Today, on the first day of classes for the 2020 fall semester, we want to wish all the Brown students an amazing year!
What are your expectations for this fall? Do you plan to return to campus or take online classes? How are you coping with the current situation? Let us know in the comments below!
Most students are remote for the Fall, at least until early October.
President Paxon today (Sept 10) announced the the latest version of the plan for Fall, as related in this Brown Daily Herald story:
@Brown79 I found it somewhat annoying though that Brown emailed my parents with the update essentially saying: “this doesn’t affect your kid or change the fact that they won’t start full-time college till January, but just FYI everyone else at Brown has the option to start in the Fall on-campus.” Not at all miffed :lol:
the update essentially saying: “this doesn’t affect your kid or change the fact that they won’t start full-time college till January, but just FYI everyone else at Brown has the option to start in the Fall on-campus.” < I can imagine how frustrating it must be. Perhaps some of the perspective which follows will help a bit:
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What Brown is doing is pulling out all the stops to give 2024 the best shot possible at a full in-person first year. It’s tremendously more expensive this way (I should probably just mail them my checkbook…) and goes way beyond what most schools are willing or even able to do.
As is being seen at other colleges, simply putting everyone back on campus is inviting disaster. By starting with the relatively more mature upper classes, lessons can hopefully be learned and communal behavior standards solidified before a thousand or so former HS students are suddenly in the mix – most on their own for the first time and long on enthusiasm, but short on experience with how seemingly innocuous choices can have life-changing consequences.
@Brown79 Right, and I’m not trying to say that what Brown isn’t doing (or hoping of doing) isn’t much, much better than other similar schools that are either fully online or on-campus but w/mainly online class–I just wanted to express the communal frustration that many First-Years have when we see fellow students start college “like normal,” although those annoyances will probably disappear once we’re on-campus in January. 
Thanks for explaining the reasoning behind Brown’s decision, it helped address some of my questions about why Brown chose the plan it did!