entity

Brown University

Also known as: College of Rhode Island

Facts (35)

Sources

Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Brown University slaveryandjusticereport.brown.edu Brown University 30 facts

claimNicholas Brown Jr., the namesake of Brown University, served as a vice president of the Providence Anti-Abolition Society, despite having been a member of the Providence Abolition Society forty years prior.

claimWilliam G. Goddard, a professor of moral philosophy at Brown University and a member of both the Board of Trustees and the Board of Fellows, chaired the committee that drafted the resolutions for the Providence Anti-Abolition Society.

claimRev. Francis Wayland, who served as president of Brown University from 1827 to 1855, encouraged students to grapple with the moral and political issues raised by the abolition controversy, despite the university not formally supporting the abolitionist movement.

quoteWendell Phillips reportedly told heckling Brown University students that 'they might be silly as geese or venomous as serpents, he would speak if they stayed until midnight.'

accountRobert Carter III attempted to shield his sons from the influence of slaveholding society by sending them to be educated in Rhode Island, as explained in his letters to Brown University President James Manning.

claimFrancis Wayland, a Brown University educator, provided a framework that allowed students to discuss the morality and politics of slavery, though his arguments did not emphasize the responsibilities people might have toward those who were enslaved.

claimMoses Brown was the chief sponsor of the American Industrial Revolution, which began near the Brown University campus.

accountThe proposed 1786 essay contest on the slave trade at Brown University was never held due to internal opposition.

claimThe founding members of the Providence branch of the American Anti-Slavery Society included eleven Brown University students.

measurementAt least twenty-one Brown University students died in the service of the Union Army during the American Civil War, and at least thirteen Brown University students died in the service of the Confederate Army.

accountA Brown University graduate named Dresser, who served as an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, was arrested in Nashville and publicly whipped for distributing abolitionist literature.

claimBrown University developed during the era of the transatlantic slave trade and the early abolitionist movement.

accountIn 1787, Robert Carter sent his sons, John and George Carter, to the College of Rhode Island (now Brown University) with instructions that they were not to return to Virginia until after they had reached their twenty-first birthdays.

accountJames Tallmadge, a senior at the College of Rhode Island (Brown University), delivered an anti-slavery speech at the 1790 commencement ceremony.

claimBrown University did not admit Black students during the antebellum years, with the first African American students enrolling in the 1870s.

measurementRichard James Arnold served as a trustee of Brown University from 1826 to 1873, making him one of the longest-serving trustees in the university's history.

accountIn 1786, Moses Brown proposed a prize for the best student essay on the slave trade at Brown University, an idea inspired by a similar contest held at Cambridge University in England in 1785.

accountBrown University students engaged in debates regarding slavery through various forums, including classrooms, commencement orations, Phi Beta Kappa lectures, and formal debates held by campus societies.

claimMany Brown University students in the antebellum years were pro-slavery or anti-abolition, and most formal debates on the topic recorded at the university were resolved against abolition.

claimThe Brown University campus served as a stop on the Underground Railroad during the antebellum years.

accountJohn Greenwood’s painting 'Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam' (c. 1752–1758) depicts ten men in a tavern with enslaved people; six of these men were future trustees of the College of Rhode Island (now Brown University), and two became governors of Rhode Island.

accountWhen abolitionist Wendell Phillips spoke at a Providence church in 1845, a large contingent of Brown University students heckled and abused him.

claimA plaque in Manning Chapel on the Brown University main green honors the twenty-one Brown University students who died in the service of the Union Army.

claimMany New England-born Brown University graduates migrated south after graduation to work as merchants, lawyers, planters, teachers, and clergymen, facilitated by business and family ties between Rhode Island and the South.

accountFrancis Wayland dedicated several weeks of his senior seminar at Brown University to the problems of slavery and abolition, allowing students significant liberty to question and discuss the topic provided they stated their points with precision.

accountAfter the failure to hold an essay contest at Brown University, Moses Brown proposed endowing similar essay prizes at Harvard, Yale, and the College of New Jersey (Princeton), but these contests also never occurred.

claimThe Hazard family, owners of the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, were major donors to Brown University.

claimBrown University, as the nation's first Baptist college, attracted a large number of students from prominent southern slaveholding families.

accountRichard James Arnold, a Brown University graduate (class of 1814) and member of a prominent anti-slavery family, lived a double life as a businessman in Providence and a plantation owner in Bryant Country, Georgia, where he held a large number of enslaved people.

Understanding LLM Understanding skywritingspress.ca Skywritings Press Jun 14, 2024 4 facts

claimEllie Pavlick is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University who received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, with a focus on paraphrasing and lexical semantics.

claimEllie Pavlick leads the Language Understanding and Representation (LUNAR) lab at Brown University, which collaborates with the university's Robotics and Visual Computing labs and the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences.

referenceEllie Pavlick from Brown University researches the role of symbols and grounding in large language models.

accountTom Griffiths completed his PhD in Psychology at Stanford University in 2005 and held teaching positions at Brown University and the University of California, Berkeley before joining Princeton University.

Emails Reveal Epstein's Ties to Mossad—But Corporate ... - FAIR.org fair.org FAIR Nov 14, 2025 1 fact

measurementBetween October 7, 2023, and September 2025, the United States sent $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel, which represents more than a quarter of Israel's total military expenditures during that period, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.