PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Spending $100 million on an ambitious diversity plan over the next decade might seem like a far-fetched idea for most colleges and universities.
But Brown University isn’t exactly any university.
The Ivy League school, nestled away in the affluent Providence neighborhood of College Hill, is one of the nation’s most prestigious academic institutions.
Despite its long and complicated history with race relations — including a public admission in 2006 that the university benefited in its early years from funds made from the slave trade — the diversity initiative pledge is largely the result of sustained student protests recently mounted by minority students.
“We begged this university to hear our stories about how racism, sexism and a whole host of other problems prevail … and prevent us from being safe, from being at peace, from being whole and from being well,” says Candice Ellis, speaking in a megaphone before dozens of protestors at an on-campus rally last fall. “They invite us to meet in the president’s office and the faculty club. They say they listen. They say they hear us. They do nothing.”
Winding path to diversity
