Brown University history

On September 8, 1803, the corporation voted, "That the donation of $5000 Dollars, if made to this College within one Year from the late Commencement, shall entitle the donor to name the College." The following year, the appeal was answered by College treasurer Nicholas Brown, Jr.

The school moved to Providence in 1770 and adopted its present name in 1804 in honour of benefactor Nicholas Brown.

The presidency of Barnas Sears, Class of 1825, was a successful one, but markedly different than that of his respected predecessor, Francis Wayland.

Launched in the summer of 1829, the Brunonian was Brown’s first student publication.

Established in 1847, Brown’s Engineering program was the first in the Ivy League and the third civilian engineering program in the country.

In 1863, Brown became Rhode Island’s first land grant university when it received 120,000 acres in Kansas from the federal government under the Morrill Act.

The decade that Elisha Benjamin Andrews, Class of 1870, served as president was a time of great growth and accomplishment for the University.

Brown’s close neighbor, the co-educational Rhode Island School of Design, opened in 1877.

President Faunce, Class of 1880, served for 30 years, longer than any president before or since.

Clarence Barbour, Class of 1888, began his presidency just two weeks after the stock market crash that would usher in the Great Depression.

Women were first admitted to Brown in 1891.

In 1897, Brown conferred its first doctoral degree on a woman.

The school entered into cooperative arrangement with Brown in 1902, initially opening three courses to Brown students.

In 1904, the John Carter Brown Library was established as an independently funded research library on Brown's campus; the library's collection was founded on that of John Carter Brown, son of Nicholas Brown, Jr.

In 1907, the new Sayles Gymnasium (now Smith-Buonanno Hall) opened for the use of female students.

In the Fall of 1915, there were 1,053 students enrolled at Brown, passing the 1,000 mark for the first time.

In the Fall of 1925, just a decade after passing 1,000 students, Brown began the year with more than 2,000 students for the first time.

In 1928, the Women’s College was renamed Pembroke College in Brown University.

Known initially as The Record, “Pembroke” was added in 1931 after the change in name of the Women’s College.

In 1932, Doctor Herbert H. Jasper of Brown’s psychology department, was the first researcher in the nation to make electroencephalograph (EEG) recordings of the activity of the intact human brain.

A decorated soldier in World War II, Barnaby Keeney came to Brown as an Assistant Professor of Medieval History in 1946.

In 1955, the Brown chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded.

Initially part of the Applied Mathematics division, the study of Computer Science began at Brown in 1956.

In 1966, the first Group Independent Study Project (GISP) at Brown was formed, involving 80 students and 15 professors.

In his later books of poetry, most notably Pieces (1968), Creeley’s poems are equally self-contained.

In 1973, African American upperclass students created the Minority Peer Counseling (MPC) Program.

The first medical degrees of the modern era were presented in 1975 to a graduating class of 58 students.

Creeley’s Selected Poems appeared in 1976.

In 1981, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women was established as a research center on gender.

Brown’s Center for Public Service was founded in 1986 to support the integration of public service into the educational experience at Brown.

In July 1988, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity was established at Brown.

In the Fall of 1994, the number of women attending Brown exceeded the number of men for the first time, with 3,714 female and 3,672 male students.

In 2001, the Afro-American Studies Program was upgraded to department status and renamed the Department of Africana Studies.

Launched in 2002, The Plan for Academic Enrichment built on Brown’s strengths and set new benchmarks of excellence in research, education and service.

In support of Brown’s long tradition of interdisciplinary studies, the Brown Humanities Center (later re-named the Cogut Center for the Humanities) opened in 2003 to support collaborative research among scholars in the humanities.

In March 2004, a new resource center opened in Faunce House to allow students to explore issues related to sexuality and gender.

In October 2006, the committee released a report documenting its findings.

In 2009, Brown and long-time partner IBM opened a multimillion-dollar supercomputer at Brown’s Center for Computation and Visualization.

With the oldest undergraduate engineering program in the Ivy League and third-oldest civilian engineering program in the country, in 2010, Brown transformed its Division of Engineering into the Brown School of Engineering.

Since 2012, Christina Hull Paxson has served as president.

In July 2013, the new Brown School of Public Health officially opened.

A 15-month celebration kicked off March 7-8, 2014 with a two-day open house for Rhode Island neighbors and school children, fireworks and a 600-pound birthday cake.

After an engagement process involving campus-wide discussion and input, President Paxson shared the Action Plan on February 1, 2016.

The three-story facility opened in October 2017 has 20 lab modules to support collaborative research groups, a 4,000-square-foot clean room for nanotechnology research and a separate clean room for bioengineering scholarship.

With the opening of the 2018-19 academic year, the University launched its initiative that replaced University-packaged loans with scholarship funds in financial aid packages for all returning and incoming undergraduate students.

The BDH reported exclusively on the expansion in 2020.