I am writing today with an important update on the Choices Program, an initiative housed in the history department at Brown with a mission to increase access to high-quality curricular content and strengthen education about history and current events in secondary schools in the U.S. and beyond.

While Choices has enjoyed a long history of providing content to teachers and school districts across the country, a detailed assessment of the program’s finances and organization has made clear that it is no longer economically viable in its current structure at Brown. Expenses for the program have significantly exceeded revenue for multiple recent fiscal years, an imbalance that is expected to worsen and cannot be responsibly and sustainably managed by existing University resources. For the past several months, we have been assessing the Choices Program in the context of the University’s financial sustainability efforts to address the structural deficit in its operating budget, as well as the increasing uncertainty about potential financial impacts of federal government actions and ongoing shifts in the national economic landscape.

We have made the difficult but necessary decision amid these financial headwinds that Brown will discontinue hosting the Choices Program, while its administrative leaders remain free to consider continuing the initiative as a separate entity independent of Brown’s resources and sponsorship. We are sharing this decision with the full community given the program’s history and engagement with faculty and other stakeholders across the University spanning decades.

Even as we face the need to end the University’s sponsorship of the program, we recognize and appreciate its decades-long positive impact. Choices originated more than 30 years ago in the academic programs that today comprise the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Its original mission was to help secondary school students understand contemporary policy choices, and the program evolved over time both to present scholarship on a wider range of policy choices and also to make that scholarship accessible to high school students. Topics explored in the program’s curricular materials range from the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement, to timely issues such as nuclear weapons expansions, U.S. policies on foreign aid, the origins of conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, and Russian-American relations.

As the program expanded its reach, it continued to create curricula relevant to policy decisions nationally and around the globe, but rooted in historical scholarship. In 2018, the program moved to Brown’s Department of History, as a self-funded unit, and its historical focus was reinforced. The decision around that time to shift to a digital model, in which educational materials could be purchased online, was critical for sustaining the program financially, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic and the rapid move to remote learning in 2020. More demand for digital curricula, and increased government funding to school systems during and after the pandemic, allowed the program to be financially successful during this period.

In recent years, however, the program has faced both financial and staffing challenges, and the outlook for future curriculum sales appears to be weaker than in prior years. In Summer 2024, Deputy Provost Janet Blume and Dean of the Faculty Leah VanWey began working with the history department and Choices Program staff to assess the financial and organizational status of the program and to review possible pathways forward. This assessment took on heightened urgency as Brown leaders began considering additional financial measures in recent months to address the University’s persisting budget deficit, and to plan for potential external impacts on major revenue streams. This includes potential threats to federal funding, uncertainty around economic volatility that could have an impact on Brown’s endowment, and a potential increase on the federal tax on college and university endowments.

These factors led to the decision for the University to discontinue hosting Choices. We made this decision after consultation with leaders from the history department and shared this difficult news with Choices staff on Thursday, while also conveying that the program’s leaders may choose to explore establishing the initiative as a separate, independent entity that would not be financed or hosted by Brown. Deputy Provost Blume and Dean VanWey will work with the history department and Choices staff with the expectation that Brown’s sponsorship of the program will end by June 30, 2025. Program staff will receive support services as part of Brown’s ongoing commitment to support its community members, and the University will notify all active customers and vendors to end current contracts and provide guidance on the implications of this transition for them.

For more than 30 years, the Choices Program has provided carefully researched scholarship to help educators teach about challenging issues. We are committed to supporting customers of the program during this transition.

Sincerely,

Francis J. Doyle III, Provost