Brown study = creative play

Well, let’s let Cleveland sit on its hands and ruminate some more while the rest of the world moves ahead with creative thinking and action.

A few days ago, I discovered a place that effervesces with creativity of a sort that may sound frivolous, but actually matters tremendously. I was walking around Brown University in Providence, R.I., one of several college stops I made during a trip to New England last week. 

Despite a nearly 250-year history and its membership in the august Ivy League, Brown has, I think, remained just outside the spotlight relentlessly focused on Harvard and Yale universities. Like a middle child less noticed than the two other sibs flanking him, Brown has been sandwiched between those attention-grabbing, rival schools and perhaps overlooked by a lot of us. 

In a way, that may have helped: Perhaps because it’s been spared all that celebrity, Brown doesn’t seem to have the ponderous self-importance or the quasi-religious reverence for its own traditions and myth that public awe engenders in so many respected institutions. And maybe that’s why Brown also seems freer to experiment with what kind of institution it is. 

The school’s open curriculum is a reflection of its pervasive sense of fun and intellectual space, offering students the right to study anything they want, unrestricted by required courses. But It’s more the unofficial stuff, the quality of campus life there, that makes me think Brown may be fostering the joyful inventiveness and unimpressed-with-itself humor that entrepreneurship and other significant creativity depend on:

A tour of the campus revealed, for instance, a residential quad where a statue of Caesar Augustus lost its arm to a falling tree in a hurricane years ago. The students who lived there took possession of the bronze limb and it’s now passed regularly among their several dorms – whichever residence has the arm gets to program activities in the quad that month. One of the events they host in the spring includes putting tarps down over the entire quad and turning it into a giant Slip ‘n Slide.

Like many young people at other colleges, Brown students dress up their campus statues in costumes, paint campus fixtures for special events and hold campus-wide scavenger hunts. But they also drape their buildings in sheets and project movies on them.  They climb and play hide ‘n seek in a big, fascinating art installatiion made of woven tree branches, an installation the student body demanded be kept even after part of it was damaged in a storm and the university wanted to take the whole thing down. They circulate news about upcoming events by printing it on fliers that they then place on the cafeteria tables like mats, so students can read, eat amd learn. (Journalism industry: Take note.) 

Brown students can invent their own majors – and do, like the young woman who combined studies in physics and religion in a concentration she named “The Search for Meaning.”  The university is further encouraging intellectual and artistic exploration with a recently created dual program that lets students enroll simultaneously in Brown and the nearby Rhode Island School of Design and earn a degree from each.

All this information came from a highly articulate student tour guide, a young black woman from Ireland who is an opera singer and who plans to double-major in music and economics because her advisor recognized that she had a “computational mind” and urged her to take some math courses, she said.    

Curiosity and ideas are being let out of the cage at Brown, where young people enjoy something beyond the common cycle of intense academic grind, binge-drinking and pranks. They’re discovering their own larky, constructive power of invention – and we’ll all be the better for it.