In the last five years, no fewer than 30 institutions, including Brown University, have added a chief diversity officer (CDO) to the roster of executive administrative positions. Damon A. Williams and Katrina C. Wade-Golden are co-principal investigators for the “Senior Diversity Officer Study in Higher Education.” They report on some of their findings in this piece.

Connie Sadler, director of IT security at Brown, discusses some of the steps her office took to protect the University’s computers when security researchers discovered major security flaw in Windows Metafile. A third-party patch was made available, but, as Sadler notes, such patches pose a dilemma for her office. "If we ask our users to install that, it tells them it's OK to find and install a third-party patch, and it gave phishers an opportunity to exploit users," she says. Sadler also discusses how her office helps the Brown community “avoid alert overload.”

Much about higher education and the role of a university president has changed since the 1970s. Author Dennis Barden of executive search firm Witt/Kieffer compares the presidency of Frank P. Piskor at St. Lawrence University (who had served as provost at Syracuse University) with the upcoming presidency of Brown Provost Robert Zimmer, who will become president of University of Chicago this summer. “Search committees and boards have to begin to think not just about hiring a leader who is capable of addressing the problems of this day and the next few but about selecting someone to fit into a continuum of leadership,” Barden writes.

The strongest glue on Earth may be made by bacteria, according to findings by Brown University and Indiana University scientists.

1998 Brown graduates Ayana Evans and Felicia Lyde, along with 1982 graduate Roland Laird have founded the Ethel Tremaine Robinson Foundation Inc. According to Laird, this non-profit corporation was designed specifically to promote African-American philanthropy among graduates of Brown University.