In 1981, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women was established as a research center on gender. The Center supported a new, multidisciplinary Women’s Studies concentration as well as the integration of the study of gender into undergraduate courses. 

In 1984, the Brown Corporation approved the Program in Liberal Medical Education (PLME). This new eight-year continuum incorporated four years of undergraduate work and four years of professional training into a single course of study. The only program of its kind at the time, it is today still the only combined baccalaureate-MD program in the Ivy League. An application of Brown’s open curriculum concept, the PLME allows students, in exchange for an early decision on their pursuit of a medical degree, to take full advantage of the breadth of a liberal arts education.

On March 13, 1985, over 300 students rallied on the Green to protest institutional racism at Brown. Five weeks of protests followed, led by the Third World Coalition. Students protested that the University had not followed through on commitments made after the occupation of University Hall in 1975. Citing progress made in the intervening decade, the administration pledged to bolster minority hiring, to find a new home for the Third World Center, to address charges of harassment of African American students by campus security, to explore issues of Third World subject matter in the curriculum and to form an investigatory panel on minority issues at the University. While the protests, which had peaked with an occupation of the John Carter Brown Library to reclaim documents of the Brown family’s slave-trading past, were over, concerns about equitable admissions policies continued.

Brown’s Center for Public Service was founded in 1986 to support the integration of public service into the educational experience at Brown. One of the first centers of its kind in the nation, it connected students to community partners in support of the University’s mission “to serve the community, the nation, and the world.” In 1991, the center was named the Howard R. Swearer Center for Public Service, in recognition of the late Brown president’s advocacy of public service for undergraduates.

In the celebratory spirit of Spring Weekend, students perform a “group sit,” with Brown’s mascot Bruno, at the center.

Two workers hang paper lanterns, preparing for the outdoor Campus Dance.

Members of the Brown University Band describe the experience of being part of one of Brown's oldest student organizations. Founded in 1924, the band plays at a range of sports events (football, ice hockey, basketball) as well as at official University celebrations, including commencement, while embodying the spirit – and constructive irreverence – of Brown.

Michael W. Harper, University Professor and Professor of English since 1970, was named the first Poet Laureate of the State of Rhode Island, a post he held until 1993. At the award of an honorary degree from Trinity College in 1987, he was recognized as: “…one of the most influential voices among black artists and intellectuals in America, [whose] vigorous and dexterous poetry speaks to all readers.”

In July 1988, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity was established at Brown. One of the nation’s earliest academic centers dedicated to research, scholarship and academic exchanges on issues of race and ethnicity, the Center became home in 1996 to the newly established concentration in Ethnic Studies.

Born in Iran, Vartan Gregorian studied in Lebanon before being awarded a scholarship to attend Stanford. After holding a number of teaching and administrative positions, Gregorian became head of the New York Public Library. In 1984, he was awarded an honorary degree from Brown for his eight-year effort to bring the NYPL back to cultural and financial stability and in 1988 was elected Brown’s president. In addition to growing the endowment to over $1 billion, Gregorian also oversaw an increase in diversity in the student body and increased international prominence for Brown. On his career path, Gregorian said, “If in 1956 when I came to the States without speaking English, someone had told me I would finish a Ph.D., that I would be a professor at University of Texas, that I would be the second foreign-born provost of the University of Pennsylvania, that I would have the opportunity to be chancellor of Berkeley, that I would be the first foreign-born president of the New York Public Library, and finally the first foreign-born president of an Ivy League University, I would have considered that person to be crazy. But then I said to him, ‘You know, these kinds of things happen only in America.’”