The student was assaulted in the early morning of May 12 at the corner of George and Thayer streets, sustaining serious injuries when he was punched in the face and hit his head as he fell to the ground. Connecticut police arrested suspect Tory Lussier May 15, and Providence police charged Dillon Ingham ’14 with disorderly conduct later that week.

The Herald is not releasing the assaulted student’s name due to his family’s wishes to protect his privacy.

Correia said he thinks the student “is improving but still has some medical issues” butdeclined to go into further specifics.

A pretrial hearing on the felony charges facing Lussier and Ingham will be held July 22, The Herald previously reported.

“It’s our understanding from talking to witnesses that the initial altercation was started by Ingham,” Correia said.

Police believe Ingham, the assaulted student and several other Brown students were walking down Thayer toward George when they crossed paths with a group of individuals that included Lussier, Correia said.

Witnesses told police that Ingham made a provocative comment about the tattoo of a male member of Lussier’s group, prompting a verbal altercation that escalated into physical violence, Correia said. In the ensuing fight, Ingham dealt “substantial” injuries to two individuals standing with Lussier, one of whom, Joseph Lyan, fractured his cheekbone, Correia added.

The physical altercation seemed to have subsided when both parties began to disperse at the corner of Thayer and George, Correia said, but then Lussier allegedly approached the male victim and struck him. Police do not believe the victim was “an active participant” in the disturbance preceding his assault, Correia added.

Editor’s note: Due to an editing error, a previous version of this story named the assaulted student. The name has since been removed.

The news, first reported by the Columbus Dispatch, comes partially in response to a recent controversy after the Associated Press reported several potentially offensive comments Gee made at a meeting last December.

Among these comments, Gee said the University of Notre Dame was not offered a spot in the Big 10 athletic conference because “you just can’t trust those damn Catholics” and joked that students at schools in the Southeastern Conference could not write or read.

Gee issued an apology after the AP made his comments public last week, saying the remarks were “a poor attempt at humor and entirely inappropriate.”

Gee, 69, has been a widely popular president at Ohio State, which he led from 1990 to 1998 before returning in 2007. Gee was president of the University of Colorado and West Virginia University, as well as chancellor of Vanderbilt University. He was included in Time Magazine’s 2009 list of the 10 best college presidents.

Gee’s rocky tenure at Brown also came to a controversial end. After he unveiled an ambitious plan to bolster the sciences partially through bond sales, many members of the Brown community expressed worries that he did not focus enough on the arts and humanities and that he did not understand the University’s core mission.

His often unilateral leadership style was widely seen as a new direction for Brown, and Gee — the University’s only president since 1937 without a PhD — acknowledged at the end of his tenure that it was sometimes a difficult fit.

He attracted ire for his wife’s renovation of the president’s house, which was rumored to have cost $3 million.

Gee’s presidency remains the shortest in the University’s history.

Gee’s move to a higher-paid position at Vanderbilt left Brown in a nebulous financial and planning state and was met with significant indignation on College Hill, The Herald previously reported. According to campus lore, his only namesake at Brown is the E. Gordon Gee Lavatory Complex at Spring Weekend.

But Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences Sheila Blumstein, who succeeded Gee as the University’s interim president from 2000 to 2001, highlighted a number of initiatives at Brown that started under Gee, including the Brown Institute for Brain Science, increased funding for the Graduate School, a redesigned Watson Institute for International Studies and the building of the Sidney E. Frank Hall for Life Sciences.

Gee was also an active presence in undergraduate life, sometimes bagging books at the Brown Bookstore and visiting student dorms, Blumstein said.

“He was only at Brown for a couple years, but in that time he did a number of things,” she said.

“Ohio State now has a richness of new opportunities that would be the envy of most universities,” Gee said in a statement released by Ohio State. “And after much deliberation, I have decided it is now time for me to turn over the reins of leadership to allow the seeds that we have planted to grow. It is also time for me to reenergize and refocus myself.”

The University gave a total of 2,419 degrees, with 1,554 of those being bachelor’s degrees. The ceremony marked the first Commencement presided over by President Christina Paxson.

Ceremonies began Saturday at the First Baptist Church of America, where the Baccalaureate ceremony was held. The traditional Baccalaureate processional was canceled due to rain.

The service opened with a Chinese drum performance, in which students danced inside dragon costumes. Members of different faith communities recited prayers from a number of  religions, and two students spoke about the confluence of individual and community goals.

A cappella, opera and dance performances, hymns of many cultures and a reading of the poem “Keeping Quiet” by Pablo Neruda preceded the main speaker, Beverly Wade Hogan, president of Tougaloo College.

“Our privilege should not be a cringe-inducing guilt trip,” Hogan said, challenging graduates to “engage with the future.” “Don’t confine your activity to the private pursuits of health, wealth and happiness,” she added.

Sunday morning began with chilly temperatures but a cheerful atmosphere as alums led the way in the procession for the class of 2013. Crying, laughing and waving, undergraduates walked down to the First Baptist Church of America wearing leis, flags, bedazzled caps and robes. Graduating medical students and professors followed.

Student speakers Tanayott Thaweethai ’13 and Elizabeth Susan Mills ’13 echoed Hogan’s sentiments from the day before, speaking about the specific skills and opportunities Brown provided.

“Brown, you have given me — given us — the courage to explore such unfamiliar territory,” Thaweethai said in a speech titled “Doors.”

When he first perused the University’s course catalog four years ago, he said, he felt that choosing any door closed off all others. He said he soon learned he could continue to open doors, but the trick was finding the right door for himself.

“2013, you are extravagantly talented. But what keeps you going?” Thaweethai asked. “What keeps you up at night?”

Mills spoke about the control over one’s own education that Brown entrusts to each of its students.

Brown students “demand overrides” and live in a world where “failure is not an option — no credit is,” Mills said. She contrasted this with the outside world that does not always accept such a refusal to fail.

Mills encouraged her fellow graduates to “walk through the gates with an unshakable trust in ourselves.”

Actor and film director Ben Affleck received raucous cheers as he dedicated his honorary degree to his mother. Other honorary degrees were awarded to Hogan, author Junot Diaz, bacteriologist Stanley Falkow, health care activist Risa Lavizzo-Mourey and president of Miami Dade College Eduardo Padron.

Blue skies peeked through the clouds and the sun began to shine as Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron presented degrees to undergraduate bachelors of art and science.

“Today we are graduating not as individual graduates,” Thaweethai said. “We are graduating as the class of 2013.”

The Corporation will vote on the plan at its next meeting in October.

Brown Divest Coal members Emily Kirkland ’13 and Ryan Greene ’16 attended the meeting and participated in a question and answer session with the full body of the Corporation.

The Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies released a public letter in January to President Christina Paxson urging the University to “publicly divest” from what environmentalists call “the filthy 15,” some of the largest coal companies in the country. Students from Brown Divest Coal met earlier this month with members of an ad hoc committee created to discuss divestment.

The Corporation will not address the issue of divestment again until October.

“Climate change is an incredibly urgent issue,” said Brown Divest Coal member Grant Glovin ’16. “It’s unfortunate that we did not divest at this meeting.”

Glovin said the group will continue to organize and plan during the summer. The group hopes the “dialogue will continue, but it’s time to move past the dialogue and into action,” he said.

The Corporation also reviewed preliminary directions for the University’s strategic plan, a document that will likely inform Paxson’s broader presidential agenda.

Administrators will use the feedback from the meeting and the results of a financial analysis launched this summer to develop a completed draft of the report. That draft should be released for campus input in September, said Provost Mark Schlissel P’15.

In its current stage, the plan represents a “very high-level set of goals” for the University rather than specific initiatives, he said.

The plan will emphasize service to “the local and state communities, the nation and the world” and focus on innovation, creativity and “Brown’s academic core,” Paxson wrote in a community-wide email.

“It’s easy to come up with lots of great ideas,” Schlissel said. “The challenging thing is picking through the great ideas and finding out what we can afford. There’s no way we can afford to do all the good ideas that have come out of the planning process.”

When Alex Keegan ’12 graduated from Brown last May, she found herself working three different jobs while trying to break into the directing world in New York City.

“I work all seven days of the week,” she said, noting that she usually spends most of the day at one of her two internships — one with Women’s Project and Production, an off-Broadway theater company, and one at New Dramatist, a play development center.

When work at the office wraps up, she heads over to the theater to rehearse a play she is directing or tutors a student in preparation for the SATs. In addition to her two internships, Keegan works for Stanley Kaplan SAT Test Prep — her most lucrative job.

“I get home usually around 9:30 or 10 and eat dinner and go to sleep and do the same thing the next day,” she said. “It’s busy.”

Close by, Sadie Kurzban ’12 is also trying to make it in New York. But for her, “making it” means growing the nightclub-inspired exercise class she started while at Brown with Brielle Friedman ’12. Called “305 Fitness” after her Miami area code, the class is set to pop and hip-hop music and incorporates dance and sports drills.

Kurzban’s days are packed with answering emails, planning events, training instructors and teaching classes. But she said she feels “really lucky to be doing something that I love and just going for it.”

Keegan and Kurzban’s immediate experiences in “the real world” reflect a larger fact: There is no typical post-graduate path for alums when they first leave Brown. The majority of the class of 2012 — 65 percent — indicated they planned to enter the workforce straight out of college, according to a survey administered by CareerLAB. About one quarter indicated they were continuing on to graduate school, and 11 percent reported “other endeavors,” including studying abroad through fellowships, volunteering or taking additional courses.

Ron Foreman, a CareerLAB adviser, said some students who meet with him say they have no idea what they want to do after graduation. But it’s rare that students actually have no direction, he said. “Their definition of having no idea is having four or five interests.”

Recent graduates from the classes of 2011 and 2012 are pursuing their interests in cities across the world. Their jobs range from working with Fortune 500 CEOs in Austin to launching a family-focused nonprofit here in Providence.

Still, some common factors tie students together. Many young alums said they were still in close contact with their core group of college friends, and many cited a specific Brown course or extracurricular group that gave them the skills and motivation to pursue their chosen path after graduation.

The unemployment line

Michael Weissman ’12 and Adam Maynard ’11 headed for two cities further away: Austin and Washington, D.C. Despite living 1,000 miles apart from each other and working for companies in completely different sectors, the alums share something in common: neither found employment by the time of graduation.

According to data from CareerLAB, 36 members of the class of 2012 indicated they were “seeking employment” at the time of graduation, representing roughly 3 percent of the student responders.

A physics concentrator, Weissman said he initially planned to teach math or science abroad after graduation. Had he done so, he would have joined 129 students in last year’s graduating class who indicated they were entering the education sector, the most popular field of employment for students in the class of 2012.

Though he received an offer from a company in Shanghai, he said it was not a good fit, so he turned it down.

“I was without a job and unsure of what I was going to do,” he said. So he moved back home and began applying for “anything you can imagine a physics degree might be good for,” focusing his search within what he called the “typical Brown cities”: San Francisco, New York and Boston.

He expanded his search to Austin at the suggestion of a friend and received an offer from Gerson Lehrman Group, a firm that connects clients with expert consultants, in October.

Though Weissman said he knew little about the company when he applied, he said he now feels lucky about the outcome. His job enables him to speak with people managing vast sums of money, as well as some of the world’s leading health experts.

He works between 50 and 60 hours a week and said most of his social life involves people he met through work. But he is also still in touch with friends from Brown — they’re all planning to meet at Commencement this year, he said.

Maynard lived at home in Connecticut for an entire year before landing his dream job in Washington at the U.S. Green Building Council. He said his job enables him to apply what he learned from his urban studies and environmental studies double concentration.

Though many students feel unsure about what career field to pursue, Maynard said he knew exactly what issues he was passionate about and that he worked hard applying to jobs throughout senior year. It was tough to have to move back home, he said, though he said he is grateful he could spend time with his younger brother and learn from two different environmental jobs he held while in Connecticut.

City dwellers

Weissman’s decision to expand his job search to Austin marks a path less traveled — many young alums focus their job search on the coasts.

Kurt Teichert, a lecturer in environmental studies who advises undergraduates, said he often advises students to consider staying in Providence or moving to cities that aren’t “San Francisco, New York, Paris or Berlin.”

“Any city has great communities,” he said.

Stephen Foley, director of undergraduate studies for the English department, echoed Teichert’s message. Though New York and Los Angeles are the country’s two media centers, the Internet has opened up opportunities for students looking to be writers in any location.

Rebecca McGoldrick ’12 said remaining in Providence after graduation allowed her to reap benefits from the Brown community.

She currently serves as executive director for a nonprofit organization that she and other Brown students co-founded. The organization, Families First, “supports progressive issues related to families and young people in Rhode Island,” she said.

“I don’t think I could do the type of work that I’m doing if I weren’t in Rhode Island,” she said. The state’s size enables her to quickly reach “key players” she needs to work with, she said.

“I feel like I’m making a difference now,” McGoldrick said. “I loved being at Brown … but toward the end of my academic career, I started getting this feeling, ‘I have all this knowledge. Let me go do something with it.’”

Grad school plans

McGoldrick plans to head back to school eventually, as do Maynard and Weissman.

McGoldrick and Maynard both hope to pursue master’s degrees in urban planning, and Weissman is contemplating business school.

Keegan plans to pursue an MFA in directing. Though she hopes to enroll in a program soon, most schools only take two students each year.

Rebecca Schneider, chair of the theater arts and performance studies department, said many students pursuing the performing arts do not need to attend graduate programs straight out of Brown.

“You don’t go out fully prepared for a profession. You know yourself, you’re broadly educated and you’re ready to go begin to prepare for a profession,” she said.

Both she and Teichert said taking time off to work or travel before pursuing a graduate degree can be advantageous.

“I do tend to advocate for students to travel or do more of a short-term assignment,” Teichert said.

Foley said he often advises students considering pursuing a Ph.D. in English to take some time off first, both to cultivate experiences that will make them better applicants and to build better survival skills for graduate school.

“There are practical reasons, too,” he said. “You better buy a car before living on a graduate student stipend.”

Brown’s lasting impact

All five graduates said they regularly draw on specific courses or experiences they had at Brown.

Kurzban said one of the most influential courses she took at Brown was one on entrepreneurship and social ventures taught by Danny Warshay ’87.

When she first arrived at Brown, Kurzban began teaching Zumba classes at the OMAC, she said. As she listened to feedback from students, her class slowly evolved away from the Latin music-inspired Zumba into 305 Fitness.

During her senior year, Kurzban said she decided she wanted to try to make a living leading the class, so she moved the class to a space she rented in Hillel after the fall semester.

Kurzban credits Warshay’s class both in helping her refine her “nightclub” workout idea and in helping her formulate a business plan that she is now putting into action in Manhattan. She has used the money she made from teaching her class at Brown to fund the new iteration of her business.

Though Weissman said he did not learn anything specific about finance at Brown, he uses some of the skills he learned through other classes.

“What my job is is to take a very complex topic and boil it down as quickly as possible to get down to the nuts and bolts,” he said. The skills he learned from doing rapid research in physics and “writing a late-night paper at the last minute … have definitely paid off.”

Staying connected

Maynard said he has managed to stay well-connected to the Brown community, especially through Washington’s active alumni community.

But some aspects of the transition from the “insular and nurturing environment” of college have been tough.

“Being released and scattered to the wind … can be daunting,” he said.

Though Keegan said she is far from unhappy, her post-graduation experience has been “different.”

“I’m trying to learn how to construct a different but equivalently meaningful happiness in this new structure and this new framework,” she said.

She has kept in close contact with her friends from Brown, but she added that they are all trying to figure out how to maintain meaningful relationships while not living within a five-minute radius. “There’s no longer the spontaneity of late-night conversations,” she said. “How do you recreate those instances and forge those relationships to maintain that level of happiness?”

“You end up staying in touch with the people you expect to,” Maynard said. For him, the worst part of leaving Brown is not always being surrounded by his best friends. Without that convenience, he said “developing those really close and connected relationships is hard.”

Schneider said she hopes students never lose their college-age curiosity about the world. “Students have a culture that’s really vibrant,” she said.

The path to a career in writing, media and film can be daunting for recent graduates who are used to having every step planned out for them. But these fields offer many possible routes to success, and each journey requires spontaneity and innovation. Life after Brown often begins with waiting tables — a job to pay the bills while true passions are pursued on the side or at night, in lieu of sleep. Five alums, many of whom are returning for their class reunions this year, said their Brown education fostered the passions, skills and close friendships that have accompanied them in their pursuits of their dreams.

Though they have established themselves as standouts in their chosen fields, these writers and producers still cherish the relationships they developed as undergraduates, and many of them regularly convene and collaborate with old classmates.

Just beyond the gates

After graduating from Brown, independent film producer Christine Vachon ’83 worked as a proofreader at a cable television company. At night, she proofread to pay her bills, and during the day she pursued her dream of a career in television by working as a production assistant. After years of working her way into filmmaking, Vachon broke into the business in 1991 when she produced “Poison,” written and directed by Todd Haynes ’85, and was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at that year’s Sundance Film Festival for her work. Since then, she has produced several acclaimed films, including “Boys Don’t Cry,” winner of an Academy Award in 2000. Another, “Far From Heaven,” was nominated for four Academy Awards in 2003.

Many seniors leaving Brown can feel like they cannot support themselves unless they land their “dream job” right after graduation, Vachon said. But this fear is misplaced, she said, adding that there are many opportunities in television and film for entrepreneurial students. “If you want to tell stories, the most important thing is to start doing it.”

Jeffrey Eugenides ’83 had to work a series of “lousy jobs” right after college to support himself, he said. His first job was as an editor for a “failing magazine” in Northern California. He continued to work various secretarial jobs before publishing his first novel in 1993.

Still, Eugenides cautioned that even for talented novelists, the writing profession is filled with uncertainty and ceaseless doubts about the future.

“It’s not a career that you can rely on a series of defined steps,” Eugenides said. “There’s no point to know when you’ve arrived.”

But Eugenides himself has found success in the field, receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003 for his novel “Middlesex.” Two years ago, he published “The Marriage Plot,” a novel about three friends who graduate from Brown and start out on the confusing world of post-college life. Eugenides is now working on a book of short stories.

Writer Lois Lowry ’58 said she worked as a freelance contributor to various magazines and newspapers early in her career. Though she has since won wide acclaim for her novels, she said writers cannot start with “phenomenal success” as a primary motivation, since such achievement is rare.

Lowry, who dropped out of Brown after her sophomore year, said she focused on raising her children before she fully pursued her writing passion. She published her first novel, “A Summer to Die,” in 1977 at the age of 40, and later achieved her most well-known success with her 1993 novel, “The Giver,” which received a Newbery Medal.

For other alums in the media and entertainment business, finding a first job after college flowed naturally from extracurricular pursuits. Director and producer Doug Liman ’88 began his life after Brown heading a nonprofit association of college radio and TV stations. After briefly living in France, he decided to jump into the filmmaking business and moved to Los Angeles, where he connected with several friends from Brown. Liman has since directed and produced the 2002 action film “The Bourne Identity” and served as executive producer for the other two films — “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum” — in the “Bourne” trilogy. He also directed the action film “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” and most recently directed “Fair Game,” a 2010 biographical film about former C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame.

Television producer Lauren Corrao ’83 P’16, who now works as a consultant for Comcast Entertainment Studios, began as an intern at a Providence television station during her senior year at Brown. Three days after graduating, she started working as a production assistant for MTV, where she would remain for 10 years. Since then, Corrao has worked as an executive at FOX, Comedy Central and A Very Good Production, Ellen DeGeneres’ production company.

“I think Brown graduates are positioned quite well these days,” Corrao said, citing the Internet’s impact on media production, which allows tech-savvy producers to cut costs and work outside traditional corporate structures.

Built by Brown

Regardless of the paths these alums took to get to where they are today, they all noted the importance of their experiences at Brown, particularly in helping them cultivate a sense of independence and drive.

“The Brown curriculum and the unstructured nature of it taught me the skills I needed to survive in the film business,” Liman said. “No two directors follow the same route, and no two Brown students have the same education.”

Noting that the entertainment industry is in “a state of flux” in the digital era, Liman indicated Brown graduates are well-positioned to thrive in the newly entrepreneurial environment. Since “a core aspect of the Brown education is independence and leadership,” self-motivated alums have an edge in today’s filmmaking business, he said.

Eugenides said the “self-discipline” demanded by the writing profession is a quality that goes hand in hand with the independent streaks of many Brown students. As a former actor in Production Workshop shows at Brown, Eugenides used his theater experiences to try to place himself inside a character’s skin, a skill that came in handy as a writer, he said.

“I think there’s a connection between playing a role in a play and trying to inhabit a literary character,” Eugenides said, adding that though theater was his main extracurricular focus as an undergraduate, he also wrote for a campus literary magazine.

Corrao explored political science, philosophy and even a “detour” into computer science before being drawn by the film studies classes in the semiotics department, she said. “I felt like I found my passion,” Corrao said, adding that she had never seriously considered filmmaking as a career until taking film studies courses at Brown.

She decided to leave her executive job at FOX in 1997 to get away from the corporate environment, and she went on to produce her own show on ABC. Her desire to always challenge the status quo was fueled by “the freedom to explore” that was central to her Brown experience, Corrao said.

Lowry said that though she dropped out of Brown after her sophomore year, the English courses she took had a profound impact. One of Lowry’s instructors, the late Professor of English Charles Philbrick, gave Lowry newfound confidence in her writing talents. “He was really the first person who told me I had the makings of a professional writer,” Lowry said. “That was really very affirming for me.”

Other alums pursued academic interests farther afield from their chosen profession. Liman, who concentrated in history, said though he knew he would go into filmmaking after graduation, he sought to use his undergraduate years to get a broad education. “I just wanted to take classes that taught me about the world,” he said.

Lasting ties

Though they have now spent decades outside the Van Wickle Gates, these alums said they have maintained ties with their alma mater and often create their own reunions.

When Eugenides was just starting out as a writer after graduating, he spoke with other alums who had also become novelists. “We all gave each other feedback and support,” he said.

He added that he still keeps in touch with many friends from Brown and just recently wrote a favorable blurb for “The Interestings,” the latest novel by his former classmate and fellow writer Meg Wolitzer ’81.

Corrao, who will be hosting a “Brown Women in Comedy” Commencement forum May 25, said she has come to every fifth-year reunion since graduating.

“I’ve stayed in touch with Brown since the moment I graduated,” she said, citing her involvement with a group of alums in the entertainment industry who gather at least once a year to “mostly reminisce” about their undergraduate years.

“My closest friends are still the people I was at Brown with,” Vachon said.

Liman said he plans on attending this year’s reunion and added that he maintains a whole network of friends from Brown whom he often sees. In fact, he said, his current office in New York City is located just next door to his first-year roommate’s office.

Before taking an administrative position at Princeton in 2009, Christina Paxson spent two decades as an economist examining tradeoffs, human capital and other concepts that could be applied to her latest role as Brown’s 19th president. But when she arrived on College Hill, Paxson tried on a new discipline: anthropology.

“It’s been very, very interesting and really almost exhilarating because I’ve been taking in so much information,” Paxson said. “One of the most important things I needed to do was to learn about Brown’s culture.”

In interviews with The Herald, administrators, faculty members and students widely hailed Paxson’s willingness to listen as one of her greatest strengths.

The University faces the ongoing challenges of emerging from a crippling recession, navigating unknown territory in online education and forging ahead with plans for new modes of expansion. Paxson’s administration is in the initial stages of forming a broad strategic plan that outlines the University’s future direction. Some of Paxson’s more immediate policy decisions have already taken effect, including taking steps forward with the School of Engineering, the School of Public Health and the Watson Institute for International Studies.

Paxson’s leadership style, particularly through the University’s strategic planning process, has emphasized a collaborative approach involving a broad circle of people, administrators and faculty members said.

“People are pretty amazed to have a president who is so disarmingly available and open,” said Department of History Chair Kenneth Sacks, who was not the only person to use the word “disarming” to describe Paxson.

Paxson also faces the challenge of following former President Ruth Simmons, known nationally and adored by Brown students.

“President Simmons was almost a once-in-a-generation gifted communicator, and I think both the president and I struggle with having to communicate in the shadow of President Simmons,” said Provost Mark Schlissel P’15.

Yet Paxson and Simmons share certain characteristics, said Stephen Nelson, higher education expert and senior scholar in the Leadership Alliance at Brown. For one, he said, “neither of these folks suffered fools gladly.”

Strategic planning process

Including a diverse set of voices in the strategic planning process has been an important component of the administration’s approach over the past year.

The process began in earnest Oct. 1 with the formation of six strategic planning committees, which met throughout the year to imagine new priorities and paths forward for Brown. The committees examined faculty hiring and retention, doctoral education, financial aid and the curriculum. Though no committee exclusively focused on diversity or internationalization, administrators highlighted both as goals that would span the entire planning process.

The preliminary recommendations the committees released in January were wide-ranging, including a new concert hall, expansion in the Jewelry District and a three-year bachelor’s degree option. Not all suggestions will make it into the committees’ final reports, let alone the University’s new plan. But taken together, the committees propose a vision for the future of Brown: an increasingly flexible curriculum with more pathways to the community and the world, continued expansion on and off College Hill, and more resources to support faculty members and graduate students.

Some recommendations have already been highlighted as top priorities. The administration affirmed a commitment to assessing the feasibility of going need-blind for all applicants in the future, a policy currently extended only to domestic first-years. The School of Engineering is also headed toward decamping from a cramped Barus and Holley and moving to new quarters.

There is still much dialogue to come. On issues like online course development, Brown is experimenting with various models, but “quite frankly, we really haven’t had a full discussion of all the implications of online education, what it means for a university like Brown,” said Dean of the Faculty Kevin McLaughlin P’12.

The final plan will likely emphasize broad principles and goals over specific targets, which will allow for flexibility to adapt in the years to come, Paxson said.

But the planning committees’ ambitions may come up against some hard financial truths. The University’s $2.5 billion endowment, the smallest in the Ivy League, posted a weak 1 percent annual return in fiscal year 2012. Federal research funding continues to shrivel as Washington remains stuck in gridlock. At Brown, that means some priorities may have to be cut. The University will complete a financial analysis this summer to assess the feasibility of different recommendations, Paxson said.

“That’s just the world that we live in now,” said Elmo Terry-Morgan ’74, associate professor of Africana Studies. “We are doing more with less.”

The extent to which the University can draw in money through its upcoming capital campaign may be critical to determining how many of the priorities can be addressed.

Paxson has been an effective fundraiser for certain priorities already, Schlissel said. The University last month initiated a $160 million campaign for the School of Engineering.

But it remains to be seen how her ability to raise money will compare to Simmons’, especially as the University moves toward its 250th anniversary next year, a key fundraising opportunity. Simmons’ five-year Campaign for Academic Enrichment brought in $1.6 billion, the largest fundraising drive in University history.

Inititiatives in action

Paxson has already made major decisions that have had an immediate impact on the University.

Among the most noteworthy was the choice, made in consultation with other administrators and members of the Committee on Reimagining the Brown Campus and Community, to keep the future School of Engineering on College Hill.

At the beginning of the year, there was a significant chance of the School of Engineering relocating to the Jewelry District, said Russell Carey ’91 MA ‘06, executive vice president for planning and policy. Students and faculty members pushed back, and top University administrators “absolutely listened,” Carey said. But the decision not to move needed to be explained to disappointed prospective partners in Providence and Rhode Island, Paxson said.

Some choices required more immediate action. Paxson, who led the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, was instrumental in leading the search for a new director of the embattled Watson Institute, Schlissel said. Incoming director Richard Locke, currently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be its seventh leader in nine years.

Paxson also shepherded the upcoming School of Public Health through its final stages of seeking University approval. The school was already well on its way toward official approval under the stewardship of Terrie Wetle, associate dean of medicine for public health and public policy and the school’s future dean. But Paxson, whose research has often focused on the intersection of economics and health, “made that happen pretty fast,” Nelson said.

The school was approved by the Corporation in February and will officially be created in July, with leaders hoping for national accreditation by 2015, The Herald previously reported.

Faculty collaboration 

Much of Paxson’s perspective is informed by the fact that, unlike Simmons, she was an active researcher until this year, multiple sources said. As president, Paxson has also published one academic paper and given a talk at the World Bank.

“She still thinks like a researcher and an intellectual in a very particular way,” said Patricia Ybarra, professor of theatre arts and performance studies and co-chair of the strategic planning Committee on Educational Innovation.

When she first arrived at Brown, Paxson met with every department chair individually to learn about the University’s research and academic offerings. It was an unprecedented step, faculty members said, and one that still gets many professors talking. Sacks described Paxson as part of a “new wave of university presidents that want to demonstrate that they are, first and foremost, of the faculty.”

That perception was cemented this spring when Paxson announced that the faculty would sit on stage at Commencement, a privilege that has traditionally been reserved for administrators, members of the Corporation and other honorees, Terry-Morgan said.

Many professors and administrators said they were impressed by Paxson’s visibility at a variety of events on campus — including sports games and less prominent departmental offerings — as well as through the Providence and Rhode Island communities, where Ybarra said the president has worked hard to foster ties.

Much of this is attributable to Paxson’s leadership style: engaged and personable but decisive when the time comes, according to faculty members. McLaughlin described it as “no-nonsense informality together with very high standards.”

Throughout the planning process, Paxson has opted to include a diverse group of people in the decision-making process. Susan Harvey, professor of religious studies and co-chair of the strategic planning Committee on Financial Aid, said Paxson made everyone feel comfortable.

“She’s very welcoming of people she’s working with, and she establishes an immediate rapport of collaboration, which is very affirming,” Harvey said. “You really feel you’re in a partnership.”

Student opinion

If Paxson is generally popular among the faculty, she remains something of an unknown entity to much of the student body. Though her approval-disapproval split in a March Herald poll was roughly 45 percent to 7 percent, a plurality of students — about 48.9 percent — said they had no opinion. Simmons had developed a cult status on campus, meriting a 62.5 percent approval rating in Spring 2011.

Some students have been vocal about their dissatisfaction. Herald opinions columnist Daniel Moraff ’14 has criticized the administration for focusing on building renovations and expansion while financial aid priorities remain unmet. And leaders of the Brown Divest Coal Campaign and the Student Labor Alliance, two visible student activist groups on campus, have expressed frustration with Paxson’s unwillingness to move quickly on their priorities.

Emily Kirkland ’13, a leader of Divest Coal, said though Paxson has “definitely made herself very available to meet with us, … we would like to see her take bolder steps on the issue.” Campaign members, who had hoped that divestment from coal companies might reach a vote at the Corporation’s meeting this weekend, were disappointed by Paxson’s announcement that more dialogue was necessary, thereby making a vote at this meeting unlikely.

Simmons’ actions on other divestment issues reflected a desire to make Brown a leader, Kirkland added, saying she hoped Paxson would help Brown lead on coal divestment.

Though the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies recommended divestment this year, the campaign has some prominent skeptics in the administration. Schlissel told The Herald that while he is committed to the principles of the cause and working with students, he believes divestment could set a risky precedent by inspiring a cascade of similar divestment campaigns.

The ultimate recommendation will come from Paxson and an ad hoc Corporation subcommittee she has convened to carefully examine the issue, he said.

Guiding principles

Before she came to Brown, Paxson said she read about the University’s commitment to liberal learning, student autonomy and the open curriculum.

She was heartened to discover the extent to which these themes continue to guide life on campus.

“What I hadn’t realized is how fundamentally those ideas shape the entire University. It’s not just words on paper,” she said. “It was quite remarkable to see how different this place is, relative to other institutions that I’ve been involved with.”

Clarification Appended: An earlier version of this article stated that the Paxson administration has affirmed a commitment to going need-blind for all applicants. While Paxson has stated improving financial aid is a firm goal of the University and that the administration would seek to move toward expanding need-blind admission in the long term, a pledge of going need blind for all students has not been made.

Tim, Tom and Craig hurtled down the mountain, three pinwheels of red and blue on an infinite expanse of white, far from Providence. Ice axes desperately striking the mountain, they dragged themselves to a stop after 300 meters, stranded from their trail.

Professor of Geological Sciences Tim Mutch, Tom Binet ’78 and Craig Heimark ’76 had set out together, the first of their seven-man party to approach the summit of Mount Nun, a 7,135-meter peak. Bound by rope, they fell together, too.

The cliffs are slanted at a hostile 60 degrees, and the air seared at 30 degrees below zero. They knew they couldn’t return that night. So they chiseled a ledge in the side of the ice and rested, 22,000 feet above the ground.

The men talked. “Why the hell did we do that? What the hell were we climbing?” Heimark remembered asking himself.

They spoke of their kids and families. Of their love of exploration, of testing the limits of what they could do. Of how hard it was for people to understand why they were doing this.

What they were doing was returning to the Himalayas for the second time in two years, an expedition that would claim Mutch’s life. Why, though, was a question not as easily answered.

A singular attraction

Tall and lanky with wire-rimmed glasses and a shock of sandy hair, Mutch nurtured a boyish curiosity that belied his near 50 years, remembered Rebecca Moore ’77, a member of the first expedition.

In the 1970s, when the University’s New Curriculum was still new, Mutch offered a Modes of Thought course: “Exploration.” The Modes of Thought program sought to inspire first-years’ intellectual curiosity. The course tracked the “singular, compelling attraction” exploration held for men throughout history, according to Mutch’s course description. It culminated with the opportunity to test exploration itself.

The open expedition marked Mutch’s first time leading a Brown group of climbers and attracted a diverse array of students and faculty, most of whom had never taken Mutch’s course. “There was no thread of connection except they all decided to do this very Brunonian thing,” said Liz Wheeler ’79, a member of the first expedition and a Brown professor of psychiatry and human behavior. Students took the initiative to handle the logistics of the expedition.

A space pioneer who directed surface photography for the Viking 1 space probe on Mars, Mutch never abandoned old-fashioned exploration ­— mountaineering ­— his whole life.

“I never knew if he was in outer space or there with us at the moment,” said John Braman ’77, a member of the first expedition. “Or in both places at once.”

Expedition 1: Against the elements

The Nanda Devi and the two peaks of Devistan I and II stand at more than 25,000 feet and 21,000 feet, respectively. These giants lie within a near insurmountable halo of alpine crests, 12 of which exceed 21,000 feet.

Only one passage exists to the sanctuary of Nanda Devi that would serve as the expedition’s base camp: a narrow, treacherous river canyon called the Rishi Gorge.

Hundreds of local porters,boxes roped to their backs, had lashed together trees and logs into a bridge several feet above the river.

Spring had just come to the Himalayas when the Brown group set out on the first expedition in 1978. The glacial melt surged into a torrential river that rose each hour, Moore said. The noise was deafening. “It was a race against time,” she said.

A few members of the 33-person party had been delayed in Delhi. Among them were Moore and Paul Palatt, a biology research assistant.

Eager to rejoin the others, Palatt went on alone. But as he stepped to the center of the river, a wave flooded the bridge and swept him away.

Minutes later, Moore arrived at the gorge to see the bridge had washed out completely. She learned that Palatt had been carried away into the river from Czech climbers who saw him lose his footing. She sprinted down the river to find him. She found a 100-foot waterfall.

A runner caught up with the group in a meadow high above the gorge to deliver the news.

Palatt’s body was never recovered.

Mutch, whose father was a preacher, held a memorial service for Palatt. They remained in the meadow for days, grappling with the loss. But they unanimously decided to carry on.

Above 12,000 feet on Devistan, rocks and glaciers pockmarked with deep crevasses suffocate all vegetation. Everyone split into small teams to approach the peak.

Wheeler remembers taking four to six breaths before each step. “The altitude was really surprising,” she said. “How tired you would be. How deformed your body got — swollen and burnt.”

Twenty-four members of the expedition reached the peak, a success.

Wheeler and Moore climbed the summit of Devistan with two other women, the only all-female team on the expedition. They sat there for an hour, facing the panorama of the colossal mountain of Nanda Devi shooting up out of the foothills. “It blew you away,” Wheeler said.

They buried Palatt’s wool cap at the summit.

Wildflowers greeted the weary climbers upon their return to the sanctuary. “We had come from a world of ice and rock,” Moore said. “It was like we were coming back to life.”

Expedition 2: In thin air

A decade after one of his early climbs in the Himalayas, a young Mutch found out he did not actually reach the summit. He had stopped at an illusory peak. “It pushed him to want to go back,” Binet said.

So in 1980, Mutch led a second expedition of six other members — among them Binet, Heimark and Nat Siddall ’82  — of the Devistan trek, serious mountaineers who wanted to tackle a more ambitious mountain, said Siddall, a member of both expeditions. They chose Mount Nun, all 7,135 meters of it.

Heimark, Binet and Mutch were the first to make the summit push.

They reached the summit on a clear, frigid day. Binet cried with joy. “It was the best half-hour of my entire life, to see we were the highest in the horizon, the clouds below us,” he said.

But most mountaineering accidents happen on the way down, Heimark said.

Mutch faltered while descending, dragging Heimark and Binet down the mountain for hundreds of meters. When they stopped, Mutch was concussed, his glasses torn from his face during the plunge. So they chipped out the ledge and waited, marooned in a world of white.

Mutch had lost one of his crampons, metal-spiked devices necessary to climb ice. After a brief consultation, Heimark and Binet secured Mutch to the ledge and returned to camp for spares.

Binet climbed back up to the ledge alone. Only the steel of Mutch’s ice axe glinted from the ledge where he once sat. Binet called out in the stillness. He saw a trail in the powder and followed it to an overhang. No sign of Mutch.

Night came quickly. Binet decided to stay at the ledge. His only meal — a can of tuna fish — had frozen solid, so he ate M&Ms, occasionally shouting Mutch’s name in the quiet gloom. “Maybe he would wander back,” Binet remembered hoping.

In the morning, a haggard Binet realized he had to return. During his descent, his sleeping bag slipped out of its pouch and tumbled down the mountain.

“It was another thing sliding out of my life,” Binet said. “I thought, ‘I could just go to sleep here and not wake up. Why should I go on?’”

But after a few moments he knew. “I’m not ready to die,” Binet remembered thinking. “So I got back up and continued down to Craig.”

Binet’s feet had flushed an ashen gray overnight from frostbite. They needed to leave, and soon. But first they built a cairn for Mutch.

Siddall and another member abandoned camp to search when the summit party failed to return. They encountered two figures “like zombies, shambling along,” Siddall said. It was Heimark and Binet.

They all huddled together in one of the two tents they had set up days before. The men sat in silence, speaking only about Mutch and the logistics of returning to base camp. It snowed all night.

They descended in one day the summit they took four days to climb.

Mutch remembered

A year after his death, NASA renamed the Viking 1 lander the “Thomas A. Mutch Memorial Station.” A crater on Mars bears his name. A plaque remembering Mutch will accompany the lander when humans first set foot on Mars.

“I would just sit and think about how lucky I was to be alive,” Binet said after the second expedition.

While some members would mountaineer for years following, others never climbed again. But for many, the first expedition to Devistan was a lifelong dream realized, Peters said.

Since 1978, most of the climbers — professors, classmates and former best friends — have lost contact. But during this Commencement Week, 25 of the 33 members of first Brown expedition will reunite in Providence 35 years after it occurred.

For the anniversary, Moore, who leads the Google Earth Outreach program, designed a virtual model of the first expedition that matches photos from the trek to real locations.

But reconnecting the members of the expedition will be the primary concern, Peters said.

“How many people get to have an experience like that?” Wheeler said. “To have your life feel so meaningful, so young.”

“It’s with me forever and all the time,” said Binet, whose 10 toes were amputated from frostbite.

When Binet and his wife moved into their first apartment, the first thing they hung on their wall was the photo of Binet, Heimark and Mutch at the summit of Nun.

It’s still there, with a quote from T.S. Eliot. “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.”

[/media-credit] Mutch, in red, embarked with alums Binet and Heimark to climb Mount Nun, a Himalayan peak.

Six influential figures will receive honorary degrees from President Christina Paxson on behalf of the University during this year’s commencement exercises. The Board of Fellows of the Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, selected the recipients following recommendations from an advisory committee of students and faculty members.

Benjamin Affleck

Actor, director, producer, writer — Affleck has been deeply involved in every step of film production. He has been honored with an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for “Good Will Hunting” alongside his friend and fellow actor Matt Damon, and his 2012 film “Argo” won the Academy Award for Best Picture. He has starred in blockbusters like “Pearl Harbor” and “Armageddon” and directed “The Town,” a crime drama set in his hometown of Boston. Affleck has also pursued philanthropy out of the public eye. After traveling to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to witness the humanitarian crisis there firsthand, he founded the Eastern Congo Initiative in 2010, which aims to promote sustainability, economic growth and accessible health care in the region. The organization also advocates for fair elections in the Congo. Affleck’s other charitable work includes activism for the Jimmy Fund, a Boston-based organization that channels funding to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for adult and pediatric oncology research, and for Feeding America, a national charity that aims to connect food banks across the country.

Stanley Falkow PhD’61

Falkow, a bacteriologist, is recognized as a pioneer in the field of microbial pathogenesis. After completing his doctorate at Brown, he joined the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and rose to assistant chief of the Department of Bacterial Immunology. During this time, Falkow’s research examined the genetic foundations for antibiotic resistance in bacteria. He has also worked as a faculty member of the Georgetown University and University of Washington medical schools. “Bacteria are important in all facets of life, from making sauerkraut to what goes on in the soil,” he told USA Today in a 2009 article. “I became enchanted with bacteria and the discovery of organisms that cause disease.” He served as chair of the Department of Medical Microbiology at Stanford University’s medical school from 1981 to 1985 and retired from the department in 2010. In 2008, Falkow received the Lasker Medical Prize for his research, which has focused on the “microbial perspective” of disease. At age 72, Falkow received his pilot’s license and now spends his time flying planes and fly-fishing.

Junot Diaz

“I didn’t learn to read until I was seven,” writer Junot Diaz revealed in an interview with the New York Times last fall. Having immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic at age six, he grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Rutgers University in 1992. His novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008. He now sits on the Pulitzer Prize Board, which judges entries each year, and is the first Hispanic individual to hold the position. Diaz is also known for his shorter works — he has published two short story collections, “Drown” and “This is How You Lose Her,” and has contributed to the New Yorker and the Paris Review. In addition to writing, Diaz is fiction editor at the Boston Review and a creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Diaz also works as honorary chairman of the DREAM Project, an organization that aims to increase education opportunities for children in the Dominican Republic.

Beverly Wade Hogan

Hogan became the first female president of Tougaloo College, her alma mater, with her appointment in May 2002. A life-long resident of Mississippi, she was drawn to community activism from an early age. Following graduation, Hogan focused on mental health in her work as a therapist and then as the executive director of the Mississippi Mental Health Association. She also organized the first rape crisis and domestic abuse response centers in the state. Her academic papers have highlighted the need for pay equity and fair working conditions. Since Hogan was appointed president, enrollment has increased 12 percent and retention has increased 68 percent, according to the school’s website. This honorary degree coincides with the 50th anniversary of the partnership between Brown and Tougaloo. The partnership developed amid the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and has grown to offer semester study exchanges and early opportunities for graduate school enrollment.

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey

Lavizzo-Mourey, a daughter of two physicians, knew she wanted to be a doctor as a child. She studied as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and received her MD from Harvard Medical School before interning at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Perhaps best known for her role as president and chief executive officer of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Lavizzo-Mourey has focused her career on public health initiatives. She took the helm of the foundation, an organization that stresses the need for reducing costs and improving quality in the health care system, in 2003. The foundation’s work encompasses childhood obesity prevention, disease prevention and insurance coverage. Lavizzo-Mourey was trained in geriatrics and served as chief of geriatric medicine at Penn’s medical school, where she was recognized for her focus on patients — she made house calls and created teams of caregivers, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s website.

Eduardo Padron

Presiding over a student body of approximately 175,000, Miami Dade College President Eduardo Padron described the institution in a College Board interview as “a community of true believers passionate about the mission of a college with an open door.” Under Padron, more minority students have graduated from Miami Dade than any other college or university in the country. He has advised six presidential administrations, most recently as chair of the White House Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans under President Obama. Padron immigrated to the United States as a Cuban refugee at age 15 with little knowledge of English. He completed high school and attended what was then known as Dade County Junior College, now Miami Dade, completing his graduate studies at the University of Florida with a PhD in economics. Padron has dedicated his career to ensuring students receive high-quality education at an affordable price. “Our concern is making sure that people who have the least opportunity are given a chance to get an education,” he told Miami Today in 2012.

What a lark! What a plunge! these past four years have been. We’ve gone up to the roof of Metcalf to watch the sunrise and down to the SciLi basement to pull all-nighters. There are risks we wish we’d taken; nights we try to forget. Some of us never want to leave. Some of us know that it’s time. But overall, it’s been a blast.

This weekend, the class of 2013 will step off College Hill and scatter in different directions — toward jobs, graduate school, unemployment and the unknown. We asked 17 graduating seniors to reflect on their formative experiences at Brown and how they’ve been shaped by their time here. From empowering youth through hip-hop to working on an ambulance caravan in Nepal, students offered us a glimpse into their experiences beyond the classroom. We also look at life after graduation. In our “Life After Brown” section, we call on graduates — both old and new — to reflect on their journeys after they walked through the Van Wickle Gates. One article looks at how alums from the past two years are transitioning to the “real world” immediately after graduation. Another explores the experiences of Brown alums across the decades who pursued similar career paths. A spotlight on reunions depicts what it’s like for alums who return to Brown after years away.

Brown has changed us, but the University itself is not the same place it was four years ago. A lot has happened in the year since Christina Paxson, a little-known dean from Princeton, took the reins from Ruth Simmons after her 11-year tenure. We explore the University’s future direction as the Paxson administration seeks to define its priorities, and we revisit the University’s recent expansion that began before the class of 2013 even set foot on campus. National tides of change have reached Brown and its surrounding community as well. This year, Rhode Island became the 10th state to legalize gay marriage, and a student group is taking on a national campaign calling for the University to divest from coal companies. The class of 2013 and Brown are both at transition points, seeking to determine the best direction forward.

We’ll miss you, Brown. But we know that the friendships and the memories we’ve made and the lessons we’ve learned will last far beyond the Van Wickle Gates.