Category:Famous Brown Alumni
In the late 1960s a Brown undergraduate named Ira Magaziner co-wrote a report with a fellow student, Elliot Maxwell, proposing that the university abolish its distribution requirements. Brown adopted it, the result became known as the New Curriculum, and it is still the thing the institution is best known for. This category collects biographical entries on people who studied at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the roster it holds reflects an Ivy League university in a small state: Rhode Island and New England politics are heavily overrepresented, the research end of the category is concentrated in economics and molecular biology rather than spread across the sciences, and a distinct group of technology chief executives came through the same computer science and engineering departments a generation later.
Background
Brown was founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, the seventh college established in the American colonies, and was the first to admit students without regard to religious affiliation. It is one of the smaller Ivy League universities, and it sits in a state small enough that its graduates fill a visible share of Rhode Island's public offices, which is why this roster is denser in state politics than in any single national industry.
The New Curriculum is the institutional fact that shows up most often in the entries. Adopted in 1969 out of the Magaziner-Maxwell Report, it removed general distribution requirements and let undergraduates design their own concentrations. Several members of this category describe unusual academic paths as a result, and two of them, Ted Turner and Dylan Field, left before finishing at all.
Rhode Island, New England and national politics
The state connection is the strongest single pattern. David Cicilline was born in Providence, took his BA at Brown, and represented Rhode Island's first congressional district. Seth Magaziner graduated in 2006, served as the state's general treasurer, and now represents its second district; his father Ira Magaziner is in this same category, and went from the curriculum fight to a Rhodes Scholarship at Balliol College and then to senior policy work in the Clinton White House. Freddie O'Connell carried the same Providence connection to the mayoralty of Nashville.
Beyond Rhode Island, Maggie Hassan took her BA at Brown before a law degree and then the governorship of New Hampshire and a Senate seat. Jack Markell became Governor of Delaware and Matt Meyer holds the office now. Bobby Jindal studied biology and public policy, graduated with honors, won a Rhodes Scholarship and became Governor of Louisiana. Dean Phillips represented a Minnesota district, Deborah Ross represents one in North Carolina, William Tong is Attorney General of Connecticut, and Tahesha Way is Lieutenant Governor of New Jersey.
The nineteenth century supplies the category's most senior offices. John Hay took his A.B. in 1858, served as private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, and later as Secretary of State. William Learned Marcy and Richard Olney both held cabinet offices in the antebellum and Gilded Age periods. Charles Evans Hughes transferred to Brown from Madison University and graduated in 1881, then served as Governor of New York, resigned from the Supreme Court in 1916 to run for president, returned as Secretary of State, and came back to the Court as Chief Justice from 1930 to 1941. Richard Holbrooke took his bachelor's degree at Brown and negotiated the Dayton Peace Accords.
Three laureates in economics and biology
Brown's research profile in this category is narrow and deep rather than broad. Douglas Diamond took his BA at Brown before doctoral work at Yale and shared the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Ben Bernanke and Philip Dybvig for work on banks, liquidity and bank runs. Guido Imbens came from Erasmus University Rotterdam and the University of Hull to Brown's doctoral program, finished in 1991, and shared the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Joshua Angrist for methods of drawing causal conclusions from observational data. Craig Mello earned a bachelor's degree in biochemistry at Brown and shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Z. Fire for the discovery of RNA interference. Janet Yellen graduated in 1967 and went on to chair the Federal Reserve and to serve as Secretary of the Treasury.
Technology, finance and the press
The technology group is recent and unusually senior. Dara Khosrowshahi took a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Brown and runs Uber. Sridhar Ramaswamy came from IIT Madras for a master's and a doctorate in computer science and runs Snowflake. Aneel Bhusri went from Brown to Stanford and co-founded Workday. Dylan Field met his co-founder Evan Wallace, a teaching assistant, while both were computer science students at Brown, then left at twenty on a Thiel Fellowship to build Figma.
Finance follows the same route. Barry Sternlicht took a bachelor's degree at Brown and founded Starwood Capital. Orlando Bravo came from Puerto Rico as an undergraduate, co-founded Thoma Bravo, and later gave the university twenty-five million dollars to study economic disparities. Brian Moynihan took his AB at Brown, runs Bank of America, and serves as the university's chancellor. Ted Turner studied economics and sailed competitively before being expelled, and went on to found CNN.
Journalism and film close out the roster. Kevin Roose wrote his first book out of an undergraduate semester spent as a transfer student elsewhere and now writes about technology for a national newspaper. Rebecca Ballhaus graduated in 2013 and has won two Pulitzer Prizes at The Wall Street Journal, one of them for investigative reporting on stock trading by federal officials. John Hamburg went from Brown to film school and into studio comedy.
See also
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