A Hope in the Unseen

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Wed, 27 Feb 2008 06:58:14 +0000

I read the book quite awhile ago and am not a student, but rather an adult in the community with many close ties to Brown. Several of the faculty members and administrators mentioned in the book are people I know (some as acquaintances, some as people with whom I’m very close), and they are portrayed in ways that make them nearly unrecognizable to me. I’m sure there are some Brown students who’d describe Brown in the way you fear, but I’ve never met any. As a psychologist in private practice who has seen quite a few Brown students over the years and served as an advisor to a student group concerned with mental health issues, I can tell you that even Brown students who are under some type of extraordinary stress speak overwhelmingly of how much they LOVE Brown. People sometimes feel stressed out for all the reasons they would wherever they attended school - exams, papers due, too much extracurricular activity crammed into the schedule, personal issues, etc. - but I’m hard-pressed to remember even a single instance of anyone describing the atmosphere at Brown as “competitive”.