The American Scholar at Brown - Brown University

Liberal Education, Fall, 2002 by Paul B. Armstrong

IN AN ADDRESS at Brown's Phi Beta Kappa initiation ceremony, I borrowed the title of Ralph Waldo Emerson's oration to Alpha of Massachusetts in 1837, and I asked what "The American Scholar at Brown" might mean today. The answer I gave has to do with what I think is the great potential of Brown's often misunderstood but immensely popular "open curriculum" to provide a model of how we can negotiate difference with one another in a spirit of civic dialogue and with an appreciation for how our differences can enrich our intellectual, cultural, and moral lives.

Theory put to the test

A week after that talk the Brown Daily Herald published an ad by David Horowitz, the former ally of the Black Panthers turned conservative activist, that opposed reparations for slavery. Many members of the campus community found that ad racist and offensive, and shortly thereafter a group of student took one day's edition of the newspaper in protest. As the president and I talked about how to turn this crisis into a "teachable moment," we agreed on a forum where faculty from different disciplines and with varying political allegiances would attempt to sort out the complicated issues at stake. Many faculty and students regarded the taking of the news-papers as an egregious violation of free speech, a theme taken up by the national press with condemnations of the alleged intolerance of the minority students. Other members of our community (and not only students and faculty of color) accused the defenders of free speech of naivete about the hostility toward minorities that tolerance of hate speech fosters, and there were indeed some ugly incidents during the days that followed. Then-President Sheila Blumstein issued forceful yet also temperate statements affirming Brown's commitment to freedom of speech while also stressing the importance of community values, but few on either side seemed to listen.

This was the campus climate when almost a thousand students, faculty, and staff filled the largest lecture hall on campus for the sort of "teach-in" I hadn't seen since the '60s-only then I was a left-leaning student in the audience, and here I was the administrator in coat and tie moderating an event that threatened at any moment to spiral out of control. But it didn't, and we had instead a long, exhausting, and ultimately (I think almost everyone on all sides agreed) enlightening debate about free speech and the values of mutual respect and trust on which the possibility of an open exchange of ideas in an academic community depends. In that meeting, and in a series of colloquia we organized throughout the rest of the semester, Brown faculty modeled the process of offering thoughtful opinions, sometimes forcefully and even passionately argued, and listening carefully and respectfully to opposing views--not aiming for consensus but sharing the belief that sincere intellectual conflict is a productive activity and, by engaging in such disputation, demonstrating that this is indeed the case.

I thought that these dialogues and debates were especially important because the civic discourse they exemplified was something we risked losing as the campus became polarized. Like many colleges and universities, we are a community of communities at Brown. Our ability to talk with one another across the boundaries separating us is what makes it possible for our differences to be enriching--a resource for creativity, innovation, and exploration rather than an occasion for misunderstanding, mistrust, and divisiveness. The culture of confrontation and ultimatums that we risk falling into during times of polarization is the opposite of the culture of conversation, listening, and response that characterizes academic discourse at its best.

A unique curriculum

Before this crisis broke, my Phi Beta Kappa talk had been an attempt to suggest that there is something special about Brown's curriculum that can teach the nation about how to negotiate differences productively. I think the idealism of the curriculum makes Brown unique--and that is one of the reasons why episodes like the Horowitz controversy trouble this community so deeply. We don't do a worse job than the rest of the country in talking about race, ethnicity, and cultural differences. Rather, Brown students and faculty like to think that we hold ourselves to a higher standard, and so we are more disappointed when we fail to reach it. That standard is implicit in the "open curriculum" that everyone here deeply believes in, whatever else we may disagree about--which sometimes seems like almost everything.

Let me return to Emerson's notion of the American Scholar and explain further the values I find in Brown's curriculum that have special contemporary relevance. Emerson challenged his generation to embrace his vision of the American scholar's civic responsibility to provide the cultural leadership needed by the still relatively new nation. He felt that defining the role of the American scholar was work worth doing because fundamental principles of citizenship, nationhood, and culture were embedded in the way this vocation was conceived. Brown's long tradition of viewing scholarship and learning as having civic purposes began with the University Charter of 1764: