Hello. Please forgive me if this has been covered. I tried a few searches and cannot find this specific answer. We know that colleges are closed and will almost surely remain closed this summer but does anyone heard if people will be permitted to walk around the campuses and not enter the buildings?
I would start with
https://healthy.brown.edu/visiting-campus
for general information regarding physical presence on campus (or lack thereof) for visitors, and note the “hosted virtual campus tour” option within that page.
Beyond that, simply driving around the streets (vs walking), looking at The Green etc as you go, would give a reasonable feel for what’s there, especially in concert with the above virtual tour to fill in the gaps. Unlike say Yale, there aren’t substantial areas of campus which can’t be reasonably ascertained from the street. Lincoln Field (now Simmons Quad) is a bit of a keyhole view from Thayer Street, but pausing in the car at Soldier’s Arch will get that job done fairly well.
Note that ~half of the names of Brown’s WWI dead on Soldier’s Arch are actually student soldiers who died on campus from the so-called Spanish Flu, rather than on the battlefields of Europe. Then as now, pandemics are serious business, and we will all have to make do as best we can to keep the death toll in check.
Good luck with your college hunting. An exciting time, pandemic or not.
I’m an incoming student at Brown this Fall and I found the virtual tours posted by a ton of colleges (Brown’s here: Experience Brown University in Virtual Reality.) to be super helpful to get a feel for what campus life is like, especially if you’re unable to visit in-person, like I was. Brown’s Admissions Office is also holding hosted virtual tours with current students so I would recommend that you sign-up for one at admission.brown.edu/visit.
Hope that helps!