page_title: Brown University
section_title: Presidents
hierarchical_section_title: Brown University / History / Presidents
caption_attribution_description: English: Dr. Ruth J. Simmons speaking at the National Press Club
context_page_description: Brown University is a private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, it is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution.
  At its foundation, Brown was the first college in the U.S. to accept students regardless of their religious affiliation. Its engineering program was established in 1847. It was one of the early doctoral-granting U.S. institutions in the late 19th century, adding masters and doctoral studies in 1887. In 1969, Brown adopted a New Curriculum sometimes referred to as the Brown Curriculum after a period of student lobbying. The New Curriculum eliminated mandatory "general education" distribution requirements, made students "the architects of their own syllabus" and allowed them to take any course for a grade of satisfactory or no-credit which is unrecorded on external transcripts.
context_section_description: Brown's current president Christina Hull Paxson took office in 2012. She had previously been dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and a past-chair of Princeton's economics department. In 2014 and 2015, Paxson presided over the year-long celebration of the 250th anniversary of Brown's founding. Her immediate predecessor as president was Ruth Simmons, the first African American president of an Ivy League institution.
caption: 18th Brown president Ruth J. Simmons, 2001–2012, was the first African-American to lead an Ivy League university
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