distraction that we really can't afford.

Peter Robinson: Glenn, let me take you back to your day job as professor at Brown.

Glenn Loury: Okay.

Peter Robinson: Last spring, you conducted a seminar at Brown called "Free Inquiry and the Modern World." And you were kind enough to send me the syllabus. And I showed that syllabus to my research assistant, who by the way, is a recent graduate of Yale, sister school, sister Ivy school of Brown. And my research assistant could hardly believe his eyes. He said this is the most courageous syllabus I think I have ever seen. So could you just take me, I know the seminar lasted a whole semester at Brown, but I'd like to ask you a few questions. Tell me the significance. Tell me why the items I'm going to mention are on your syllabus. And by the way, you've described this as a seminar. How many kids were involved?

Glenn Loury: 20.

Peter Robinson: So this is not a lecture class.

Glenn Loury: No.

Peter Robinson: There's nowhere to hide. You're running a conversation, you're calling on kids, they have to participate. All right. Socrates apology quote, and this I'm quoting from Socrates or I'm quoting from Plato's... You know what I'm quoting.

Glenn Loury: Plato's apology excerpt, yeah.

Peter Robinson: "I prophesy to my murderers, that after my death punishment far heavier than you have inflicted on me will surely await you. For the noblest way of life is not to be crushing others, but to be improving yourselves." What did the kids make of that?

Glenn Loury: They loved it. I should mention David Sacks here, who was my teaching assistant because this course... he's an undergraduate at Brown. He's a great concert pianist and he's also reading Greek and Latin. He's a classics major at Brown.

Peter Robinson: You know kids that smart really annoy me, Glenn.

Glenn Loury: And he's a contrarian. And he walked into my office one day and he says, you're one of the two or three professors around here I think's got his head on straight. Can I talk to you? Would you mind giving me some time? This is just out of the blue a couple of years ago, he walked into my office. He said I want to break free from the group think, can you help me? So we put together a reading list and we, over the course of a year did an independent study. Just him and me reading some of the works that ended up in this course.

Peter Robinson: So stop, we'll come back to this course. I really want to come back to the course. But wait, this kid is reading Greek and Latin. He's a smart kid. He got into Brown. He's reading Greek and Latin, plays the piano, he's smart and he's talented and I want to break free of group think?

Glenn Loury: Yeah.

Peter Robinson: Why is a kid at one of most elite institutions in the country feel shackled in his mind, intellectually subjected to group think? How can this happen?

Glenn Loury: Now, this was a kid who thought that every Republican politician was not necessarily a fascist. This is a kid who thought that capitalism might not really be the road to hell. A kid who thought that while he's Jewish and not especially observant, religious people actually have a place within society. Isn't there something interesting about the fact that people constantly seek meaning in these mythological and fanciful systems of belief? And what he's getting all around him in the dorm, at the lecture hall or in the classes, the other classes that he's getting is this kind of left of center, secular, ultra woke mantra he's getting. And he knows that it isn't quite right. It certainly hasn't hit his mind as being right. And he's looking for an alternative. And he found out about... he followed my podcast a few times. His parents encouraged him because they followed the podcast, go talk to Loury. And so he walks into an economist’s office to say, can you help me? Can I breathe? I can't breathe around here. Can you help me get some fresh air?

Peter Robinson: I can't breathe. I can't breathe, that's just awful.

Glenn Loury: Anyway, all I want to say is the course that you're referring to came about after that year of reading with David and we sat together and said we can make a course out of this. Why don't we? And you can be my TA, even though it was only his third year, he's in his fourth year now. He's in his third year and there were seniors sitting in the class. So he was junior to some of the people whom he was TA, but he's a cracker jack smart kid. They loved being challenged to think about what does a philosophical life mean? What is an examined life? What was Socrates about as Plato presented in the dialogue? So it was scintillating. The questions, the discussion that went on within the class was really deeply rewarding. And I've gotten some tributes from students after the course who have written me things, “best experience in my educational career by far.”

Peter Robinson: Milton, Areopagetica, "Give me the Liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties." The liberty to argue freely above all liberties [crosstalk 00:28:59] . What do the kids at Brown make of that?

Glenn Loury: Paradise Lost. Well, he's trying to inveigh against the idea that the crown should license the printing of books. The printing press is 100 years old or so at the time he's writing and books are pretty dangerous things. And he's saying, look, I don't want to live in a society in which political commissars decide what it is that I can read and what I can't read. There's freedom in those books. There's immortality, says Milton in that great essay, in those books. You write a book that says something really important about life, you may die but that book lives forever. As long as they don't ban the printing of the book. Keep your hands off my books.

Peter Robinson: Vaclav Havel, the dissident in Czechoslovakia, becomes president of Czechoslovakia after the communist regime falls. He writes a book called The Power of the Powerless. "In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along down the river of pseudo life." So the kids read this and say, wait a minute, is professor Loury trying to tell us we're all accommodationist?

Glenn Loury: No, they got it. They really did. And I love that essay by Havel and I love that particular quote. So if your audience doesn't know Vaclav Havel, he was a playwright and became president of the Czech Republic. Was a dissident at the time that the Soviet Union was dominating political life in countries like Czechoslovakia. And he was a part of the underground samizdat-producing critique of the status quo. And it was life or death. I mean, you could lose your livelihood, you could end up losing your freedom if you spoke against the party. So it was a very closed, very cloistered system. And people were being betrayed by their loved ones and things like this because they weren't adopting the party line. And he says, we're dying over here. These are my words but this is what he's saying. We're living in unfreedom. And believe me, we are the ones who produced the system, going along with it is making the system possible to work. We have a choice to make, are we going to live or are we going to die? Are we going to embrace life or are we going to embrace what is in effect spiritual death? The power of the dissident comes in his or her relentless affirmation of life by standing for the truth come what may. And you know what? That's more powerful than those tanks at the end of the day. This is Vaclav Havel and the kids loved it. They could see the kernel of the idea, which is that the truth teller is a very subversive and a very dangerous fellow.

Peter Robinson: Glenn, one more from your syllabus. You entitle week number 12, the case of Clarence Thomas. Clarence Thomas, Mr. Justice Thomas, Supreme court justice. And you assign for that session, Justice Thomas' memoir My Grandfather's Son. Why? What do you hope for the students at this elite university to learn from his example?

Glenn Loury: The very interesting question, Peter, I'm so glad you raised it because it's not necessarily what you would expect, which is these kids, they're pro-choice in terms of abortion and pro-gay rights and things like that. A conservative Catholic, long serving jurist on the US Supreme Court is an unlikely hero for them. My point was, you may agree or disagree with this or that opinion of the great Justice Clarence Thomas. Let me tell you about his life. Born off the coast of Georgia in one of those sea island situations where it gets you speaking and whatnot. Dirt poor, scraped his way along, et cetera. You want a model of African-American heroism, you want an ideal of what it is that we should teach our kids to aspire to, I don't see how you could do any better than the life of Justice Thomas. But guess what? When the National Museum of African American History and Culture decided to stand up a museum, they didn't even have an acknowledgement of the existence of Clarence Thomas and until people started complaining about that. And guess what? If you go to any liberal law school and you ask civil rights professors who teach about civil rights law what they think about Justice Clarence Thomas, they'll say he's a sellout and he's an Uncle Tom. And you can't find in Hollywood, you can't find in the TV scripts, you can't find in the novels that are being produced by these publishing houses any affirmation of the heroic character of this man's life. Why? He's a black conservative, he's off the reservation, he's thinking for himself. I had them, it's not on the syllabus, look at the film from that testimony that Thomas gave at his confirmation hearings, as I'm sure you're familiar with it, in which he very valiantly and powerfully affirms his right to think for himself. Justice Clarence Thomas was on my syllabus because he thinks for himself, he's iconic representative of the cost you pay for thinking for yourself. And I wanted my kids to be able to look at his life in the whole, not filtered through what the talking heads at MSNBC might have to say about him.

Peter Robinson: Glenn, last question. You gave a lecture at Oxford that contained the following two sentences. First of all, let me repeat what I said at the beginning, you've traveled places. You've traveled intellectually, but you've also made a socioeconomic journey. You're in your 70s now, you do not look it and you do not act it, but you are.

Glenn Loury: Thank you.

Peter Robinson: And you have some wealth and a tenured position and kids clearly who love you. And here are the two sentences that your Oxford lecture contained. "I am a black intellectual and I must stand with my people." Why? Glen you don't have anything to prove to anybody. You could just relax and enjoy yourself.

Glenn Loury: Well, I guess it's my upbringing at South Side of Chicago of 1950s and the 1960s. As you said that, Peter, it reminded me of something that my uncle Alfred, now deceased, my mother's brother, a patriarch in our family, I loved him. He was a wonderful man in so many ways. And early in my flirtation with Reaganomics in the 80s when I started moving right, he pulled me aside and he said, "Son, we can only send one from the South Side to MIT and Harvard. We sent you and we don't see us in anything you do." And it crushed me. I wanted him to see me as a furtherance of the river that's flowing along of our human existence, of our culture, of our family, of our 'people'. I wanted to be seen as a black man, making it in the world and making the world a better place for 'his people'. Now in that very same essay, I acknowledge that when I say my people, the antecedent is ambiguous. I mean, my people, I'm an American. So my people are the American people, as well as the African American people. And maybe 100 years from now, a man like myself, with the same kind of background of descent of Africans, wouldn't feel it so necessary to affirm as his people, that subset of the American nation, which is the African American people. I expect that if you were of Irish descent or Italian descent or Jewish descent now, perhaps not so much the latter, but the need to affirm people-hood in your ethnicity is less than 2021 than it was in 1921. I hope for the sake of our country, that that'll be something that we can also say about blackness in 2121. But I don't think we are there yet with the jails overflowing and the et cetera, et cetera. And I just feel as a part of my own identity, a call of the tribe, and I'm not resisting it entirely.

Peter Robinson: Professor Glenn Loury, woke buster. Thank you.

Glenn Loury: My pleasure, Peter.