Brown University

Brown began life as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (officially) or Rhode Island College (unofficially). It is the twelfth-oldest institution of higher learning in the US.

Rhode Island College was established in the town of Warren on the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay, a few miles south of the city of Providence. The school moved to Providence in 1770.

The College was established by a group of Baptist ministers (that being the religious affiliation of Rhode Island’s founder, Roger Williams), working in close cooperation with Quakers (Friends), Congregationalists, and Anglicans (Episcopalians). The College’s charter stated that there was to be no religious test for entrance.

A family consisting of four brothers—Nicholas, John, Joseph, and Moses Brown—was heavily involved in the College’s affairs from the beginning. Joseph Brown was a professor of Physics there, and John Brown served as treasurer for some 20 years during the Revolution and after.

In addition, Nicholas’s son, Nicholas Brown, Jr., was a very successful businessmen who made a series of generous gifts to the College to boost its endowment. In 1804, the College expressed its gratitude to the Brown family by changing its name to the present one.

Brown is linked to seven Nobel Prize laureates, namely,:

• Physicists, Leon Cooper & J. Michael Kosterlitz
• Chemist, Lars Onsager
• Physiologists, George Snell & Craig Mello
• Economists, George Stigler & Vernon Smith

Other notable faculty and alumni include:

• Early-20th century Japanese scholar, educator, and social reformer, Fukuzawa Yukichi
• Financier and philanthropist, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
• Psychiatrist, Aaron T. Beck
• Novelists, Jeffrey Eugenides & Edwidge Danticat
• Singer, Mary Chapin Carpenter
• Actresses, Laura Linney & Emma Watson
• Film director, Todd Haynes
• Radio personality, Ira Glass
• Media mogul, Ted Turner
• Entrepreneur and investor; John Scully III
• Entrepreneur, philanthropist, and 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination candidate, Andrew Yang
• Economist and former Federal Reserve Chairwoman, Janet Yellen
• Former US diplomat, Richard Holbrooke
• Former World Bank President, Jim Young Kim