The More Things Change...

By The Editors / May / June 2002
June 29th, 2007
Another phase of the difficulties confronting us at Brown is the constant temptation of young and promising members of the faculty to go to other institutions for financial betterment and titular promotion. Associate and assistant professors at Brown are forever being asked to accept full professorships from our more fortunately circumstanced sister universities. It would surprise our alumni to know how many allurements of this sort have been withstood by loyal teachers here in the last few years. As a matter of fact they stay as long as they feel they can in justice to themselves and their households. They like Brown and they like Providence. There was never a time when faculty associations here, thanks largely to the Faculty Club, were so pleasant; and the social and cultural resources of the city approximate the ideal. But facts are facts, money is money, household expenses and the future of children have to be taken into account. And so it is that in order to hold our faculty as it exists today we must provide more liberally for it.

The real university consists of its teachers and the learners who sit before them. There can be no letdown in the quality of our teaching at Brown; rather it must be keyed up, just as must be done with the student personnel. We do not propose in this place and at this time to discuss these matters further. We intend simply to suggest some of the lines along which opinion is moving at present on the Hill. For ourselves personally and editorially we are confident that there is to be in the near future a general realization that Brown must go forward to an era of improved quality rather than increased quantity. We say this in no disparagement of the substantial quality of the present time but in recognition of the plain fact that if we do not go forward thus we shall go backward - an intolerable alternative.

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May / June 2002