The Brown Reader

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  From the beginning of our action we had agreed to designate specific spokespeople who would negotiate for the group to ensure that we maintained a consistent public position. We needed the university to take our demands seriously and to adopt actions that would demonstrate a real commitment to changing their policies. Our negotiating team—women and men from different classes—included Sheryl Grooms, a sophomore, and Glenn Dixon, a junior, who was president of the Afro-American Society. Kenneth McDaniel, a senior, was one of our spokespeople.

  Each day, our team met with the administration and then reported back to the larger group. Together, we fashioned responses that the team could use in further negotiations. The discussion lasted several days. Those of us at the church had only minimal contact with the outside world and we were not aware of the conversations taking place on campus. We spent our time at the church studying, discussing the negotiations, and keeping in touch with our parents. We later learned that there was a lively debate on campus over whether or not our demands were reasonable. The Brown Daily Herald argued in an editorial that we were demanding too much and that the administration had already done more than enough. In contrast, a petition signed by more than 2,800 students supported our actions.

  After five days of talks, an agreement was reached. The administration agreed to recruit more black students. They did not, however, set the hard percentage goals we had demanded. Still, we decided to end our walkout, believing that substantial progress had been made. We had raised consciousness about important issues and had pushed the university to act more rapidly on these matters than they might otherwise have done. Our goal, on returning to campus, was to continue to push for more progress, but to do so as a part of the campus community, rather than as a separate entity.

  The 1968 Walkout changed the environment for African-American students at Brown. In the aftermath, more courses were offered that related to issues of race and the roles of African-Americans. George Houston Bass came to Brown and created Rites and Reason Theatre as an outlet for the creation of African-American–oriented theater. I was a history major and was pleased that a course on African-American history was quickly established. In addition, two remarkable graduate students, Wilson Moses and Rhett Jones, were hired to teach history courses. They were the first African-American instructors I had at Brown. Working with them transformed how I thought about American history and elevated my understanding of the critical role African-Americans had played in the creation of this nation. I was drawn to their commitment to impeccable scholarship and the discovery of new sources of information. They saw history as a tool for social change—as a vehicle for better understanding the present and creating change for the future. This was a perspective I enthusiastically shared. During my remaining time at Brown, whenever the opportunity arose, I wrote my term papers on African-American or African topics. And it was largely because of those two gifted instructors that I went to graduate school with a focus on African-American history, going on to a lifelong career as a historian of the black American experience.

  * * *

  Several months after the walkout, the Afro House was established by the university as a place for students to live, study, and plan programs. Soon thereafter, the Third World Transition Program was developed. Its goal was to help new minority students, prior to the onset of the academic year, to become acclimated to Brown and to prepare for the new experiences and challenges they would soon face. It would then continue to provide support during the course of the year. Both Afro House and TWTP were important demands in the letter we had sent to President Heffner.

  The 1968 Walkout changed the makeup of the African-American student body. In the years that followed, during which time I “retired” from playing football and focused more on my studies, the number of students of color who were recruited and matriculated at Brown steadily rose. By the time I graduated in 1971 there were more than three hundred African-American students at Brown. Those numbers were still not representative of the percentage of African-Americans in the general population, but this bigger and more diverse group marked a substantial improvement.

  It was a good change for Brown, but ironically, for those of us who had participated in the walkout, it marked the end of a special time for us. As the African-American community expanded, our sense of belonging to a close-knit community that was almost like family slowly dissipated.

  But if that was the price we had to pay in order to stimulate such important changes, it was well worth it. Ultimately, the policies set in motion by the walkout helped to cement Brown’s leading place among the universities of the world. Indeed, it set the stage for an environment in which the Corporation of Brown University, following the recommendation of a search committee of which I was a member, would eventually elect Dr. Ruth Simmons as its eighteenth president.

  Need-Blind Now!

  SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM

  I felt old and lonely when I started at Brown. It was January of 1992, and I was nearly twenty. Since leaving high school I’d lived on my own in Los Angeles and then Philadelphia, working at a video store, a diner, a discount clothing store, a café. College had delivered me from these jobs, for which I was deeply glad. At the same time, I was unspeakably depressed by the cinder-block walls of my freshman dormitory and the camaraderie of its residents. Having been for the most part a companionable person all my life, I was surprised to find myself incapable of making much conversation or finding new friends.

  The absence of friends became most apparent whenever I entered the dining hall, so I avoided the dining hall by eating my meals in a dimly lit student lounge that had a sandwich counter. Almost every night I ate a sandwich for dinner, watching the television that hung from the ceiling. This is where, in the spring, I watched live coverage of the Los Angeles riots, and this is probably where I first learned about the protest movement that was happening on campus. I imagine that I picked up a flyer from the black laminate surface of one of the bistro tables near the sandwich counter.

  On an April evening I went to a meeting held in Salomon Center, hosted by an organization called Students for Aid and Minority Admissions. There were easily over a hundred people in the room. At issue was the college’s need-aware admissions policy, which took a student’s ability to pay tuition into account as part of her application. This meant, from what I understood, that when choosing between two similarly qualified applicants, Brown picked the kid who could come up with the money, and more likely than not that kid would be white. We were the only Ivy League school still practicing this approach, maybe not surprisingly, given that our endowment was also the smallest. SAMA was demanding that the university add $50 million to its current $450 million capital campaign in order to address the problem.

  I’d been ignorant up to this point of the need-aware policy, but its existence seemed to confirm an uneasy feeling I had about Brown: that exactly what made it so attractive to me (a lack of requirements, an absurdly generous grading system, a freedom to indulge one’s particular interests and obsessions) was its luxuriousness, and this luxuriousness was reserved largely for those who could afford it. And while I had spent the previous year and a half folding sweatshirts and shelving videocassettes and dumping out coffee grounds, I had done so at will, and as soon as I’d tired of working minimum-wage jobs, going to bars, following rock and roll bands, as soon as I felt ready to resume my education, my parents had been ready to pay for it. They paid the full tuition, just as US senators and film directors and musical icons and minor European royalty had paid for their children to go to Brown. It no longer seemed a glamorous coincidence that they were among my classmates.

  That night I signed my name to a petition circulating the hall. I signed my name to a list of those interested in attending future meetings and teach-ins. Every time a clipboard came my way, I seized hold of it and wrote my name. Never a joiner, suspicious of anything resembling a team, I felt suddenly, mysteriously, moved to take part. This I can clearly remember, this urge, but it’s h
arder to put a finger on what actually stirred me as I sat there, signing up for everything. Was it the organizers themselves, their competence and seriousness, their air of experience, of having been seasoned in the service of other causes? Or did I feel, after several years of erratic volunteerism (tutoring kids, working at shelters, passing out pamphlets for Planned Parenthood), that it was time for me to commit meaningfully to the work of social justice? That it was time for me to commit to something other than rock bands and my long-distance boyfriend?

  A few days later, I woke up early, walked from my dingy freshman dorm to the brick Georgian spread of University Hall, and joined a group of students sitting quietly on the polished floor outside the president’s office. The plan, I think, was to waylay Vartan Gregorian as he came in to work that morning: the organization’s leaders would insist on an audience and then formally present him with our demands. About seventy of us spent much of the morning waiting, cross-legged, or scooting up against the rotunda’s walls and drawing our knees to our chests whenever a staff person needed to pass through. Vartan never showed up, and neither did the provost; it turned out that they were both out of town (conveniently, was the general conclusion). By the time this news filtered down to us, a SAMA rally had gathered force outside on the Main Green, with hand-lettered banners and bullhorns and chanting, swelling to a size and pitch much greater than anyone expected, and in an unplanned development, a spontaneous act of solidarity, the demonstrators surged through the doors and windows of University Hall, and our sit-in turned into a takeover.

  Those of us already on the inside must have cheered when the others pushed and climbed their way in. We must have cheered and clapped and sung throughout the day as we asserted our presence along the halls and in the large, airy Corporation Room of Brown’s administrative headquarters. Curiously enough, I remember none of this. I spent over twelve hours camped out in that building with more than three hundred protesters and I can recall almost nothing of the experience. It was a day that culminated in my arrest, in the arrest of 253 students, a day that ended with multiple misdemeanor charges and fingerprinting at the downtown Providence police station, yet the details and the feelings surrounding this singular episode in my life somehow refuse to be summoned. The event has for me the blankness of a day spent waiting in an airline terminal for an extremely delayed flight, or of an endless afternoon passed under fluorescent lights at the DMV. Maybe a few friendly, commiserating glances and remarks exchanged with one’s fellow passengers? But mostly just a lot of sitting and waiting in silence.

  There is only one moment I can clearly and perfectly recall: at some point during the day, students on the outside began passing food and water in through the windows, and I remember watching the handsome lead singer from a campus ska band I liked lean in and hand over an industrial-size carton of Goldfish crackers, with a huge smile on his face, and wishing badly that he were on the inside of the building with the rest of us.

  When, a week later, the Rodney King verdict was announced, I was alone again in the dimly lit student lounge, eating a sandwich in front of the television, watching Los Angeles, the city where I had recently lived and worked and made friends, erupt.

  I didn’t come back to Brown after that semester. I returned to Philadelphia and enrolled in the African-American Studies program at Temple. I got back my old job at the café. It’s funny to think that I didn’t know, that I didn’t have any way of knowing, what was happening with the protest movement for which I’d been arrested. There were no email blasts, no Tumblr posts, no Facebook updates, no tweets: none of the means by which we now communicate en masse existed then. As soon as I left campus, I lost all contact with SAMA.

  I’ve been tempted at different points since then to think of the takeover as a brief burst of sound and fury that didn’t end up signifying much. After all, the administration declined to meet SAMA’s demands; need-aware admission continued at Brown; the student organization soon disbanded; I’d failed to find an opening into a new community of friends. Worse, the isolated nature of the event made me feel unserious, a dabbler, my activism ersatz. When I pictured myself being escorted out of University Hall by the police, a particularly self-damning phrase came to mind, the harshest possible insult from my days as an aspiring hardcore kid: What a poser.

  The writing of this essay and the woolliness of my memory have compelled me to make use of the technology unavailable to us back in 1992; through Facebook, Google, and the online Brown Daily Herald, I’ve tracked down details I had completely forgotten regarding names and numbers and dates. In the course of doing so I’ve also learned something important about the students who organized and took part in that protest: many of them are still activists. Over twenty years later! Working for ACT UP and the Communist Party USA, for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, for language justice, for the movement to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. Knowing this makes me feel retroactively happy about having been among the 253. I was a late arrival to the cause and just another warm body in the occupation, but maybe enough warm bodies showing up at the same time can start someone on a certain path, or strengthen a conviction that the path they’ve already started on is the right one.

  As for me, I did eventually circle back to Brown, and when I returned I found myself, a year after my first SAMA meeting, signing up again, this time not for a sit-in or a rally but for the Writing Fellows Program. I joined a group of students who loved to write, who loved to talk and think about writing, and who wanted to support others in their writing efforts. The whole program was built around the idea that all writers, no matter how inexperienced or how accomplished, would become stronger through the process of receiving thoughtful, one-on-one feedback. Our approach didn’t single out students needing remedial help; we worked with undergraduates across all disciplines and all levels. I liked this equitable approach. Really, I liked everything about the program: the other Fellows, the cozy basement office, the road trips to Long Island for pedagogy conferences. My activism had shrunk to the scope of a well-wrought sentence, but I believed in the power of that sentence, and that its power could be available to everyone. I still believe that.

  And as for Brown: eleven years after the takeover of University Hall, the college finally admitted its domestic freshman class on a need-blind basis.

  A momentous change, truly, but this sentence still doesn’t quite achieve the note of ringing finality that I was hoping for. The problem is its awkward qualifiers: domestic and freshman. Awkward, but necessary, because Brown’s need-blind admission policy applies to first-year applicants who are US citizens or permanent residents. Which means that a significant swath of Brown’s population—international, transfer, and RUE students—are not included. A new movement on campus is now advocating for universal need-blind admission, a policy that would provide equal access to all applicants, regardless of citizenship or transfer status. And this group is breathtakingly well organized: they’ve built a website, made a short video, established a network of alumni ambassadors, created a Facebook page, and presented a comprehensive report to administrators and members of the Corporation. They’ve also launched a succinct and forceful petition. No more clipboards this time around—just now I went online and signed it.

  JOAN HILTY

  INSPIRATION

  I think one of the most inspirational figures in my life—certainly in my life as a theater artist—was a professor at Brown University named John Bass. What he taught me was the joy of ritual. He taught me that, through playwriting, we could discover our ancestors. We could explore issues. We could find our history.

  —Lynn Nottage (’86)

  Mostly I say, just write the poems you must write. And then write some more so you’re ready; it’s a marathon, not a foot-race, so you have to train. Then buy a book, go to a reading, expect the unexpected—and poetry will surprise you.

  —Kevin Young (’96 MFA)

  [What] had the strongest impact on me were not valuable technical lessons but the, “Yes, yes, d
o more of that, keep going on, more, more, more.” Paula [Vogel] really had this childlike enthusiasm for nudging me and pushing me on the path without telling me what that path should be.

  —Quiara Alegría Hudes (’04 MFA)

  [Robert Coover] taught a course called Ancient Fictions which included the Bible and Homer’s Odyssey, Gilgamesh, Ovid; early works of fiction. He was enormously erudite, generous, challenging, fascinating, filled with ideas. He didn’t seem to mind when a student did really well, he was extremely supportive of a whole range of younger writers to an incredible degree.

  —Ben Marcus (’91)

  To Be Young, Indignant, and Inspired

  PAMELA CONSTABLE

  On September 18, 1970, Jimi Hendrix died.

  On August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned.

  I will never forget those two dates, which bracketed my four years as an undergraduate at Brown during a politically turbulent, culturally freewheeling time. Hendrix, whom I worshipped, and Nixon, whom I detested, represented two sides of a struggle that loomed large for us at the time—a struggle between generations, ideologies, and values. Hendrix reinvented “The Star-Spangled Banner” as an anthem of the counterculture; Nixon betrayed it.

  I had applied to Brown mostly to please my father, a member of the class of 1939, who had gone almost straight from graduation to parachuting out of warplanes. By the time I entered college, he was a dignified gentleman in his sixties, proud of my good grades but appalled at my choice of music and friends. We disagreed about almost every issue of the day, but he was the rock of my life, and I was eager to succeed at his alma mater.