Thank you for visiting the Presidential Seminar website. As its founding director, I would like the Seminar to raise questions about education, civic responsibility, and community (see Description). These questions are intended above all to provoke and stimulate, rather than to be resolved. It is in their very complexity and ambiguity that universities often make important contributions to society.

The Seminar is going through rapid experimentation and transformation, and I most heartily invite your comments and suggestions ([email protected]). One important component of the Seminar is its campus-wide events that are intended to produce intentional and sustained conversations (see Events). We hope that these programs stimulate the Brown and the Rhode Island communities. In attempting to maintain conversations beyond the events themselves, the Seminar creates list-serve discussion groups. The intensifying of these conversations is one of our greatest challenges, and we would greatly appreciate learning about other approaches.

The Seminar also has a teaching component, UC 110 (see Course). Now in its second semester, the weekly seminar, consisting of fifteen Brown students, presents an opportunity for pedagogical experimentation. The seminar poses some of the most difficult questions facing higher education. For example, although liberal arts tradition in the United States claims as one of its core missions the teaching of democratic skills and practices, students certainly do not see the university as itself democratic. We find ourselves constantly struggling with questions about our own candor, self-definition, and community.

Discussing these issues is essential to our mission. But so is action. Not only do we attempt to bring together the Brown and broader Rhode Island communities in discussion, we also as a teaching seminar work on action-research projects. These currently include:

1. "Brown and the Providence Public Schools": We research and analyze the ways in which the University is involved with and in the city's public schools.
2. "Mapping History in the Landscape": We research and analyze the ways in which Brown's history is written on the University and Providence landscapes and, conversely how the city's history is mapped onto Brown.
3. "The Changing Institution, The Changing Society": We uncover the context and perspectives of individuals and organizations that have changed Brown over its history and have contributed to broader social movements. In effect, we will begin to write an alternative history of the University.