Division of Campus Life

Eric Estes joined Brown University as vice president for Campus Life in July 2016. He oversees a large division of 20 departments, offices, and centers that works with and supports all students, as well as faculty and staff. The division centers its work on building inclusive community, cultivating developmental advising and mentoring, fostering health and wellbeing, embedding equity and inclusion, and advancing operational excellence. He also has a faculty appointment in American Studies.

Prior to Brown, Estes worked at Oberlin College and Conservatory for 12 years, serving his last five years as vice president and dean of students. He also served as an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and in Student Life and was the longest-serving director of the Multicultural Resource Center (MRC) in its almost 30-year history. Prior to Oberlin, Estes held faculty and administrative positions at Duke and Syracuse Universities. While on the faculty at Duke, he chaired a presidential task force on LGBT matters, served on a presidential commission on the status of women, and was a faculty affiliate of the Center for LGBT Life. At Syracuse, he worked for three years in the Graduate School on professional development programs focused on excellence in undergraduate teaching.

 At Syracuse, Duke, and Oberlin, Estes co/taught courses on modern Germany and the Holocaust, gender and mass violence, gender and sexuality, and athletics and U.S. culture and connections between Oberlin’s early missionary history in China and Asian American student activism at the college. He also sponsored practicums for graduate students in the higher education program at Bowling Green State University. He has given numerous invited lectures and talks nationally and internationally and co/organized more than a dozen national academic and student life conferences and symposia. He was a Fulbright doctoral fellow to Germany, and received grants from the Friedrich Ebert and Mellon Foundations, GHI, and the DAAD. 

Estes is currently a member of the Trinity College Board of Trustees and past president of the college’s national alumni association. He is a past chair of the steering board for the Consortium on High Achievement and Success (CHAS), the oldest and largest national organization dedicated to the academic success of students of color at institutions dedicated to liberal arts education. Additionally, Estes is an engaged member in the local communities he has called home over the years. He is currently serving on the capital campaign committee for the Boys and Girls Club of Rhode Island and is a member of the Conservator Society at the Providence Public Library.

Ph.D. History, Syracuse University
M.A. History, Syracuse University
B.A. History, Trinity College

To be as accessible as possible to students given individual schedules, I am available by appointment throughout the year. Please don’t hesitate to contact Laurie Grasso, executive assistant, at 401-863-1800 or laurinda_grasso@brown.edu. My door is always open.