Brown University

About

Brown University is a private Ivy League research university in the College Hill neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island, United States. The university is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. One of nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution, it was the first American college to codify that admission and instruction of students was to be equal regardless of the religious affiliation of students. The university is home to the oldest applied mathematics program in the country and oldest engineering program in the Ivy League. It was one of the early doctoral-granting institutions in the U.S., adding masters and doctoral studies in 1887. In 1969, it adopted its Open Curriculum after student lobbying, which eliminated mandatory general education distribution requirements. In 1971, Brown's coordinate women's institution, Pembroke College, was fully merged into the university. The university comprises the College, the Graduate School, Alpert Medical School, the School of Engineering, the School of Public Health and the School of Professional Studies. Its international programs are organized through the Watson School of International and Public Affairs, and it is academically affiliated with the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Rhode Island School of Design, which offers undergraduate and graduate dual degree programs. The university is surrounded by a federally listed architectural district with a concentration of colonial-era buildings. Benefit Street has one of America's richest concentrations of 18th- and 19th-century architecture. Undergraduate admissions are among the most selective in the country, with an acceptance rate of 5% for the class of 2026. As of October 2025, 12 Nobel Prize laureates, 1 Fields Medalist, 1 Dan David Prize winner, 7 National Humanities Medalists, and 11 National Medal of Science laureates have been affiliated with Brown as alumni, faculty, or researchers. Alumni also include 29 Pulitzer Prize winners, 21 billionaires, 4 U.S. secretaries of state, over 100 members of the United States Congress, 58 Rhodes Scholars, 22 MacArthur Genius Fellows, and 38 Olympic medalists.

In 1761, three residents of Newport, Rhode Island, drafted a petition to the colony's General Assembly:

That your Petitioners propose to open a literary institution or School for instructing young Gentlemen in the Languages, Mathematics, Geography & History, & such other branches of Knowledge as shall be desired. That for this End ... it will be necessary ... to erect a public Building or Buildings for the boarding of the youth & the Residence of the Professors. The three petitioners were Ezra Stiles, pastor of Newport's Second Congregational Church and future president of Yale University; William Ellery Jr., future signer of the United States Declaration of Independence; and Josias Lyndon, future governor of the colony. Stiles and Ellery later served as co-authors of the college's charter two years later. The editor of Stiles's papers observes, "This draft of a petition connects itself with other evidence of Dr. Stiles's project for a Collegiate Institution in Rhode Island, before the charter of what became Brown University." The Philadelphia Baptist Association was also interested in establishing a college in Rhode Island, which was founded as a Baptist colony in America, including the mother-church of all American Baptists: the First Baptist Church in America. At the time, the Baptists were unrepresented among the colonial colleges; the Congregationalists had Harvard University and Yale University, the Presbyterians had the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University, and the Episcopalians had the College of William & Mary and King's College, which later became Columbia University. The local University of Pennsylvania in their native Philadelphia was founded by Benjamin Franklin without direct association with any particular denomination. Isaac Backus, the Baptist minister and historian of the New England Baptists, who was an inaugural trustee of Brown University, wrote of the October 1762 resolution taken at Philadelphia:

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