One of these inquiries came from a group of Brown students hoping to bring what they described as space focused on promoting conservative ideals and expanding ideological diversity on campus. According to Sophia Treder, one of the students who attempted to found the chapter, “I personally felt that Brown lacks this type of community, where everyone’s views can be heard and have a purpose, not just those of the majority.”

Despite the efforts of Treder and her peers, the Brown Undergraduate Council of Students (UCS) has since denied the group’s proposal to establish a TPUSA chapter on campus, prompting inquiries about whether the club recognition process is ideologically neutral. In their rejection notice, the UCS Activities Committee said that the proposed TPUSA chapter did not demonstrate a “clear, distinct niche” that was not already filled by existing student groups. The committee claimed that the decision followed a “thorough and careful review process” during a competitive application cycle with more applicants than available slots for new organizations.

“While we absolutely acknowledge the potential benefits and enthusiasm your organization proposes,” the committee wrote, “we were unable to identify a clear, distinct niche or an unaddressed need within our currently recognized student organizations that your group would fulfill.” UCS instead suggested that Treder and her peers work through the Brown Political Union (BPU) or the Alexander Hamilton Society (AHS) to host the speaker and debate events they proposed in their application.

Brown is widely regarded as one of the most politically liberal campuses in the United States, a reputation that supporters of the proposed chapter say contributes to a lack of ideological diversity on campus. For Treder and her peers, the goal of their TPUSA application was to establish a structured community connected to a national organization that promotes free markets, limited government, and constitutional rights through student activism.

What UCS fails to recognize is that TPUSA is fundamentally different from AHS and BPU in both structure and mission. Treder’s application described programming that extended beyond campus debates, including activism training, speaker events, and educational programming on economic and civic issues centered around TPUSA’s core values. As part of the national TPUSA network, the chapter would also have had access to organizational training resources and grants for campus programming.

The suggestion that the Alexander Hamilton Society fills the same role as the proposed TPUSA chapter is flawed, as AHS is focused on empowering young leaders interested in careers in foreign policy and national security. A similar misalignment exists regarding the suggestion that the Brown Political Union could serve as an alternative venue. While the BPU regularly hosts debates and political speakers, the organization describes its role as facilitating discussion rather than advancing a specific ideological mission.

“The Brown Political Union is the student-centric home for intellectual discourse and civil dialogue across political differences,” said the organization’s president, Daniel Solomon, in a statement to The Spectator. “The Union holds no political persuasion and maintains no affiliation with any national political movements.”

The precedent at other Ivy League institutions further complicates UCS’s reasoning. Universities including Princeton and Dartmouth have, in this academic year, recognized chapters of TPUSA, and Brown itself previously had a TPUSA chapter active on campus as recently as 2019. Dartmouth’s TPUSA chapter was approved despite the prominence of the Dartmouth Political Union, an organization that operates very similarly to the Brown Political Union.

A broader look at Brown’s student organization landscape also raises questions about how the “niche” standard is applied in practice. For example, the University recognized sixteen a cappella groups this academic year, demonstrating a clear willingness to support multiple organizations operating within the same general space. Similarly, the University’s student activities directory lists numerous left-aligned advocacy groups across a range of issue areas, including environmental activism, labor organizing, immigration policy, racial justice advocacy, and international political movements including the Brown Democrats, Young Democratic Socialists of America, the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Students Demand Action. Many of these organizations operate in overlapping advocacy spaces and frequently organize around similar policy goals or activist campaigns. Despite this overlap, they remain independently recognized groups within the UCS system.

In contrast, students on the political right have comparatively few institutional options. The only explicitly conservative political organizations currently recognized by Brown are the Republican Club and Students For Life, even though several hundred students at Brown identify as as conservative. The decision to deny the TPUSA club application made by UCS implies that conservative student organizations are a monolith, and that conservatives at Brown should not be granted the ability to express their minority perspectives on campus. The issue isn’t a lack of interest from students—it is a symptom of a University culture that seemingly prioritizes liberal perspectives over conservative ones.

For many students on campus, the denial of the TPUSA application raises questions about whether Brown’s institutional structures are capable of promoting meaningful ideological diversity. If multiple progressive activist organizations with overlapping missions are permitted to coexist, why would the creation of an additional conservative-leaning organization be rejected on the grounds that its niche already exists? Without further explanation from UCS, the justification offered—that TPUSA does not occupy a distinct role on campus—suggests that conservative students will always take a backseat to progressive ones despite Brown’s mission of understanding through free inquiry.

Critics of the recent anti-ICE demonstrations will likely point to the results of the George Floyd protests of 2020, which on many occasions devolved into rioting, looting, and mob rule — actions clearly prohibited by Dr. King’s dogma of nonviolent resistance. Defenders of the protests might counter that such incidents of violence were related but tangential to the broader BLM movement that aimed to draw attention to perceived injustices around policing in America. Many activists suggest that the degradation of these protests was inevitable, arguing that the voices of the marginalized could not be heard any other way.

However, when the debate shifts to clarifying the obligations of the oppressed and oppressor, the powerless and the powerful, we overlook a foundational question: what exactly are we protesting in the first place?

For Dr. King, it is exactly this question that sets the boundaries of acceptable protest and the appropriate course of action to be undertaken in pursuit of fighting injustice. What was central to King’s promotion of civil disobedience was that it be a response to unjust laws, because, to quote St. Augustine and Dr. King, “An unjust law is no law at all.” Identifying which laws are unjust was the means to constructing both boundaries of protest and an actionable goal for it.

Dr. King’s doctrine is remarkable for having a great reverence for the law, which was why he willingly accepted the punishments for breaking unjust laws.

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Dr. King’s efforts in Birmingham were successful because by breaking unjust laws and accepting the consequences, he and his cohort had successfully demonstrated that said laws ought not to exist at all. For Dr. King, it was only the unjust laws that were to be broken, and never the just ones, especially those that we find are rooted in the moral law.1 This philosophy is particularly profound and diverges from what we have witnessed in Minneapolis recently, watching agitators assault police officers and destroy personal property.

My question to the protestors in Minneapolis and around the country is this: what are the unjust laws that are to be broken in protest? I imagine that many demonstrators would argue that it is our immigration laws that are unjust. But which ones? Those that maintain that there is no universal right to enter and live in the United States? Of course, many would be hard-pressed to make a statement endorsing open borders and a severe limitation of sovereignty, so they’ll make an appeal to something more specific: it isn’t having immigration laws that is unjust, but rather the manner in which we go about enforcing them that is problematic. But here we run back into the original problem: which laws related to the enforcement of immigration law are unjust? What should those laws look like?

For Dr. King and his struggle, this question had a straightforward answer. It was laws enforcing the doctrine of segregation that were unjust, and so it was those laws (and only those laws) that civil disobedience targeted. Civil rights protests had a defined objective: the elimination of specific unjust statutes. Protest grounded in reform, not rage.

The lack of such a vision or goal will be damning for the recent wave of protests, which express no particular desire for reform, but rather an unrefined want for chaos and action when no action is warranted. They are hasty, ill-thought-out, and worst of all, demonstrate a willingness to break any law, even just ones.2 Let’s concede for the sake of the argument that there is something unjust about ICE as an institution: does it thereby follow that illegal hostility towards agents of the institution is warranted? Do issues stemming from the objectives of enforcement magically render those laws that protect enforcers as illegitimate?

To reference another controversial law, many would argue that marijuana prohibitions are wrong or unjust somehow. In this case, we can perfectly understand how civil disobedience could protest such an unjust law. By possessing marijuana and subsequently accepting the unfair punishments of laws prohibiting it, one has perhaps successfully demonstrated that those laws are wrong. It certainly wouldn’t follow from this view that a state trooper searching someone’s car for some weed has forfeited his right to protect himself from agitators who wish to prevent him from doing his job. While weed laws might be unjust and should thus be broken, laws protecting police officers are just and must still be followed.

Let’s go back to the subject at hand: is ICE unjust? If what was at stake here was that there are particular tactics of ICE that might be unjust (like racial profiling, or something), then calls for action would all concern those particular tactics. But that isn’t the rhetoric or mission of these protests, which advocate something much more extreme: abolish ICE. Not replace ICE, reform ICE, but abolish it. We want a country, we want sovereignty, but we aren’t willing to empower the authorities necessary to maintain our border. This position is irreconcilable.

Of course, only the least serious demonstrators would give that account to save face; at the core of the protest is something most Americans would find much more sinister. What is at the core of the recent anti-ICE protests is the belief that laws maintaining the sovereignty of the United States are illegitimate. That Americans possess no right to have a country at all. To many, this statement will appear to be going down a slippery slope, but if we are to take the logic behind immigration laws and their enforcement seriously, it is obvious that without them, we have no country.3 This line of reasoning will not persuade those who don’t believe in countries or borders, but my suspicion is that most people taking up their signs to protest ICE don’t actually want what they are protesting for.

When pitching this argument to a friend, he countered, “The protests do have a specific achievable goal, that is, we want ICE to leave our community.” While certainly more actionable than the abolishment of ICE, this account still struggles under the test of unjust laws. Who gets to decide which states ICE can remove people from? Is it unjust that immigration law is under the umbrella of the federal government? One might remember the Nullification Crisis of 1832, when the great state of South Carolina decided the laws of the federal government did not apply to them when they did not approve. This is not how federalism works. No state can declare federal law carrying out an explicated duty of the Constitution null and void because it simply does not agree.

Perhaps there is no unjust statute to be protested in the case of ICE, but rather, there are actions being taken by ICE that are unlawful, like the suspension of habeas corpus. What should we do then? I would suggest turning back to the words of Dr. King, who wisely states that “in any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action.” The accusation that ICE routinely violates the rights of habeas corpus doesn’t even survive the first step. If a person is given an order to appear in court, and they fail to appear, and then are arrested, have we violated their right to appear in court? Surely not, yet this is the justification for many of the deportations happening right now in our country. If we were so concerned about immigrants not having their day in court, wouldn’t our “direct action” involve escorting our immigrant friends to their local immigration court?

I submit that I have complaints with ICE. It is disconcerting that they drive unmarked cars and conceal their faces; unfortunately, US citizens are mistakenly caught up in ICE raids; it brings me no sick pleasure watching hard-working immigrants being removed alongside the non-working and criminals, as necessary as it is to enforce immigration laws. However, these are not grievances that render ICE an unjust institution, and they do not prompt the direct action we have witnessed by demonstrators across the country.

Liberal activists want to live in the unfulfillable middle, where they can express outrage over perceived injustices without having to grapple with the consequences of reform stemming from the outcry. Without cultural, political, or legal intervention, these protests will inevitably devolve from ‘civil disobedience’ to mob rule – there is no end goal to be achieved beyond the destruction of our country’s sovereignty.

According to official guidance issued by the University, while faculty enjoy broad academic freedom, the exercise of that freedom “should not interfere with the normal functions of the University,” with classroom instruction explicitly identified as one of those functions. The policy states that it is “inappropriate to cancel class in direct or indirect support of a demonstration, rally, walkout, or activity of non-curricular advocacy or activism.” The language is direct, leaving no room for alternative interpretation.

Professors have a professional obligation to hold scheduled class meetings. When a class must be missed due to illness, professional travel, or religious observance, the expectation is that the class will be rescheduled or that an appropriate substitute will be arranged. Political demonstrations are notably absent from the list of acceptable reasons to cancel instruction.

The rationale for these restrictions is clearly spelled out. While students retain the right to protest or walk out of class, the University acknowledges that canceling class to accommodate such activity infringes on the rights of students who do not wish to participate, in alignment with the University’s Academic Freedom policies. In other words, institutional support for activism through canceled instruction comes at the direct expense of students who simply want to attend class.

Several students reported to the Spectator that classes were canceled or substantively altered in advance of and in anticipation of today’s major campus demonstration, effectively eliminating instruction they had paid for. In the case of the ICE walkout, promotional materials circulated bearing the slogan “no school, no work, no shopping,” an explicit call for academic disruption rather than protest alongside instruction.

Notably, the protest itself was scheduled to begin at 1 p.m., yet students reported that classes throughout the day, including those scheduled hours before the demonstration was set to begin, had also been canceled. At a university where tuition, fees, room, and board now roughly equal $100,000 per year, the absence of scheduled classes carries real financial weight. When an entire day of instruction is canceled in anticipation of a protest whose slogan calls for “no school,” students are left paying full price for no instruction at all. When classes are canceled without rescheduling or replaced with asynchronous videos or materials readily available on YouTube, students are left paying full tuition for a lower-quality educational experience.

Brown has long affirmed students’ right to demonstrate and engage in political expression. The issue is, in the second week of the semester, students who were planning on attending class today – whether because they oppose the protest, support it but still value instruction, or simply want the education they are paying for – no longer have that ability.

“I came to Brown for an elite education, not to have my classes canceled in support of a political agenda,” one student told the Spectator, requesting anonymity due to fear of academic repercussions.

Brown’s policies already articulate a careful balance between free expression and academic responsibility. They protect students’ right to protest while drawing a firm line against institutional endorsement through canceled or altered instruction. When classes are canceled before a protest has even begun, that line is explicitly crossed. When that happens, it is a procedural violation that garners a University response and is a breach of trust between the University and its students.

As the protest is currently in progress, but classes have already been canceled, Brown faces an easy question. Will the University uphold its written standards governing academic responsibility, or will it refund students and their families for the canceled academic instruction in the name of political activity?

In her musings on Charlie Kirk, Ms. Peus makes a strange rhetorical maneuver and praises him for his free speech absolutism. She is correct to cast doubt on the coherence of the “hate speech” category, but when she shifts to discussing the supposed predicament of conservatives on Brown’s campus, her discussion of “hate speech” seems to concede — at least implicitly — that particular conservative speech could fall under that label. Just because you are allowed to say something does not magically make that thing good.

As far as I know, the United States is not on the verge of adopting a European-style hate speech law, but hate speech is still something worth discouraging. In the wake of Kirk’s death, many on the left accused him of “hate speech.” Instead of defending him against those accusations that I believe are baseless, Ms. Peus simply affirms that hate speech should be allowed in the country.

Furthermore, free speech is not under threat at Brown University. Quality debate, on the other hand, is nowhere to be found!

Just last spring, when the Brown Political Union announced a debate concerning whether local governments should cooperate with ICE, the thought that someone could argue for the affirmative was so appalling to many students that there were widespread calls to protest and shut down the debate itself. The rationale put forth by these students was that mass deportations are so deplorable that it wasn’t even worth having the debate. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone agreed? Alas, the majority of our elected officials consistently support these deportations, and the burden is on us to alter the zeitgeist should we disagree. The ability to debate sensitive issues is elevated only by confronting dissent.

Ms. Peus seems to understand that quality debate is rare at Brown, but she misses important details on how we got here. The conservative students at Brown are indeed relatively soft-spoken, but it’s a mistake to blame this phenomenon on some nebulous, omnipotent University bureaucracy. Ms. Peus fails to give an example of how exactly Brown University has stifled conservative speech. Perhaps there is an argument that professors have a liberal bias that sacrifices the intellectual integrity of the faculty; I appreciate that Ms. Peus brings this up and discusses the mechanisms for why this is the case. But what about the students? Ms. Peus cites a Brown Daily Herald survey showing that 40% of students in 2015 were vaguely right-of-center. Who exactly is preventing these students from speaking their mind?

Conservative thought is mute on campus, and not because of the meddling of The University Anti-Conservative Machine, but rather because conservatives are too weak to speak up. Conservatives are not victims for going to a predominantly liberal campus in the same sense that white people are not victims when attending an HBCU, nor are atheists attending Liberty University. Instead of complaining about the Brown’s culture and blaming a vacuous entity, it’s time for conservatives to untuck their tail and stand up for what they believe.

Political discourse going across the aisle hardly exists at Brown University. But this has little to do with the political views of the faculty or the administration, and everything to do with the taboo surrounding right-of-center views among students. Predictably, the self-proclaimed tolerant left is not bursting at the seams to embrace conservative ideas. The burden is on conservatives to demonstrate the merit of their ideas. The left has a grip on Brown’s campus culture because of their relentlessness and vocality. Silence with the occasional complaint will change nothing.

When conservatives generally hold their tongues, they become the silent majority in the country. When conservatives at Brown do so, they become a silent minority, a truly special snowflake that is easily ostracized by the vocal majority. We cannot allow this to happen. Cross-party debate is important, not because it changes anyone’s mind immediately (although it could), but because it serves as an opportunity to learn about opposing values. Without debate, we are left only with knowledge of opposing policy, and no direction for how to productively work towards a common goal.

Say what you believe. Don’t be ashamed. Don’t be afraid. If you genuinely think your beliefs are Good, then there should be no hesitation in speaking them. Brown students need a reality check, and they need to understand the predominant view of the American proletariat: conservatism. Don’t deprive them of such education by living in fear of repercussions.

The modern research university system in America finds its roots in the Cold War, when competition with the Soviet Union spurred the federal government to launch a series of initiatives designed to bolster the country’s scientific and technological prowess. One of the most important of these was the National Science Foundation, which was founded in 1950 to fund scientific research at some of the top academic institutions in America. The NSF operated on a tight budget in its early years, forcing it to pass up on many appealing grant proposals, but everything changed following the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1958. Fears over Soviet technological superiority led lawmakers to more than triple the NSF’s budget from $40 million in 1958 to $134 million in 1959, and by 1968 the NSF was allocated a yearly budget of almost half a billion dollars to improve America’s scientific research. This proved to be a windfall for private research universities, and the NSF now operates a $9 billion budget that schools have come to depend on for both direct and indirect research expenses. Other government agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) spend tens of billions of dollars on medically focused research, with over 80% of the NIH’s $48 billion budget going towards extramural grants for research outside of government laboratories.

These government funding programs have become a lifeline for top research institutions like Brown to engage in what would otherwise be prohibitively expensive research: in 2023 Brown spent more than $350 million on research, over 70% of which was financed directly by the federal government. This figure is particularly interesting given that on paper Brown is a private university that is theoretically independent from the federal government in its operations. Brown is legally registered as a “Rhode Island nonprofit corporation,” and just like any other corporation it has a governing body that makes decisions for the university on matters related to faculty, finances, and gifts among other responsibilities. This model is common to nearly every private university in America and is understood to be a necessary safeguard for the protection of student and faculty academic freedom. This makes it all the more concerning that universities, especially those dedicated to costly research, are effectively in the pocket of the federal government, something that administrators only recently woke up to when their federal funding came into question.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration rocked Brown and other universities when it announced that it would be withholding billions of dollars in pre-approved research federal grants over claims of antisemitism on college campuses. Brown was hit especially hard given its already unstable financial footing, and the school was forced to take out a $300 million loan to stopgap the lost federal funding. Trump’s actions, while controversial, raise an important question: how much say should the federal government have in its provision of grant money to schools? These grants are, after all, taxpayer funded, and government agencies like the NIH already heavily influence the research process by determining which projects to fund. The Trump administration is also not the first to put strings on federal grants, with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, and national origin in federally funded projects. The Biden administration made its own updates to federal grant policy, expanding the definition of sex discrimination to include gender identity for the first time, and the Trump administration has since updated the NSF grant policy to prohibit federal money from going towards “DEI and other far-left initiatives.”

In order to restore its research funding Brown reached an agreement earlier this year with the Trump administration, making controversial concessions that concretely demonstrate the university’s lack of independence. Brown is so dependent on federal funds that it willingly limited its provision of gender affirming care for minors and made a number of other policy changes to appease the Trump administration, moves that President Paxson explicitly tied to the burden of frozen grant money. Other schools took far more drastic steps to get their federal funding back: Columbia University named new faculty members to certain departments and Cornell agreed to turn over its admissions data to the government. While both of these concessions might not seem like much, they also came with fines in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars that some have decried as extortion payments to the Trump administration.

It is evident that the federal research grant system is actively hurting the independence of America’s “private” research institutions, though schools unfortunately have to toe the government’s line if they want to engage in scientific research. There is simply no other funding source that can match the scale of federal grants, leaving America’s research institutions at the mercy of policymakers who have the final say over where the money goes. While this control over universities was certainly not an intended outcome of government agencies like the National Science Foundation, it has since become a useful tool for politicians to influence a sector of America that they would otherwise struggle to touch. This leaves research universities like Brown with a difficult choice: retain academic independence, or submit to the power of the government’s purse and the political consequences that come with it.

Documents from 2024 and 2025 show that Brown is now drawing this program to a close, separating its commitment to diversity from the process of evaluating individual candidates. This change re-centers academic merit as the deciding factor in hiring and admissions decisions while treating diversity as a value to be cultivated once students and faculty are already on campus.

The University’s course correction reflects a national moment. After the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling on race-conscious admissions, institutions have faced pressure to demonstrate that their processes are both equitable and compliant with civil rights law. In Brown’s case, formalizing merit-based evaluation while maintaining post-selection support offers one model for reconciling those demands.

In August 2024, the Diversity and Inclusion Oversight Board (DIOB), tasked with progressing goals set forth in the DIAP, cautioned in a memo addressed to President Christina Paxson that “the broader U.S. climate on diversity and inclusion could eviscerate Brown’s commitment” to the plan. The Board cited the reinstatement of standardized testing as evidence of changing priorities, describing the SAT as “a tool proven to be discriminatory” and criticizing the decision for taking place “without public conversation.”

The University’s response marked a decisive change in tone. President Paxson argued that standardized tests, when interpreted “in the context of a student’s background and record,” could “serve to redress some disadvantages” and that strong results from those at under-resourced schools “may actually serve to demonstrate [a student’s] ability to succeed at Brown.”

The 2025 correspondence between the DIOB and the administration makes Brown’s shift away from DEI-based assessment practices unmistakable. In its final memorandum, the DIOB noted that the DIAP had been conceived as a ten-year plan and that “it is time to move forward.” Shortly after that memo, on July 30, 2025, Brown signed a federal resolution agreement that restored research funding and permanently closed all pending federal investigations and compliance reviews related to its compliance with anti-discrimination laws, including Title VI’s prohibitions on discrimination in undergraduate admissions and hiring.

In its subsequent response to the DIOB, the University articulated its new direction within the legal requirements of the federal agreement. The response stated that the University’s commitment to cultivating a diverse community “operates in tandem with our commitment to comply with legal prohibitions against discrimination and harassment reflected in federal laws and the resolution agreement.” Additionally, the response pointed to Section 3.3 of the University’s Nondiscrimination and Anti-Harassment Policy, which “makes clear that we implement our educational and employment decisions without regard to any protected characteristic and that our programs and operations are open to all and advertised as such.” Together, these statements show that Brown’s post-DIAP framework is being shaped by both internal priorities and binding federal obligations.

President Paxson’s October 2, 2025 message to the community confirmed the end of the DIOB’s work and the DIAP era. This announcement outlined the creation of a new Ad Hoc Committee on Diversity and Inclusion, composed of faculty, staff and students, that would develop recommendations for a replacement framework by May 2026. The creation of this new committee signals that Brown intends to maintain diversity as an institutional priority even as it redefines how that priority is pursued.

Taken together, these correspondences between the University and the DIOB outline a new equilibrium. Brown continues to describe diversity and inclusion as “essential for advancing knowledge and discovery,” but its official documents now place academic performance and legal neutrality at the center of decision-making. Diversity work is being redirected towards initiatives that come after, rather than before, admission or hiring like mentoring programs, first-generation support, and inclusive pedagogy.

The impact of Brown’s shift will depend on how the University defines diversity going forward and whether it can avoid replicating the same ideological pitfalls under a new structure. In correspondence with The Spectator, Ilya Shapiro, Director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute, argued that “it’s of course good that Brown isn’t defying a Supreme Court ruling by continuing to use racial preferences, but the devil will be in the details of how it pursues ‘diversity.’” He added that “the problem with DEI isn’t programs meant to help disadvantaged students or underrepresented minorities but an ideological structure that teaches students to view all issues through identitarian lenses,” warning that while “it’s a good thing to celebrate different cultures,” it becomes “a bad (and illegal) thing to create a culture where your rights and benefits are determined by where you are in a privilege hierarchy or whether you belong to a class deemed oppressor or oppressed.”

For students and faculty, Brown’s changes mean that admissions and hiring will rest primarily on achievement, research promise, and potential for scholarly contribution. Once members join the community, diversity initiatives will continue to ensure that opportunity and belonging are accessible. The University’s leadership presents this not as retreat, but as continuity through adjustment, using diversity as a tool for building community rather than a prerequisite for entry.

In closing her October statement, President Paxson framed the next stage of Brown’s diversity programs as a collective effort, writing that “the creation of a new action plan will offer an opportunity for a broader conversation across campus about the meaning and significance of the concepts of diversity and inclusion as drivers of our academic mission.” That language captures the University’s new direction that keeps diversity within its educational mission while reaffirming that merit and accomplishment are the basis for entry into the Brown community.

- Benjamin Franklin -

“At Brown, undergraduates are creators, leaders and doers who are not satisfied with merely raising questions — they learn to confront, address and solve problems facing society, the nation and the world.” These words welcome visitors to the Undergraduate Students page on Brown University’s website. Will Brown stand behind them when it’s most necessary?

Charlie Kirk’s assassination on Sept. 10 put a spotlight on the topic of free speech, highlighting the fact that many Americans on both sides of the political spectrum appear to be rejecting the principles enshrined in the First Amendment. Should individuals be persecuted and socially ostracized for their beliefs? Should they be fired? And, what in the world is “hate speech”?

Like him or not, Charlie Kirk had one thing right: “My position is that even hate speech should be completely allowed in our country,” he said to the Wall Street Journal. “The most disgusting speech should absolutely be allowed in our country.” He went on to explain that the term is subjective, and that it will ultimately be defined by whomever is in power. Gray areas are dangerous, particularly for those in the democratic minority.

Brown University should lead by example and emphatically make a stand for freedom of speech. Of course, civility should still be encouraged, but the university has, for far too long, been actively stifling the conservative minority by creating an environment that is not conducive to fostering an open debate on controversial issues. Most conservatives I know, including myself, are nervous to speak up in class or with friends, fearing academic and social repercussions. This environment of fear is unacceptable at an institution like Brown.

Free discourse is predicated on the notion of debate, often described by scholars and politicians as the “marketplace of ideas.” Prior to the last several decades, competing in this marketplace was a cherished tradition of the Western world. May the best idea win! This is no longer the case, and universities are a major reason why. Universities like Brown have replaced honest intellectual debate with “safe spaces,” intended to minimize the disagreement necessary for a free society. In 2020, Stanford discouraged the use of offensive terms such as “walk-in” and “you guys” at student gatherings, but after receiving significant resistance, the university amended this rule book in 2023. This policy of censorship is not only dangerous: it is also nonsensical.

For starters, the world is not a “safe space.” Universities that shelter their students from this reality are doing them a disservice. Students need to learn to be strong and articulate their opinions. They need to know how to apply intellectual rigor to their arguments, to hone them, and to defend them. For too long, universities have allowed only one side of the argument to be presented. A New York Times Article published in 2022 found that although American views have become far more diverse in recent decades, elite institutions have not become representative of this shift. They are typically a predominantly liberal population whose lifestyle tends to be considerably more affluent than the average American. This political correctness continues to damage the very people it purports to protect. What are these students going to do when they graduate and find themselves in the real world, which is by no means a “safe space”?

Second, most issues are not black and white. We don’t always know the “right” answer. Intellectual debate and the free flow of ideas help our society to determine the best course of action. All should feel free to contribute to the debate, as it is the only way for us to ascertain what is right. Preventing open debate does nothing but create the dreaded “echo-chambers.” A Brown Daily Herald article from 2016 reported that the ratio of liberal to conservative professors at Brown was approximately 30 to 1—a striking imbalance given that, in 2015, around 40 percent of students identified as right-leaning or conservative. Even if these viewpoints represent a minority, students who hold them still deserve to feel that their perspectives are acknowledged and respected by their professors. Must we only engage with those who share our beliefs? Do students at Brown truly have the freedom to encounter and debate differing ideas?

Why are universities suddenly so afraid of open discourse? Academic tenure was created, in part, to protect freedom of speech and promote intellectual honesty and integrity. What happened to these ideals? Academia is no longer a merit-based system. On the contrary, it is perhaps more political than any other profession. A comprehensive study conducted by the University of Washington, spanning from 1996 to 2014, reveals a critical insight into academic tenure: it is predominantly determined based not on making waves but on how frequently one’s work is cited by other academics. This creates a positive feedback loop where academics defer to the politically correct status quo rather than risk their citation rankings. Where is the quest for the truth?

The unfortunate truth is that these academic institutions have an overwhelmingly liberal dominance of professors and campus environment which has stifled debate. There is no upside to articulating one’s views — only the fear that one might be offended. The result is timidity and overall weakness at the elite universities that once challenged the status quo. Opposition has been criminalized by social shunning and student codes of conduct. Neither side has the opportunity to win the debate because it is no longer allowed to happen.

In lieu of blindly falling in step with other elite universities, Brown should vigorously defend freedom of speech. The university must be a “safe space” for all ideas, not just the ones that are accepted at other elite universities. Brown should give its students the freedom to develop and test their opinions against the views of other students across the political spectrum. This will result in a more enlightened world and stronger, more confident students.

Perhaps most importantly, it is worth remembering that those who trample on free speech when they have the power to do so will likely regret their decisions when the tables turn. Today’s minority won’t be the same as tomorrow’s, and principles like free speech ensure democracy continues to function regardless of who’s in power.

For decades, higher education in America has been underpinned on a simple transaction: students investing their money and time in a degree, and that degree getting them a high-paying job when they graduate. It is this promise of future earnings that has allowed schools to charge exorbitant amounts of money for their services — one oft-cited statistic is that the average college graduate will earn $1.2 million more than someone who only graduated from high school, according to the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities. For many students, these figures make college seem like an obvious choice, and lenders are more than happy to offer loans that make schools like Brown, which costs $97,284 (including room and board) for the 2025-2026 academic year, more affordable to middle- and lower-income families. Pell grants, scholarships, and financial aid lower Brown’s nearly six-figure sticker price down to an average net price of $26,723, which, while a considerable amount, is far more palatable for students and families. Nevertheless, the cost-benefit ratio does not favor Brown graduates as compared to their peers: on average, Brown University graduates earn less than those from peer Ivy League institutions, with median salaries 10 years post-graduation at approximately $87,811 compared to higher figures like $102,491 at Columbia and $104,043 at Cornell, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard.

One might expect that the vast majority of this money would go towards educating the students footing the bill, but that is hardly the case at Brown. Faculty ranks remain comparatively slim with only 866 regular faculty members, and their compensation accounts for only 17.1% of Brown’s $1.9 billion FY2026 operating budget. This imbalance is indicative of Brown’s continued expansion of its non-instructional workforce, causing resources to shift away from classrooms and educators in a process that weakens the institution’s core mission of teaching. This administrative overgrowth reflects national trends of skyrocketing overhead, diluted academic focus, and rising costs, eroding Brown’s teaching luster at a time when the promise of higher education is already under scrutiny.

Students, for their part, have come to expect Brown to provide amenities outside the classroom, with schools justifying annual tuition increases by offering non-educational services like healthcare and transportation. This puts Brown in a difficult position, as the cuts necessary to address deficit spending are difficult to sell to students whose tuition bill is only growing. For this reason, Brown has avoided addressing its budget crisis earlier, instead relying on a combination of deficit spending and tuition increases that only kicks the can down the road. As student expectations grow with every subsequent tuition increase, Brown now finds itself in an unsustainable cycle of spending with no end in sight.

For years, this cycle has been fueled by federal grants and endowments, but recent policy shifts have exacerbated the strain. Under the Trump administration, higher education institutions have faced significant budget cuts, including the freezing of $510 million in federal funding for Brown alone, funds that while reinstated remain under threat following recent threats from the White House. Compounding these financial issues are bad investments in illiquid assets within university endowments, forcing Brown and other schools to take out loans to finance operations despite having billions of assets on paper. This lack of liquid cash has forced Brown to prepare for “significant cost-cutting,” including staff reductions and scaled-back capital spending.

Brown’s current difficulties are caused by an expansion of its functions beyond the school’s core expertise of educating students. To address student expectations and justify tuition hikes Brown has ballooned its administrative staff in recent decades, and the school now employs 3,805 non-instructional full-time staff members, despite running a $29 million deficit in FY 2026. This administrative bloat includes roles unrelated to teaching, such as extensive DEI bureaucracies, which critics argue drive up tuition without enhancing academic quality. As a result, essential student services like housing suffer from maintenance failures and flooding, even as tuition approaches $93,000 annually. This nationwide trend of increased administrative spending is shifting resources from classrooms to overhead, leading some institutions to raise tuition up to 42% over the last decade, according to Crimson Education.

Despite significant investment in service areas and administrative staff, Brown has failed to perform its management duties well for years. As far back as 2015, there have been complaints about the wait times for mental health counseling, and recent reporting by the Brown Daily Herald uncovered a pattern of inappropriate behavior by officers in Brown’s Department of Public Safety. Moreover, Brown has mishandled labor negotiations with its staff, leading some labor unions to threaten strikes last November.

It is clear that Brown has expanded beyond its ability to deliver top-quality services, and the school will need to make difficult decisions in the near future on which services should be cut or outsourced to private contractors that actually have domain expertise. Brown can no longer pretend that it is an expert in all domains of student life: private companies can often deliver better results in hotel management, catering, security, and healthcare services. Other universities commonly outsource dining services to companies like Sodexo and Aramark, bookstores to Barnes & Noble College or Follett, and facilities management to specialized firms that use predictive analytics for maintenance. During the pandemic, approximately 300 new deals were reached between universities and for-profit online program managers, representing a 79 percent increase over the previous year. Brown would be wise to follow suit.

Brown recently took a step towards fiscal stability by laying off 48 employees and eliminating 55 unfilled positions to help reach a targeted $15 million in savings, according to the Brown Daily Herald. But these actions are unlikely to be enough. Even after these cuts, Brown will continue to run a large structural deficit, and further cuts will be a hard sell to students paying unprecedentedly high levels of tuition. However, the alternative is simply not sustainable: Brown can no longer afford to run its own sovereign state with a police force and healthcare system in a corner of Providence, Rhode Island. Instead, Brown should emphasize its core skill of education and take steps to reduce both tuition and student expectations. A failure to do so will see Brown relegated to history as yet another corporation that expanded beyond its means.

But by sophomore year, seminars give way to Goldman Sachs information sessions. Calendars start to fill up with coffee chats. The freedom to build our own schedules never wanes, but the choices inevitably arrange themselves around a single question: will this help with recruiting?

Firms on Wall Street hire their intern classes nearly 18 months in advance in an effort to snag top talent before competitors do. By sophomore fall, students are already expected to have leadership positions, polished resumes, technicals mastered, and an extensive network built from coffee chats. Miss that window, and students risk being shut out of the most lucrative jobs entirely. This urgency convinces students to drop classes they once dreamed of taking, skip extracurriculars, and ironically enough, put off the hobbies and passions that earned them admission to Brown. For many, this demanding process ultimately becomes the defining feature of their undergraduate years.

According to Brown’s Center for Career Exploration, 79 percent of employed graduates enter the for-profit sector, and over half land roles in just finance, consulting, and tech. At Brown, Computer Science concentrators alone accounted for about one-sixth of the undergraduate body in 2018. For all our talk of exploration, we are no less guilty of defaulting to the same, familiar career choices.

I’ve experienced the pressure to land a role in these lucrative industries firsthand. I transferred to Brown after my freshman year as a journalism student at Boston University, excited to jumpstart my dream career reporting on business stories, interviewing founders, and writing about the human side of companies. The open curriculum seemed like the perfect way to kindle that fire while I built a technical context to enhance my reporting and explore other subjects I hadn’t been able to under B.U.’s general education requirements. Instead, my dream of journalism became a dream deferred, supplanted by coffee chats and case prep.

“I’ve noticed in my personal experience that students are accepted, or even apply, to Brown because they want to save the world in their own ways,” said Professor Bill Allen, who has been teaching classes on nonprofits and social entrepreneurship at Brown for 20 years. “The open curriculum allows that. But once they arrive, they start to feel the pressure of career choices, and many gravitate toward finance as the ‘safe’ path.’”

The choice is certainly not irrational. Brown’s full cost of attendance now totals nearly $96,000 a year, and national data shows that STEM and business majors command the highest early-career pay. Consulting and finance offer a clear short-term safety net with structured, predictable recruiting cycles and unmatched “exit opportunities” from having a name-brand firm on your resume. In an uncertain job market, stability, even if short-term, is seductive. Bashing our peers for “selling out” is deeply rooted in Brown’s spirit, but such criticism borders on imprudent. It neglects the reality that a strong foundation of economic freedom builds capacity to effectuate change.

“Students need to set themselves up for a better future,” a junior recently confessed to me anonymously. “And so naturally, when you get a degree from a college like [Brown], you want to make sure that it’s worth it. [These jobs are] very high paying; they will set you up well for your career. So you sacrifice some of your passion to attain some higher level of security and comfort.”

The point is not that students shouldn’t explore careers in finance and consulting. The true danger lies in treating the job as an entire identity and deferring every other interest until some imagined future. Far too many students have an “all or nothing” mindset going into recruiting, losing their identities in the process.

“I remember going back to my roommates who all had secured offers [in finance] by now, and felt a huge sense of imposter syndrome,” a Brown student recruiting for a top private equity firm told me. “I began to cry in front of them, because it felt as though my world was literally collapsing, which is ironic given that I stepped foot on this campus just one year before that, not knowing a single name of any of these firms that I was applying to.”

We tell ourselves we’ll explore later, after the offer, after we’ve saved enough, after the pressure eases. But “later” rarely comes. I know far too many talented writers, debaters, musicians, at Brown who postponed those parts of themselves in the name of recruiting. Even the freshmen feel it; this fall, more than 200 underclassmen applied to Bruno Finance Society. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of these sharp, creative students would let the very things that make them interesting wither as I read through applications.

This mindset of postponement doesn’t end with recruiting. Once you start earning a certain salary, the lifestyle that comes with it makes it harder and harder to walk away. That’s what people mean by the golden handcuffs: you can always leave, but you almost never do.

Professor Allen put it more simply: “You can lead a purpose-driven life and still make a good living. But the money motivation can get to a point where you begin to make a lot of money, you’re comfortable, and then some, if not many, get to a point of saying, ‘Well, is this what I really want to do?’”

It doesn’t have to be this way. “Even if you still go into finance or banking, it’s a richer experience if you don’t crowd the other things out,” Professor Allen explained to me. “Brown allows you to do that. You can get a great concentration in economics and still explore widely. But too often, students build a bubble around themselves instead.”

Brown’s open curriculum is designed to encourage students’ curiosities beyond their major requirements. But in practice, it largely funnels underclassmen into the “holy trinity” of studies: Applied Mathematics, Economics, and Computer Science, often combined into a tongue-twisting double concentration that looks good on a resume. The paradox is that instead of choosing freedom, students impose rigidity and prioritize the courses they think recruiters want them to take over the ones they once promised themselves they’d try.

“I think if freshman year I hadn’t decided to take so many math and finance classes immediately, I wouldn’t have been pushed in that direction so quickly,” a Brown junior told me. “Because I chose classes based on what other people were doing, I ended up taking the same ones over and over again in the same field.”

As I flew back from JFK to T.F. Green after a grueling day of final round interviews, I reflected on my three-month-long recruiting process for just one internship. By now it was March of my sophomore year; I had already rearranged my entire life around recruiting. I had given up newspaper reporting, violin, creative writing, and the nonprofit I had worked on throughout high school and freshman year of college. By the time both my sophomore and junior summer internship offers were signed, I was staring back at a completely different version of myself in the mirror.

College is a time to explore, fail, and try again. Perhaps there is a balance that can be struck between stability and curiosity. Between recruiting for a job that pays well and not abandoning the things that make you who you are. You don’t need to wait until you’ve made partner or managing director to lead a purpose-driven life outside of work. Passions don’t have to be postponed, and they can coexist with careers, even demanding ones, if we refuse to set them aside. The real tragedy occurs when we treat recruiting as totalizing and let it swallow the very freedom that drew us to Brown in the first place.

Edited by Lucas Guan

Hillhouse Ltd. and Harvey Ltd. operated as Brown’s campus haberdashers — independent shops that stocked the “Ivy” wardrobe. Harvey in particular was run by Brown students and alumni and explicitly marketed itself as Brown’s Ivy store; longtime proprietor Harvey Lapides later described the shop as “like a club” centered on the Ivy look. Harvey Lapides ’50 was a World War II Navy veteran and professional baseball player from Barrington, RI. He co-founded Harvey Ltd. with his brother Philip. Strasmich, a sports editor, described Lapides as the greatest athlete of the class in his column from October 1945. “[Harvey] Lapides was a third baseman and captain of the team in 1943 and 1944,” Matthew Longcore wrote in a blog post published on Ivy Style. He would play in the 1943, 1944 and 1947 seasons, and his college batting average of .347 would make him a record holding hitter for over 50 years. Upon graduation, he signed with the Yankees. Philip Lapides played for the Bristol Owls, a Class B team in the short-lived Colonial league. He played 51 games and batted .301 for the pennant and championship-winning 1949 Owls before a back injury forced a career change.” While at Brown, Harvey even played against former President George H.W. Bush when he was at Yale.

In January 1950, Harvey Ltd was born at 108 Waterman Street, and flyers were distributed targeting freshmen first. It had a motto, voici le meilleur (the best is here), and had no shortage of demand. Alongside the usual holidays, students established a tradition of shopping at Harveys at the start of their freshman year and during rush week. It became an integral step towards initiation into the Brunonian identity.

Hillhouse was founded by Marty Roses in Providence, 1939, and closed its doors in 1996. Roses was a traveling salesman for Rogers Peet of New York, but had a special fondness for Providence. He set up shop originally at the corner of Brook and Waterman before moving to 135 Thayer Street. A 1996 issue of the Brown Alumni Magazine fondly recalled its aesthetic: “The shop was a study in understated elegance: brass chandeliers, a spinning wheel, and, beneath an upstairs balcony, a papier-mache ceiling imported from France.” Former owner Bob Singer emphasized the shop’s timelessness amidst lots of changes on College Hill. “Returning alumni thought we were the one constant at Brown,” he said. They used to sell handwoven ties with the crest or Bruno the bear embroidered upon it.

I was lucky enough to acquire one secondhand for a mere $10. Around 1200 ties total were sold over the several decades that it was open, and it became a staple for seniors assembling an attire for job interviews post-graduation. Singer also recalled the dedication and loyalty of Hillhouse’s customers. “[A 1969 alumnus] continued to shop here at least once a year,” he said. “He would fly in on a Saturday using his frequent-flyer miles and fly home that night. All for a nice new suit.”

Some have attempted to replicate Hillhouse’s specialty. In recent memory, Drake’s of London ties were sold with a crest pattern, but the bookstore has ceased the sale of them. Now they offer Timeless Tartans, which uses a “patented algorithm that combines the defining characteristics of [Brown] including the time and place it was founded with primary colors that represent it,” according to its about page. The “Timeless Tartan” feels disconnected from our history; it is like looking at ChatGPT written poetry. It may be prompted to incite an emotional connection, but knowledge of the automata behind it breaks the illusion.

These shops were not ordinary retailers. They defined what a Brown student looked like, taught students how to wear the items (fit, knots, layering), and built longstanding traditions. Their proximity to campus and close relationships with students made fashion part of Brown rituals — buying a jacket or tie often marked initiation into clubs, teams, and friend groups. The result was an embodied, replicable identity: not just clothing but campus citizenship. Harvey also believed that fashion could establish an atmosphere of respectability. “I bemoan the way people dress so casually now,” he told the Brown Alumni Magazine in 2003 when the closing of his shop was announced, “You go into a bank or law firm and people are in jeans. There’s a loss of dignity because of it.” Unfortunately, Harvey Ltd. became the victim of business casual, 90s grunge, and Y2K.

To call for a return to the decorum and style expressed by Harvey Ltd. and Hillhouse Ltd. does not demand conformity. I am not arguing for a uniform, nor for the suppression of creativity. We are not cut from the same cloth, but we can form a complementary ensemble — like burgundy and blue or brown and grey. Reviving their spirit, whether through a student-run haberdashery, alumni collaborations, or even symbolic capsule collections, could restore not just a look, but a sense of continuity with Brown’s legacy. A Bruonian is more than an academic; they are a steward of dignity and meet thought with form. It’s time we dressed like it.

During a Sept. 10 meeting, the recently-reinstated Brown Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) promised a return to the same behaviors that got the group suspended from campus during the 2024-25 school year. The meeting offered no signs of reflection or reform. Instead, as recordings and statements reviewed by The Spectator reveal, SJP leaders doubled down on the conduct that made the organization a chief source of campus strife.

Brown’s SJP chapter was suspended last year following a pattern of harassment and disorderly conduct that included “banging on a vehicle carrying members of the community, physically blocking passage of a vehicle, screaming profanity at individuals at close and personal range, profanity and a racial epithet directed toward a person of color and following and screaming at individuals while filming them,” according to Russell Carey, Brown’s Executive Vice President for Planning and Policy, in a university-wide email. These actions, proudly displayed on SJP’s social media, created an atmosphere of hostility for Jewish and pro-Israel students.

Once SJP was removed from campus life, the campus climate improved noticeably, showing a direct link between the group’s activities and the climate of fear many Jewish students described. Yet less than a year later, Brown reinstated the very organization that caused widespread disruption, called the Oct. 7 massacre “a victory,” and is tied to the rise in antisemitism on campuses across the country.

In a partial recording obtained by The Spectator of SJP’s September meeting, attendees repeatedly chanted “Free, free Palestine” while the group’s leader described opponents as “the forces of fascism and Zionism.” Attendees were encouraged to wear masks to avoid identification by “infiltrators,” and were told explicitly not to document the event. “Do not take any photos, videos, or recordings of this meeting,” one leader instructed. “If you cannot abide by this rule, we will have to ask you to leave.” Another urged members not to use University systems for communication, an explicit attempt to evade Brown’s oversight.

Leaders then called on members to “organize and resist,” pledging to continue efforts “beyond institutional and bureaucratic policies.”

The bulk of the meeting consisted of inflammatory rhetoric. SJP speakers described Brown Corporation members and President Christina Paxson as “terrible,” “funding violence,” and “complicit in genocide.” The discussion included a distorted retelling of the history of Israel and repeated accusations that Brown University itself “supports genocide” by refusing to divest from Israeli companies. The group also promised to escalate its activism following the Corporation’s 2024 decision not to divest, declaring they would now pursue “any and all ways and avenues” to force the University to sever ties with Israel.

Perhaps most disturbing was a speaker’s assertion that “our institutions have blood on their hands,” followed by a call to “follow in the incredible example set by the people of Gaza and continue in their struggle with them.” This comment evidently refers to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks on Israel, which left nearly 1,200 civilians murdered, raped and kidnapped. The invocation of that massacre as an “incredible example” underscores the group’s moral depravity and open endorsement of violence. The meeting concluded with participants uplifing a Hamas terrorist who has also served as a reporter for Al Jazeera.

In a Brown Daily Herald interview, SJP members portrayed themselves as victims of institutional overreach. “We could not do anything as an organization for many months, which was frustrating, to say the least,” said member Kenan Zaidat ’25, claiming Brown “did not have sufficient evidence,” despite the existence of video footage and an external investigation. In that same Herald article, another member, Matisse Doucet ’27, added that members “weren’t aware at any point” of breaking policy, even though a Student Activities Office representative was present during prior demonstrations to monitor compliance.

Not all students share SJP’s view. Adi Beniluz ’28, described the group’s presence as deeply frightening and exclusionary. “SJP’s approach to activism is about silencing and intimidating anyone who disagrees with them,” Beniluz said. “They reduce a deeply painful and complex conflict into a simple oppressor-versus-oppressed narrative.”

Having lived in Israel during the Oct. 7 attacks, Beniluz recalled her shock at SJP’s response. “Last October 7, I tried to mourn on the most painful day for me and my people. Seeing SJP post messages legitimizing murder and terror simply because some of the victims were Jewish and Israeli terrified me. It meant that — had I been a few kilometers south on that terrible day — I could have been pulled out of my bed in my pajamas, murdered in front of my sister, and it would be justified.”

Such statements, especially those recorded at the September meeting, highlight the ongoing conflict between SJP’s conduct and Brown’s obligations under federal law. Earlier this year, the University struck an agreement with the federal government to restore certain federal funds and pledged to take concrete action against antisemitism on campus under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Yet Brown has reinstated SJP without meaningful change: the same national organization, the same leadership, the same membership, the same playbook.

With no turnover and no demonstrated reform, the University is effectively inviting the harassment, intimidation, and threats of physical violence that accompanied SJP’s previous activities to return in full force following their probation period.

As the recording makes clear, SJP is already preparing to resume the same tactics that earned its suspension. By lifting an “indefinite” suspension after only a few months and restoring nearly all privileges, Brown signals to the entire campus that serious violations carry little consequence. Actions that should prompt forceful and decisive responses are treated as temporary inconveniences rather than urgent breaches of community standards.

SJP’s reinstatement leaves Jewish and pro-Israel students once again wondering whether Brown’s promises of protection, and its commitments under federal law, mean anything at all.

The inverted red triangle is not merely abstract; since October 7, 2023, when Hamas murdered over 1,200 innocent civilians and kidnapped a further 251, it has been used in terrorist propaganda videos to mark Israeli homes and civilians as targets. Due to its connotations as a hate symbol, the governments of countries like Germany have banned the inverted red triangle in protests. The phrase “Within Our Lifetime” takes this one step further: it implies urgency, not for a peaceful resolution or coexistence, but for the destruction of the Jewish state under this generation’s watch.

After making Jewish students on campus feel threatened, Brown DPS was notified and asked the PSL students to leave the main green. These same students later took to social media to express outrage at the campus police for removing them from the green in response to their threatening display.

I implore everyone to reflect honestly on the following hypothetical: what if a group of students were carrying tote bags with a map of the U.S. erased and overlaid with ISIS insignia and the phrase “Within Our Lifetime”? Would anyone dismiss that as harmless activism, or would it be immediately recognized as a threatening glorification of terrorism?

Why, then, is Hamas treated differently? Hamas, like ISIS, is a U.S. designated terrorist organization that has openly called for the extermination of an entire people and has carried out countless attacks on civilians. Promoting their cause should not be normalized under the guise of political speech. It is a direct threat to the safety and dignity of students with deep, personal ties to Israel and the Jewish people.

This double standard is exhausting. When Jewish students say we feel unsafe, we are often accused of overreacting or silencing dissent. This is not about dissent: it’s about the line between political protest and targeted intimidation. Brown’s conduct policies affirm that “expression that is dehumanizing, degrading, or grossly offensive on the basis of religion” will not be tolerated. Where is that principle now?

On May 15, Brown publicly acknowledged that a swastika had been carved into a dormitory door on the Pembroke campus. The swastika was swiftly removed, and an investigation was launched. In the university’s own words, this act of antisemitic hate was “deeply troubling” and “antithetical to the University’s mission, values, Code of Conduct, and community expectations.” That statement matters as it shows that Brown can take action when the line between free speech and harassment is crossed.

What happens when we fail to draw that line? What happens when we allow hate symbols to go unchecked, when we brush off incitement as speech, and when we ignore the chilling implications of glorifying groups like Hamas?

Unfortunately, the result is often violence. Just eight days after seeing the tote bags on campus, Elias Rodriguez — also a member of PSL — opened fire outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., murdering two innocent civilians, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim.

Rodriguez, shouting “free, free palestine,” targeted Lischinsky and Milgrim as they left a peace-focused event. He fired 21 rounds, reloading his weapon to ensure their brutal deaths.

Only weeks later, on June 1, violence struck again, in broad daylight, on the streets of Boulder, Colorado. During a peaceful walk held by Jewish community members in support of the release of hostages held by Hamas, a man named Mohamed Sabry Soliman pulled out Molotov cocktails and a homemade flamethrower, and, screaming “Free Palestine” with a desire to “kill all Zionist people,” unleashed fire on the crowd. Sixteen people were injured, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who had once escaped the horrors in Europe, only to be targeted again, nearly a century later, on American soil.

Soliman admitted he wanted to kill Jews. He said he would do it again.

These acts of terror were not spontaneous: they were the culmination of escalating rhetoric and symbolism that glorifies violence against Jews. The same symbols and slogans displayed by students on our campus are echoed by those who carry out deadly attacks. What may seem like political expression to some becomes a justification for violence to others.

Recently, President Paxson published a thoughtful article in the SAPIR journal where she called on universities to educate student activists, not with the aim of discouraging protest but to shape it into something informed and constructive. She wrote that students must learn how to inspire change “with civility and humanity” and that universities should teach the skills to protest effectively.

Symbols that glorify terrorism and deny an entire people’s right to exist do not belong in on-campus activism. Instead, students should familiarize themselves with the facts, engage with students who hold different opinions, hear new perspectives, and learn how to advocate for their cause respectfully.

All I ask is that students do not wave around symbols that call for the murder of my people. Do not print maps that deny my people’s existence. When asked to leave a campus space due to your hateful symbolism, do not play the victim. Actions, especially those of political protest, have meaning and consequences. You do not get to be misinformed when your actions are fueling hate.

We can no longer afford to ignore the symbols, the words, and the rhetoric that blur the line between protest and incitement. We cannot remain silent when the same hatred that fuels violence and terrorism on the streets is being displayed on our campuses. These aren’t far-reaching threats. This is real. This is happening. It’s happening right in front of our faces.

This is written in memory of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. We must say their names. We must honor their lives. And we must confront the reality that hate, when left unopposed, becomes deadly.

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While The Spectator as an institution does not endorse any of the opinions expressed by its writers, this latest charge against Mr. Shieh merits an editorial response as it is a dangerous escalation by the school in its fight against a student journalist. Mr. Shieh’s Bloat@Brown platform may have been controversial and criticized by many in the Brown community, but he has every right as a student to express his opinions regardless of what they may be. Free speech cannot be applied selectively, and when the school persecutes its students for asking questions it creates an environment of fear that is not conducive to academic freedom.

Previously, Mr. Shieh had been charged with misrepresentation for claiming to be a journalist with The Spectator, an organization that Brown’s administration deemed nonexistent despite active work on a spring edition and a registration with the State of Rhode Island. After The Spectator’s website went live this charge was dropped, though instead of admitting its error, the school simply replaced it with a new charge for using the word “Brown” without permission.

Many independent student publications, including The Harvard Crimson, The Dartmouth Review, and of course The Brown Daily Herald here at Brown, also use their schools’ names under what the law calls “descriptive fair use” — using a term in its ordinary, factual context to indicate that a paper is published by students at the university in question. The Herald, an independent student publication like The Spectator, has used the Brown name in this manner since 1891 without issue, yet the school is now attacking a member of The Spectator for the same fair use before the first edition of our relaunch has even been printed.

Furthermore, as of writing, only Mr. Shieh has been charged in connection with his position on The Spectator’s board of directors, despite the fact that others are also listed in official state filings. Brown’s administration is aware of this, as the relevant documents were submitted to the Office of Student Conduct & Community Standards and included in the materials sent to Mr. Shieh as part of the disciplinary process. However, Kirsten Wolfe, Associate Dean and Associate Director of Student Conduct & Community Standards, has charged only Mr. Shieh for the alleged trademark infraction, suggesting potential retaliation against him for his Bloat@Brown website and posing serious questions about the fairness of Brown’s disciplinary review process.

The nature of this new charge is especially concerning given the implications it has for all student publications, not just The Spectator. By coming after a journalist for The Spectator, the school seems to be signaling to other independent publications that include the word “Brown” in their name, such as The Brown Daily Herald, that their journalistic activities are protected only so long as they stay in the administration’s good graces. Ms. Wolfe, the administrator who is handling Mr. Shieh’s case, did not respond to a request for comment on the new charge.

This case is about more than policy compliance or institutional branding. It is about the principles that support a vibrant academic community — the freedom to ask hard questions, publish unpopular opinions, and hold powerful institutions to account. If students fear administrative retaliation for their journalism, the result is a chilling effect that weakens the entire campus discourse.

As Brown moves forward in adjudicating this new charge, we urge the administration to consider the broader impact on student rights. Independent student journalism is a cornerstone of university life. It deserves not just tolerance but also protection.

All students — regardless of their political orientation or views on Mr. Shieh’s Bloat@Brown project — should consider the implications Brown’s actions have on their own free speech rights on campus. The Spectator remains committed to defending the right of all students to express their views without fear of retaliation. We hope that Brown’s administration will take this opportunity to reaffirm its commitment to open dialogue and to fair and impartial treatment for all members of the Brown community.

Receiving an Ivy League education is said to unlock upward mobility, but with a nearly five percent tuition hike set to take effect at Brown University this July, the American Dream will soon set Brown students back a whopping $93,064 per year — 143% of what the average American can expect to earn in the same timeframe. According to U.S. News & World Report, Brown already holds the dubious distinction of second-most expensive university in America, with tuition rates just $335 shy of the first-place University of Southern California.

Assuming tuition and fees continue to increase by around four percent each year — as they have historically — the 2027-28 school year at Brown will be the first to come with a six-figure price tag. Yet even as it charges each student the price of a luxury car, this fiscal year Brown is on track to operate at a $46 million budget deficit, dipping into the endowment to stay afloat.

Brown’s skyrocketing spending and legally questionable DEI programs raise serious concerns about whether tuition dollars are funding mission-critical functions — or just bloating the bureaucracy. Numerous academic studies have already pinpointed one major culprit to the rising costs of education nationwide: the ballooning number of university employees working behind-the-scenes desk jobs sitting in meetings and churning out memos of questionable value.

These employees in question aren’t teaching staff — professors or teaching assistants — nor are they workers filling critical operational roles like food service workers, janitors, or security guards. Rather, they are a small army of mid-level administrators working out of sight, and in some cases completely remotely from locations thousands of miles away like Florida or California.

Despite budget shortfalls that leave dorms flooding when it rains, Brown currently boasts 3,805 non-instructional full-time staff members on payroll — a staggering number considering Brown currently has 7,229 undergraduate students. This equates to roughly one administrator for every two undergrads, meaning that every student personally foots the bill for half of an administrator’s salary. Brown’s non-instructional staff count also dwarfs the 1,691 members of the faculty, with Brown employing more than two administrators for every faculty member on payroll.

To offer insight into Brown’s network of administrators, I launched Bloat@Brown, an interactive website hosted by The Spectator that exposed the bureaucracy to which all 3,805 administrators belong. (Not all features are currently available due to several cyberattacks from the Brown network and a subsequent disciplinary probe into the alleged publication of confidential data; no confidential information was published and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has urged the university to drop the investigation.)

At launch, Bloat@Brown featured an AI-algorithm that used data scraped from LinkedIn, student publications, and Brown’s website to analyze administrators in three domains: legality (flagging those in DEI-related roles that led to a loss of $510 million in federal funding), redundancy (flagging those in overlapping roles such as multiple full-time staffers dedicated to ad sales for the alumni magazine), and “bullshit jobs”, a term coined by the anthropologist David Graeber to describe those with useless job functions such as executive assistants for “associate vice provosts,” someone titled “Associate Director for Student Success and Senior Data Analyst,” and a “Household Assistant” tending to University President Christina Paxson.

As limited information was available for many employees, the results of this algorithm were not conclusive and employees were contacted for comment via email; those contacted were asked to explain their roles, what tasks they performed in the past week, and how Brown students would be impacted if their position was eliminated. Only 20 employees responded, including Jose Mendoza, an Event Specialist, who simply said to “fuck off.” According to Brian Clark, a university spokesperson flagged for holding a bullshit job, employees were advised not to respond.

But Brown is only the beginning. Since then the database has expanded to include Columbia, Cornell, and Penn — and the movement is only growing. With many schools facing dire funding shortfalls due to Trump’s funding cuts, the question is no longer whether these schools are bloated, but whether they can afford to remain so.

On December 17th, 2024, Brown University students and faculty received an announcement in the daily newsletter titled “Community actions for reducing the deficit”. While much of this proposal focused on limiting the growth of expenses in an effort to address Brown’s $46 million FY25 budget deficit, the fourth action item called for a doubling of residential masters student enrollment and increase in online learners to “offset slow undergraduate tuition growth.” This proposed increase in masters enrollment would make undergraduates a minority at Brown for the first time in the school’s 260-year history, and is a slap in the face to all the students who chose Brown for its undergraduate focus. Tantalized by graduate tuition dollars, President Paxson and the Brown Corporation are putting decades of undergraduate excellence on the chopping block, fundamentally disregarding what makes Brown University so special.

According to the Office of Institutional Research’s Enrollment Factbook, Brown has 7,226 undergraduates out of 11,232 total students. This puts Brown’s undergraduate percentage at 64.3% of the school, comparable to other elite undergraduate-focused schools like Dartmouth (65%) and Princeton (64%). Based on figures supplied by the Office of the Provost and the administration’s recent proposal, Brown’s undergraduate percentage will plummet to only 49.7% as residential masters student enrollment doubles from 1,560 to 3,120 students and online learners grow to 2,000 while undergraduate, PhD, and medical student enrollment remains relatively constant. This marks a seismic shift in Brown’s enrollment breakdown, and puts the University more in line with research-oriented institutions like Harvard, Yale, and MIT that have a graduate student majority.

While Harvard, Yale, and MIT are certainly good company, there’s no denying that Brown will struggle to compete against these behemoths as a research institution. According to Nature’s research output metrics, Brown faculty published 418 papers from December 2023 to November 2024; Harvard faculty published 3,883 in the same timeframe. Brown may not be able to compete with these schools in terms of research output, but it has found its niche in undergraduate education, and is consistently ranked as one of the top schools in the country in this category. This makes it all the more concerning to see Brown’s leadership so intent on shifting away from the tried-and-true undergraduate-focused model, instead trying to make Brown into something it never was and shouldn’t become. Brown isn’t Harvard, Yale, or MIT — Brown is Brown, and with that comes a unique identity worth more than any potential revenue from masters students.

December’s budgetary announcement claimed that much of this revenue will be reinvested in undergraduate education, but recent University actions suggest otherwise. This past year Brown announced a seven year, $150 million deal to rebrand the Lifespan health system as Brown University Health, after which Lifespan will reinvest $15 million a year not into Brown’s undergraduate programs but the Warren Alpert Medical School. In September, the University also announced the construction of a seven-story life sciences research facility, with much of the space slated to go towards faculty researchers rather than undergraduate instruction. The unspoken truth is that Brown will always have a steady stream of undergraduates to choose from, leaving little incentive for reinvestment into undergraduate programs and facilities. Instead, Brown will continue to spend millions of dollars on projects catering to graduate students who are better for the school’s bottom line.

The impacts of these and other projects will no doubt benefit some undergraduates engaging in research, though most of them will suffer as a result of Brown’s changing priorities. In addition to the proposed increase in master’s enrollment, the December budgetary announcement calls for decreased professor hiring, and it is likely that the limited professors who are hired will be chosen for their research rather than their teaching capabilities. Making matters worse, these professors will be teaching to classes with more and more masters students in them, giving undergraduates less time to interact with faculty and get help from undergraduate teaching assistants. Some of these teaching assistants might not even be undergraduates anymore, with a recent email from Vice Chair of the computer science department Tom Doeppner suggesting that fifth-year masters students will get preferential treatment in the undergraduate teaching assistant hiring process. This is a bewildering move given these positions are explicitly intended for undergraduates, and is indicative of what’s to come as Brown leaves undergraduates behind.

Throughout Brown’s ongoing transition towards becoming a research university, President Paxson and the corporation have created an idyllic vision of a school focused on research and undergraduates at the same time. It is perhaps not surprising that President Paxson has gravitated towards this narrative given she started her career at Princeton, a school that has succeeded in achieving the balance between research and undergraduate education Brown is aiming for. However, Brown is no Princeton, and one need not look further than the endowment to see why. At $7.2 billion, Brown’s endowment is hardly small, but it is only a fifth of Princeton’s, and recent cuts to NIH grants mean that Brown will have to find alternative sources of funding for projects like the life sciences research facility. The budget plan outlined in December’s deficit announcement makes clear that Brown intends to do this by pivoting away from undergraduates, destroying a defining characteristic of the school that has persisted for generations.

There’s no denying that Brown’s budgetary deficit is a real issue, but increasing graduate student enrollment is not the best way to address it. A doubling in masters students will create unnecessary strain on already limited university resources, and any additional revenues from graduate programs will go towards addressing the growing deficit rather than improving student life. While this article likely doesn’t present the full picture of these enrollment plans, Brown’s administration has been painfully opaque on how their proposals will impact the community, and the December budget deficit announcement is one of the only public mentions of a policy that will fundamentally change the university. Rather than bury their plans in lengthy emails, the administration needs to get community input on December’s budgetary proposal and seriously consider the consequences it will have on Brown’s reputation and mission. A failure to do so would destroy centuries of work done by generations of students, faculty, and administrators, leaving behind a husk of a university that once knew what it meant to be special.

Cover image courtesy of Kenneth C. Zirkel via Wikimedia Commons

On January 20, 2025, the Trump administration issued a presidential memorandum directing the General Services Administration, the administration responsible for federal, civic architecture, to construct architectural works that are “visually identifiable as civic buildings” by adhering to traditions of a “classical architectural heritage.” While Trump’s memorandum has been criticized by some for being unduly restrictive in granting architects the necessary degree of artistic license, a deeper understanding of the foundations of American architecture helps illuminate an underlying truth in the memorandum.

Prior to the American founding, the colonists of New England struggled to define a uniquely American artistic style and to realize the creative potential of American artists, painters, sculptors, and architects alike. As one of the most prominent American colonial portraitists John Singleton Copley explains, “Artists were treated like shoemakers,” which is to say that artists were treated as ordinary craftsmen and artisans. However, after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the severance of political allegiances to Great Britain, Americans came to realize the fundamental need to develop an identity that was distinct from the English, and architecture was one of the crucibles in which a distinct American identity was born. By the 1780s, the Federal-style of architecture was developed in America, which sought to emulate the works of Ancient Greece and Rome in a Neoclassical style.

Among the early Americans, there was an understanding that the United States inherited the traditions of Greek democracy, Roman law, Renaissance humanism, and Enlightenment thought and brought these values to their apotheosis. To that end, American architects looked to European Neoclassical luminaries, such as Andrea Palladio, to find a proper architectural vocabulary fitting for the new American nation. The Federal-style of architecture lasted until about the 1830s and is most visible in the homes of the Founding Fathers, namely George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

The Federal-style, alongside the values and aspirations it carried about our American identity, was embedded into the architecture of government buildings and can be seen in works like the United States Capitol Building, White House, and the Supreme Court of the United States. Art is at its best when its style or form corresponds to its function or vocation. For instance, the paintings of Mark Rothko represent rudimentary and sparse geometric shapes, namely quadrilaterals, to evoke a sense of harmony and symmetry and create a sense of peace and contentment within the viewer. Likewise, Federal-style architecture is often used for government buildings to evoke the function of the building, such as upholding justice, maintaining discipline through laws, and executing those laws in our society. What inspirational and aspirational values are communicated through the architecture of Brutalism, Postmodernism, or Deconstructivism? These styles simply do not convey the American values we have established through Federal-style architecture. In this sense, Donald Trump’s memorandum to represent buildings in a manner that aligns with “classical architectural heritage” is essentially asking that civic buildings represent the key values of our American identity.

Given we’ve established that architecture serves as a method of representing our common identity, it’s worth considering the question of how the architecture on Brown’s campus reflects its values as an academic institution. Brown’s architecture is difficult to define because it is rather eclectic in style, ranging from the concrete Brutalism of the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library to the rounded arches of the Romanesque Revival style of Sayles Hall. Brown’s architectural style mainly revolves around colonial architecture and the Romanesque and Gothic Revival, but it also incorporates more modern styles that are worlds apart in appearance and function.

While this eclectic architecture represents the diversity of intellectual thought on campus, the amorphous amalgamation of styles also obscures the core, common values shared by Brown as a university. Brown’s architecture seems to obscure the Universities’ values more than reveal them because there is no single “style” that defines Brown’s campus, meaning there is a lack of a single, common takeaway from the architecture of Brown.

We can compare Brown’s architecture to that of Georgetown’s which is uniformly designed in the Romanesque Revival style, save for the exceptions of the contemporary-styled housing units in Village A and the Georgetown Intercultural Center. Georgetown’s architecture reflects its particular visual identity as an academic institution centered on Jesuit values, and the Romanesque style recalls medieval universities like the School of Chartres, where students learned about the seven liberal arts — grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy.

In a similar vein as Georgetown’s Jesuit academic tradition, Brown University was originally founded as Rhode Island College by a group of Baptist clergymen with a faith-based groundwork. Its first president was James Manning, a Baptist Reverend, and the next nine presidents of Brown after James Manning were also Baptist clergymen. The influence of Baptist values on Brown’s campus can still be seen in Manning Hall, which mirrors the Doric façade of the lower half of the First Baptist Church in America with its sparse cream-colored pediment, triglyphs and metopes, and four Doric columns holding up the entablature. Despite its Baptist roots, James Manning felt it critical that “sectarian differences of opinions, shall not make any part of the public and classical instruction.” As Brown grew and expanded, both architecturally and metaphorically, it adopted new aspirations, such as the Open Curriculum in 1969, but Brown’s core values as an academic institution remain the same. The fact of the matter is that Brown’s current mission as an academic institution has been obscured by the lack of a unifying thread in its architecture.

Like President Trump’s desire that civic architecture reflect an identifiable American identity that expresses the values of the Founding Fathers, a university’s architecture should reflect its institutional values. Ultimately, Brown’s inability to tie together the different threads of its architectural styles into a common, unified tapestry has left us with an unfinished work of art; one that is vulnerable to completely unraveling unless it is stitched back together in time to come.

Cover image courtesy of gregobagel via Getty Images

No subject calls our modern understanding of gender into question quite like the transgender athlete discourse. Their achievements sensationalized by media outlets as either villainous pursuits or brave endeavors, transgender athletes face immense scrutiny for their participation in (primarily women’s) sports. While the immediate question of the debate is whether trans-women should compete in women’s sports, there is also a secondary question lurking underneath that is what is gender and how is it different from sex.

Why have transgender athletes become the right’s biggest cultural target? As many left-wing advocates will tell you, it isn’t as though many transgender athletes are competing at all. One reason might be that most framings of the issue pit two traditionally marginalized groups against each other — those being women and transgender people — and thus the discourse surrounding transgender athletes is particularly incendiary and polarizing. But, on a more philosophical level, it appears to me that transgender athletes (and, more specifically, the existence of women’s sports) exemplify a troubling complication for modern gender theory.

Due to the contributions of psychologists like John Money and several waves of feminism, modern gender theory teaches us that sex and gender are two distinct but often conflated terms. While sex is assigned to an individual at birth and determined by biological factors (chromosomes, genitals, etc.), gender is an identity, socially constructed by the culture an individual operates within. Gender identity is neither static nor binary; an individual’s gender identity exists on a spectrum and fluctuates in their life, or so the modern understanding of gender theory goes. While most people’s gender identity corresponds with their sex, transgender people find that their biological sex is at odds with their gender identity.

Modern gender theory has proven valuable because it can accommodate the first-person testimonial of transgender people without providing a contradiction when we try to evoke a gendered (or sexed) category. Consider a women’s clothing store. When we say that “these clothes are for women,” we mean it in the sense of gender, not sex. While people who hold the social identification of being women and identify themselves as women might wear clothes found in a women’s clothing store, it isn’t as though women’s clothes are exclusively for people with XX chromosomes or that people with XX chromosomes have to wear these clothes. Should a biological male wish to wear a dress or a biological female wish not to, our modern distinction between gender and sex can adequately accommodate the desires of these individuals without inserting a contradiction into what we mean by “woman.”

On the other hand, consider the phrase “this birth control pill is for women.” When we say this, we are evoking women in terms of sex, rather than gender. The birth control pill only needs to be taken by those who are biologically female. Even if one is a biological male who identifies as a woman, the birth control pill will serve that individual no use as they cannot become pregnant.

So far through these examples, the modern distinction between sex and gender has allowed us to navigate categories like “man” and “woman” without invalidating the first-person testimony of a transgender individual. However, things become more complicated when we consider the subject of transgender athletes, or more specifically, women’s sports.

When we say “women’s sports,” what do we mean by woman? It appears to me that women’s sports exist for women in terms of both gender and sex. Women’s sports provide women (as a sex) a chance to compete with each other on an even playing field, barring men, while also giving women (as a gender) a shared social space and sense of sorority. When we think about women’s sports, we mean women in two relevant, but different, senses.

When we consider transgender athletes in this context, there are two ways to approach the athletics issue: either we reject transgender women from competing in women’s sports, or we don’t. Should we choose not to bar transgender women from women’s sports, we have sacrificed a critical element of women’s sports, that being the level playing field that results from same-sex competition. The argument that transgender women have an unfair advantage over cis-women in athletics is well-articulated in the public discourse and difficult to object to, so I’m not going to focus on that here.

What we’re dealing with is deeper than the notion of fairness alone, for allowing transgender athletes to compete in accordance with their gender identity would be to compromise the competitive nature of women’s sports. This is something we should be hesitant to do, for it could foster a sexist perspective where men’s sports are seen as being more competitive, while women’s sports are viewed more as a social opportunity and less as a serious athletic endeavor.

Due largely to the fairness argument, policy preventing trans women from competing in women’s sports is quite popular: the Pew Research Center reports that 66% of American adults strongly favor policies that would force athletes to compete in accordance with their sex at birth. However, I don’t believe that the adoption of such policies would somehow alleviate all of the relevant concerns on the subject of transgender athletes.

If we were to ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports, we would be restricting their access to the important social elements they offer participants. Sports may exist primarily as an important outlet for competition, but they also allow men and women to foster valuable social relationships. Reducing sports to a bastion of competition fails to preserve the important role that they have in the social sphere as a source of fraternity and sorority.

Furthermore, athletic restrictions concerning transgender women impose a limitation on the trans woman’s femininity, drawing a dividing line that holds cis-women as “more womanly” than trans women. To some who hold a strictly anti-transgender ideology, this kind of dividing line is seen as welcome and good, but I, like many people, take seriously the testimony of our transgender brothers and sisters, and want modern definitions and categories that can more accurately describe and explain the phenomenon. Thus, we are faced with a conundrum: neither banning nor allowing transgender athletes to compete in accordance with their gender identity seems particularly appealing to someone who is to any degree ambivalent about the issue.

Unfortunately, the modern gender-sex distinction cannot save us from this dilemma, for gender and sex collapse into one category when we talk about women’s sports. Have our contemporary definitions of sex and gender failed us? Is an update to these theories in order? Alternatively, do we need to qualify or even completely change the nature and purpose of women’s sports to reconcile the issue of transgender participants? Can we go about doing either of these things while simultaneously respecting the first-person testimony of transgender people?

These questions float around in discourse, and my prescription for us as students at Brown University is not to hastily answer them, but rather to take the implications of our options very seriously when navigating the subject. Additionally, it’s essential to understand both sides of the debate as thoroughly as we can, because the subject is demonstrably more complicated than a simple issue of fairness or right-wing transphobia: what we are observing is a complication of our modern understanding of gender and sex, and one that may necessitate a rethinking of gender theory as it currently exists.

Image courtesy of Edwin Tan via Getty Images

As an Orthodox Jew, I adhere to a strict kosher diet. I’ve been incredibly grateful that Brown has invested time, energy, and resources to open the Kosher Kitchen at the Ratty, which serves three meals a day during the week. Since its launch, the Kosher Kitchen has quickly become one of the most popular dining spots on campus, often boasting the longest lines and some of the highest-rated food in the Brown dining scene. But for me, the Kosher Kitchen is more than just a dining option — it is a lifeline. This semester, that lifeline is being cut.

In 2021, Brown’s Office of Sustainability and Resiliency mandated a significant reduction in red meat usage across campus dining to meet its goal of net-zero emissions by 2040. The first major step in achieving this goal is to cut red meat consumption by 25% by 2025 and by 50% by 2030. While Brown has made this move with sustainability in mind, this policy disproportionately impacts kosher-keeping students, presenting serious inclusivity issues.

As Brown Dining Services cuts back the availability of red meat, the cost of the meal plan remains exactly the same, leaving students paying the same price for a drastically reduced menu. For those of us who rely on the Kosher Kitchen, dining services staff have confirmed that red meat options have been slashed to just once a week for lunch and once for dinner, leaving us without any access to kosher red meat for the majority of the week. The nearest kosher red meat available outside campus? Close to 50 miles away in Brookline, Massachusetts. This isn’t just inconvenient — it’s discriminatory and runs counter to Brown’s mission of inclusivity.

Kosher students now have to compete with the entire student body for a limited number of red meat plates on the rare occasions that they’re offered. And when these dishes run out? Too bad. There’s no equivalent alternative as the turkey and plant-based kosher meals simply do not offer the same taste, nutritional value, or variety that red meat does. This isn't just about preference — it’s about religious obligation and basic dietary balance.

While Brown claims these changes are made in the name of sustainability, what the university is doing amounts to cost-cutting masquerading as environmentalism. Meals that once featured beef and lamb now feature turkey, a much cheaper substitute that according to USDA data costs around $3.94 per pound compared to nearly $7.50 per pound for ground beef. Despite these cost cutting measures, Brown students are still paying the same price for a dining plan that was retroactively changed after they forked over their money.

Price concerns aside, Brown’s new dining policies also remove students’ ability to make informed choices about their own diets. While signs posted in the Ratty push students to “Choose Plant-Forward Meals” with “3 Simple Steps You Can Take When Dining,” these decisions have already been made by university administrators. One of these administrators, Associate Provost of Sustainability Stephen Porder, claimed in a recent Letter to the Editor in the Brown Daily Herald that students “can choose to eat more sustainably at on-campus dining halls,” but for many of us — especially those with religious or dietary restrictions — that choice has been removed entirely. Brown has already made it for us.

These poor policy decisions could have been a simple oversight by Brown’s Office of Sustainability and Resiliency, though now that this issue has been brought to light Brown should immediately reinstate a baseline level of red meat offerings that better reflects the dietary needs of its observant students and the larger Brown community. If these changes are no longer feasible for environmental or financial reasons, Brown must offer partial refunds for meal plans that no longer provide the same value.

At the end of the day, students who are paying for full access to a diverse and nutritionally complete menu deserve more than substitutions that fail to meet their needs. Brown Dining Services is failing its customers and the Brown community at large, and changes need to be made to ensure the University remains inclusive to everyone, not just the vocal environmentalists. If Brown is truly committed to both sustainability and inclusion, the University needs to rethink this unpopular and discriminatory policy.

By allowing students to pursue what they are most passionate about, the Open Curriculum enables students to be the “architects” of their own education in a way few other schools do. I have personally experienced the benefits of this system by enrolling in a mixture of computer science courses alongside offerings in the International and Public Affairs, Judaic Studies, Economics, and Italian Studies departments. Despite my appreciation for how it has shaped my experience, I must point out that there are flaws inherent in the liberty the Open Curriculum provides.

The Open Curriculum, officially minted in 1969 yet foreshadowed by Francis Wayland a century earlier, emerges from an era when science peeled away from faith and individuality reigned. Authors like G. K. Chesterton have long recognized the risks of this individualized approach to learning. His 1905 screed Heretics tells a cautionary tale of a culture so enamored with novelty that it forgets why knowledge matters in the first place. Brown’s challenge is finding a pedagogy that pairs study with purpose, cultivates intellectual humility, and drives students towards serving the common good without compromising on autonomy.

A major theme in G. K. Chesterton’s Heretics (1905/2017) is that past societies were calibrated towards the transcendent, with progress being defined by how closely individuals imitated the virtues prescribed by God. However, in contemporary society and academia, these same individuals are unable to define concretely what ought to be the ultimate goal of life due to a fear of conformity and lack of nuance. G. K. Chesterton describes this approach to progress as that of the “childlike and prosaic mind” (p. 39), with individuals being more preoccupied with originality over fundamentals and valuing novelty over coherence. Chesterton further speaks to the danger of creativity for its own sake:

“The most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to … [is] that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.” (p. 39)

But how can stating the obvious be courageous? Paradoxically, in circles that prize iconoclasm, affirming first principles can be the most rebellious of acts. Many intellectuals, in their hubris, refuse to defer to such basics. For Chesterton, the word “ordinary” is not pejorative but anchored in commonsense truths so basic we learn them before we can name them: that two plus two equals four, that honesty is better than deceit, and that human life has intrinsic worth. The more radical or unconventional a thinker believes themselves to be, the harder it becomes to accept these simple, self-evident truths — any fleeting idea is entertained because there is no standard to tell good ideas from bad ones.

This temptation is acute in academia, where graduate students win praise for novelty alone. In the university setting, morality and wisdom, though timeless, are easily bulldozed in the rush toward “progress.” This is why only the keenest of novelists and the most inventive of scientists share a deeper sanity: they know when to defer to first principles. They know the limits of their originality. True, moral frameworks vary, but they rhyme across cultures: whatever their views on justice, almost everyone agrees that murder is wrong.

Chesterton's insights show us that the Open Curriculum faces a unique challenge: ensuring that boundless course choice does not eclipse the cultivation of a moral and philosophical core. The Open Curriculum, with its broad, interdisciplinary scope, ought not simply encourage students to seek out the insights contained in diverse fields of knowledge for the sake of novelty. It must cultivate wisdom. Its highest aim, therefore, ought to be the pursuit of Truth. That pursuit demands intellectual risk‑takers willing to stake claims in objectivity and to order their inquiries by an explicit hierarchy of values. Whether those values arise from religious faith or secular reflection, every student should know — and be able to defend — why a particular course merits their finite attention, especially in the context of the life they hope to build beyond Brown.

A secondary danger associated with the Open Curriculum is that it sacrifices background knowledge in favor of unbridled enrollment. In his article The Privatization of the Truth (August 4, 2022) former Editor-in-Chief of The University of Notre Dame’s Irish Rover W. J. DeReuil observes that a student might “study Descartes… [without ever meeting] the Aristotelian framework he is trying to deconstruct,” or “read how Kant grapples with the moral problems posed by ‘new natural science’ without ever taking a class on evolution or Newtonian physics” (para. 7). Without “a thoughtfully ordered, comprehensive core curriculum,” he warns, learners cannot truly grapple with Meditations on First Philosophy or The Critique of Pure Reason because they lack an understanding of the very premises those works operate upon. I cite DeReuil not to call for a rigid core curriculum at Brown, but to highlight the need for contextual breadth—however achieved—so that freedom of choice deepens, rather than dilutes, intellectual engagement.

In my personal experience, introductory and some intermediate Economics courses at Brown are too narrow in their approach to offer the comprehensive background DeReuil speaks of. Courses like Principles of Economics (ECON 0110) and Intermediate Macroeconomics (ECON 1210) focus almost exclusively on Keynesian economic models, failing to introduce students to the broader intellectual ecosystem from which these theories emerged. Students leave each introductory economics course ignorant of the insights presented by Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek of the Austrian School of Economics, who placed a greater emphasis on individual liberties and decentralization and critiqued government intervention in the economy. For Brown’s curriculum to be truly “open,” the University must have diversity of ideas alongside diversity of courses.

In sum, I am not advocating against the Open Curriculum. Rather, I believe it takes precision and intention to wield its power properly. Given its aforementioned risks, more work is necessary on the University’s part for the Open Curriculum to live up to its full potential. By taking steps like emphasizing long-term goals in advising, broadening the scope of some introductory courses to encourage nuance, and embedding social‑responsibility modules across STEM concentrations Brown can ensure students graduate with a more complete understanding of the world.

Cover image courtesy of Inayaysad via Wikimedia Commons