Foundation for Intellectual Diversity — Ideas Without Labels

Brown Celebrates Latino History Month

March 19, 2010

It seems that hardly any week or month goes by at Brown that some racial or sexual identity isn’t being celebrated. This week we have a two for one—in addition to Sex Week, it is Latino History Month. The theme for the latter is … identity—how shocking! For the kick-off, organizers hosted a former social [...]

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Brown Teaches Students How to Have Kinky Sex

March 16, 2010

At any other college, a university-sponsored series of event known as ‘Sex Week 2010’ might suggest forums on condom use and relationship counseling—but not at Brown, where most of the events and how-to workshops are enough to make even the characters of ‘Animal House’ and ‘Monty Python’ blush. They include ‘Strap-On 101,’ sex toy raffles, [...]

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Speaker Asks: ‘What is Whiteness?’

March 16, 2010

File this one under the category of questions that could be answered simply by looking in the mirror. Last week, Brown hosted an American historian who spoke on—what else?—but race. The speaker, Nell Painter, tackled such burning issues as ‘what is whiteness?’ and, in an especially revealing moment of interdisciplinary failure, the professor wondered if [...]

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Student Columnist Criticizes Stanley Fish

March 15, 2010

It isn’t every day that you read lucid criticisms of moral relativism and postmodernism at Brown University, but this scathing column that recently ran in the Brown Daily Herald was a notable exception:
The Creeping Nihilism of Stanley Fish
Brian Judge, Opinions Columnist
Published: Tuesday, March 2, 2010
A few days ago, Providence native and New York Times [...]

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Investment Transparency Good for the Right Too

March 15, 2010

The Open the Books Coalition, a student organization, held a protest earlier this month, demanding that Brown University release a list of all the companies its invested in. The coalition is comprised of the usual suspects—Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Labor Alliance, and Students for Justice in Palestine—and, as those names suggest, the [...]

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Fiscal Conservatism at the Brown Daily Herald

March 15, 2010

Although the Brown Daily Herald usually is good about letting student conservatives voice their opinions, its editorials tend to be reliably left-of-center. So we were more than a little surprised to read an editorial in the Feb. 26 edition lamenting the absence of any student activism on the cause of fiscal responsibility in government and [...]

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Brown Hosts Free Speech Icon Salman Rushdie

March 15, 2010

Brown should be applauded for bringing free speech advocate Salman Rushdie to speak on campus as part of its Year of India events. We spend a lot of time on this blog criticizing Brown for its poor record on intellectual diversity and academic freedom, which is all the more reason to give the University credit [...]

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‘Racist’ Speaks at Martin Luther King Event

March 15, 2010

FID Vice President Josh Unseth has written a post at brownivy.com on Brown’s decision to bring Tavis Smiley to speak at an event honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.
Racist, Tavis Smiley, Comes to Brown

I’ve heard of Tavis Smiley before, but I’ve never had a chance to listen to him, that is until Brown University posted [...]

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BDH Mocks Conservative Minority

March 15, 2010

In its weekly Diamonds and Coal editorial, the Brown Daily Herald dealt a low blow to the Brown College Republicans:
“Coal to GOP gubernatorial candidate John Robitaille, who said he was “not used to speaking to such a small group” — you obviously have not spent enough time with the Brown Republicans.”
As a member of the [...]

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Welcoming a New Contributor

March 15, 2010

We are pleased to welcome one of our interns this semester, Kelly Fennessy, as a contributor to a blog.

Kelly Fennessy, a native of Toms River, New Jersey, is a freshman at Brown University who hopes to concentrate in Applied Mathematics/Economics. In 2009, she graduated from the Marine Academy of Technology and Environmental Science in Manahawkin, [...]

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