Students at Brown University Create ‘Burn Brown Book’ Outlining Racism and Activism on Campus
“After two years of research and writing for a class project, the group released the 175-page guide this summer as protests against racial injustice spread throughout the country.”
The campus left looks more like Mao’s Cultural Revolution every day. Does this concern the administration at Brown at all?
CBS News reports:
Brown University students create “Burn Brown Book,” outlining racism and activism on campus
A group of students at Brown University recently released the “Burn Brown Book,” a guide outlining the history of racism, capitalism and activism on campus. After two years of research and writing for a class project, the group released the 175-page guide this summer as protests against racial injustice spread throughout the country.
The goal of the guide is to provide an alternative vision for the college: become an elite public university that supports and invests in the local community, while also providing a safe space for minority students. If the university divested from private funders and reallocated its money to the Providence area, the students argue, Brown would be held to higher standards on a range of issues, including who is being admitted and who is teaching at the university.
Noël Cousins, one of the creators of the book, told CBS News they were inspired by the “burn book” in the 2004 film “Mean Girls.” In the film, the characters write rumors and spread gossip throughout its pages. Cousins said the group of students wanted to highlight academic research in a fun way while addressing serious topics.
“What I would love to see is the capital and the assets of the university be made public and returned to the state of Rhode Island, or the facilities be used publicly,” Cousins said, “So working-class people in Rhode Island and Black and Brown people have control of that.”
The project is labeled as a disorientation guide, a play on the freshman orientation experience. The students said incoming freshmen need a deeper understanding of the school’s history in order to participate in the college experience more critically. The guide is the third book of its kind from Brown this century and is part of a long history among colleges across the country.
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The goal of the guide is to provide an alternative vision for the college: become an elite public university that supports and invests in the local community, while also providing a safe space for minority students.
Interesting. This is a description of an Indian reservation, not a school. Funny they put that word “elite” in there, though—sounds like somebody’s going to find himself on the list to be purged.
I never thought much of Brown, anyway.
Brown U still trying to keep the Black Man down….
with Brown U’s slave maker students….
“What I would love to see is the capital and the assets of the university be made public and returned to the state of Rhode Island, or the facilities be used publicly”
If the authors of the book were serious, they would have suggested much more. For example: Faculty salaries should be limited to the pay schedules of all state employees and tenure eliminated so that the faculty’s performance will be transparent and accountable to the communities supporting Brown. This will reduce the isolation from real life that has been a feature of Western educational doctrine for centuries and has perpetuated the systemic racism found within higher education. And, to permit Brown undergrads to appreciate the needs of the community, student housing should require 33% occupancy by homeless persons.