Brown University will begin implementing a campus-wide three-year initiative to promote sustained, focused study and discussion of fundamental human values. The Stephen Robert Initiative for the Study of Values, named for Brown’s 19th chancellor, will be introduced during the 1999-2000 academic year with a new course oriented toward entering freshman, a symposium on participatory citizenship, and additional public lectures and seminars. By the 2002-03 academic year, the initiative will have spread the study of values throughout the curriculum, to the scholarly activities of faculty in all academic departments, to graduate teaching fellows, and to the general public through lectures and conferences.
The Ivy League school announced its plans for the initiative during its 231st Commencement exercises on Memorial Day. Undergraduates marched to the Meeting House of the First Baptist Church in America, site of all Brown Commencements since 1775.
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”The Charter of 1764 defined Brown as a place that prepared students for lives of ‘usefulness and reputation’ in the world beyond campus,” said Brown President E. Gordon Gee. “Increasingly, that world needs men and women who can discern and champion the necessary elements of a good life and a just society – citizens who are not easily distracted by the evanescent fads, trends and materialism of modern culture.”
Nancy L. Rosenblum, professor of political science and values initiative director, said the Stephen Robert Initiative will promote new settings, where students and faculty will examine the perennial elements of any good life: ethics and a just community, spirituality and beauty, friendship and love, physical well-being and freedom from fear.
”In public life and in our private lives, we face troubling questions about the quality of life, but we rarely reflect on these questions except in response to personal or social crises, in settings fraught with incivility and conflict,” Rosenblum said.
