A Tale of Two Cities: PVD vs. Brown
Disclaimer: I attend the Master’s program at Brown University’s Center for Biomedical Engineering and, well before I ever dreamed of attending Brown, I settled in Providence. It is my favorite city in America.
Providence, home to a populace that largely lives paycheck-to-paycheck just barely on the safer side of the poverty line, is home to Brown University. The University is the largest land holder in the city yet it pays only $6.5 million dollars to the city in the form of a payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) which represents a marginal fraction of its total market rate liability. In 2015, the city of Providence projected an annual structural deficit of $19.1 million in FY2021 after years of running similar deficits. Due to careful management and painful decisions by city leadership, the city managed a deficit into a surplus. But at what cost? Meanwhile, bridges within Rhode Island and Providence are the most structurally deficient in the country, Providence’s shipping port is a public health disaster, and the public schools are ranked as among the worst in the nation. Hope High School, a public school blocks from Brown’s campus on College Hill, is one of the worst in the entire country; one third of students who attend fail to graduate and only 12% of its students achieve grade-level reading proficiency.
Eighty six percent of Hope High’s student body comes from an economically disadvantaged home; as food and housing insecurity are real concerns, it is not surprising that Hope High’s students are not performing to standard. Meanwhile, one in every five of Brown’s students come from families that fall into the top 1% of the American income distribution. Whereas average annual family income for a Brown University student (who generally is the child of one of the globe’s wealthiest people) is $204,000; the average annual family income in the city of Providence is just over $45,000.
Many of Brown’s students spend their time at Brown learning about global inequality yet they fail to see the pervasive local inequalities that are within eyeshot of the tree-lined center of campus. Blame for this oversight should not rest on the student population; they know no different because they are actively discouraged by the Univeristy and its never ending quest to drive a wedge between its students and the realities of their surroundings. In the midst of a historic housing crisis in the city of Providence, the University announced that it acquired River House, a privately-held 270 unit housing complex, for the purpose of housing its graduate and medical students. While the creation of 100 units of affordable housing in Providence by housing non-profit Crossroads Rhode Island brought out the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Mayor, and a Senator, the near-threefold loss of units from the public market was greeted with silence from everyone but Brown. On July 22, Provost Richard Locke put out a tone deaf press release heralding the University’s continued commitment to affordable housing for its students which somehow spun the removal of 270 units of housing from the public market as a win for Providence’s housing shortage:
In addition to its impact on graduate student life, we believe the acquisition [of River House] will benefit the City of Providence and its residents. It will advance Brown’s commitment to increasing its student housing inventory, which alleviates the impact that the demand for off-campus rental units has upon local neighborhoods.
Where is the outrage?
Brown University has an endowment of $4.7 billion and lauded itself for an annualized investment return of 12.1% in 2020 which “significantly outperformed” all available market benchmarks. This massive war chest, depending on calculation method, ranks Brown’s hoard as somewhere in the neighborhood of the 20th largest endowment in American higher education.
The endowment exists to protect the ongoing operations of the University, its people, and its interests . When the COVID19 pandemic necessitated the shut down of all in-person University activities including food services, Brown kept food service workers on the payroll. Brown also has generous parental leave policies and healthcare plans for professionals working in the Brown community. The University goes out of its way to treat members of its walled garden with the utmost care and respect but the walls of that garden are unscalable and, in most cases, opening the door to the garden requires generational fortune. At the same time, the garden’s walls grow outward pressuring the surrounding community in the form of higher real estate prices and rents and higher cost of services all while the University fails to pay its fair share. Christina Paxson, President of Brown University, wrote a fire and brimstone op-ed on the state of COVID-inflected higher ed in the New York Times at the beginning of the pandemic:
This loss [of tuition dollars], only a part of which might be recouped through online courses, would be catastrophic, especially for the many institutions that were in precarious financial positions before the pandemic. It’s not a question of whether institutions will be forced to permanently close, it’s how many.
Without diving into why a respective college shut down (i.e. it could have been a long time coming or it could have been COVID induced) only 21 colleges and universities closed their doors between 2019 and 2021. The US Department of Education recognizes 3,982 degree-granting post-secondary schools as of the 2019–2020 school year; the 21 shuttered institutions of higher education represent just over .5% of that total. Brown did in fact lower cost of attendance during the pandemic by a fractional amount largely by eliminating activities fees. Against all odds and despite warnings to the contrary, Brown University thrived. Perhaps Christina Paxson’s forecasted blood bath is yet to come?
Brown’s hoard grows in full view of the deep challenges facing Providence. When does Brown give back?
