America's Reluctant Prince

by Steven M. Gillon

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  What separated Brown from Harvard and other Ivy League schools was its curriculum, which emerged from the social protests of the 1960s. During this era, baby boomers—who had grown up in the prosperous post–World War II years—started flooding college campuses, determined to challenge the established political and cultural order. While the sixties did not mark the first time young Americans spoke out against the injustice and hypocrisy of their elders, social and demographic forces provided this generation with new clout. The postwar baby boom had dramatically increased the number of college-aged students in the United States. In 1965 a whopping 41 percent of all Americans were under the age of twenty. College enrollments soared from 3.6 million in 1960 to almost 8 million in 1970. And since colleges contained the largest concentration of young people in the country, they became the seedbed of youth protest.

  Not surprisingly, student eruptions began just as the first wave of reform-minded youth appeared on campus. In 1962 the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the leading New Left organization on college campuses, wrote The Port Huron Statement. The founding document of the New Left, the manifesto urged universities to be agents of change in tackling the nation’s problems through “self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.” Two years later, students at the University of California, Berkeley, organized the Free Speech Movement (FSM), which initially protested regulations prohibiting political demonstrations before broadening its focus to blasting the “multiversity machine.” The revolt quickly spread to other campuses and championed diverse causes, from opposing dress codes to fighting tenure decisions. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson further fanned the flames of student discontent when he sent American ground forces into Vietnam, dramatically escalating what had been a simmering conflict. Student anger reached a new high the following year, when Johnson ended automatic draft deferments for college students. The threat of the draft pushed this generation of young people to protest the war on both personal and political levels.

  While many campuses erupted in violence, protest at Brown remained relatively tame. In 1966, students objected to the college’s loco parentis rule, which established curfews for women undergraduates (men had none) and rules restricting dorm visits by the opposite sex. In April of that year, 150 students crashed an executive committee meeting to protest the presence of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) on campus. In December, sixty-five of Brown’s eighty-five African American students staged another protest, demanding that the university increase the number of minority students and faculty. All of this hubbub proved too much for President Ray Heffner, who stated amid his resignation, “I have simply reached the conclusion that I do not enjoy being a university president.”

  At Brown, the spirit of dissent was also channeled into the mandated work of curriculum reform. Brown, like other Ivy League schools, required students to take classes in English composition, foreign language, and four courses each in sciences, humanities, and social sciences. In 1967 student government president Ira Magaziner, frustrated with the perceived lack of creative thinking and dynamism in American higher education, joined forces with another undergraduate to form a Group Independent Study Project to recommend changes to the curriculum. That summer, they submitted a 418-page report, Draft of a Working Paper for Education at Brown University, which outlined their proposals for reform. This report, which the historian Luther Spoehr dubbed “a term paper on steroids,” advocated for a “student-centered” university that would focus on creativity and curiosity, not rote learning. It advised Brown administrators to “put students at the center of their education” and seek to “teach students how to think rather than just teaching facts” through smaller courses, independent studies, and interdisciplinary efforts.

  In May 1968, Brown officials, hoping to avoid the violence sweeping other universities, approved the proposals in a marathon two-day faculty meeting. The “new curriculum” represented a bold departure from traditional approaches to learning. It abolished requirements for languages, science, math, or any other particular course. The only mandatory courses were in a student’s major, and the university allowed students to create their own major. It called for replacing large lecture classes with smaller “modes of thought” interdisciplinary seminars. To further foster individual growth, Brown encouraged students to explore different disciplines and gave them the option to take classes pass/fail. It did away with failing grades entirely. Students could take a course for a grade of A, B, C, or no credit. The “no credit” score would not show up on the transcript. Brown created a built-in allowance for students to fail up to four courses or to take a lighter schedule, since it required only twenty-eight courses to graduate.

  Unfortunately, persistent budget shortfalls prevented the university from fully implementing some of these reforms because it lacked the money to hire enough professors to teach the proposed smaller classes. During most of the 1970s, Brown was forced to borrow money from its $117 million endowment, which was already the smallest in the Ivy League. By 1974, the endowment had already dropped by $43 million. “Morale was thirty degrees below sea level,” said Sheila Blumstein, a former interim president of the university. According to Time, Brown’s academic reputation, despite its high-profile reforms, “was in the basement of the Ivy League.” Some referred to it as the “doormat of the Ivy League.”

  In 1976, drowning in debt and facing a demoralized faculty and restless student body, the university hired a new president. Howard Swearer, a forty-four-year-old political scientist and former president of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, took office as the fifteenth president of Brown University in January 1977. The change in leadership turned out to be a brilliant move, because Swearer possessed a reassuring, low-key style that made him a perfect choice for an anxious university. He could often be seen strolling around campus with his large tortoiseshell glasses and ever-present pipe. More important, Swearer excelled as a compelling salesman and prodigious fund-raiser. In the last three of his six years at Carleton, Swearer had raised more than $15 million.

  But despite the new president’s masterful leadership, Brown University’s financial problems persisted. The year before John entered, it reported an operating deficit of $721,000, nearly double what it had budgeted. The biggest problem came from a shortfall in tuition due to lower undergraduate and graduate enrollments. Swearer adopted a two-pronged approach to Brown’s fiscal problems: he cut costs, asking the faculty to delay expenditures or postpone them for the remainder of the year, and he sought new revenue by increasing university fees by $500 for the upcoming 1978–79 academic year. He also announced his plan to raise $158 million in the largest fund-raising campaign in the university’s history.

  More than any previous president, Swearer made the admissions policy part of his development strategy, requiring Brown to admit some students largely because of their ability to raise the school’s profile and improve its chances of attracting money. A February 1979 memo from the admissions office revealed that recruiters had been instructed to set aside 140 seats in the 1979 class to help with fund-raising campaigns. Howard Swearer scribbled on the memo, “Sensitive—not quotable.” While development was listed as the top priority in the selection process, other spaces remained for athletes, minorities, geographic diversity, and legacies. Admissions officers wanted the administration to know that these groups made up only 18 percent of the total applicant pool but more than one-third of all acceptances. The private memorandum also pointed out that many of those admitted under these special categories did not meet the university’s admission standards. Approximately 46 percent of them “clearly did not have the academic and personal growth potential as most of the 7,500” that the university would reject.

  Director of Admissions James Rogers pointed out correctly that admissions was more complicated than simply picking those students with the highest grade point averages and test sco
res. Committee members needed to make sure that each class was balanced, including students who added racial, gender, and geographic diversity. Otherwise the entire Brown student body would consist of wealthy white kids from a handful of prestigious feeder schools. But in 1979, amid its quest for reinvention, Brown sought more than just diversity in its entering class: it also needed students with name recognition, someone who would instantly elevate the university’s stature.

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  It was at this critical moment that John decided to apply for Brown, submitting his application in January 1979. Most of John’s application materials were made public in 2017 when they were discovered among the personal items of a deceased former Brown administrator and put up for auction. He wrote his essays in longhand; his mother filled out the cover sheet, since John was in Africa at the time. She was careful not to drop the family name, simply providing basic biographical information, such as that John grew up in New York with his mother and sister and spent “part of summer by the sea in New England with many cousins.” She noted that he had attended Collegiate School, where he developed an interest in history because of an inspirational teacher, before transferring to Phillips Academy Andover. She also told the admissions committee that John participated in many extracurricular activities, including skiing and certified diving, but drama was the most significant. For his senior project at Andover, John worked at the juvenile court in New York City. “This made a deep impression on him,” she noted, although she was not sure “whether or not he wishes to try for law school but hopes to decide during his years at Brown.”

  Finally, Mrs. Onassis pointed out that John’s father’s occupation was in “government” and that he graduated from Harvard with a BA, while she’d earned degrees from Vassar and the Sorbonne in Paris, and worked as an editor at Doubleday. When asked what John intended to major in, she wrote that his interest was always in “conceptual studies” and that science and math “have never been particularly interesting.”

  Although his mother filled out the cover sheet, the handwriting on the four-page essay clearly belonged to John. In it, he discussed the trips he had taken with his cousin Timothy Shriver to Guatemala and Panama. In Guatemala they worked for an experimental Peace Corps program helping residents to rebuild a village destroyed by an earthquake. On the morning of February 4, 1976, a 7.5-magnitude earthquake struck Guatemala City, killing more than twenty-three thousand people, seriously injuring seventy thousand, and leaving one million homeless. Many of the city’s roads and bridges were destroyed, hindering rescue operations for the thousands trapped under the rubble. John and Timothy worked side by side with native peoples, creating bricks that would be used to build new houses. The entire relief effort was very primitive, he noted. Houses were constructed of mud, using the same tools and techniques that had been relied upon for the past three thousand years. They also spent time teaching “the natives” about proper nutrition and health care. John was particularly surprised by the “major role women played in the project,” pointing out that they performed “the most demanding labor.” Men, however, exercised complete control over the household, where women remained “subservient.” During the winter, men traveled to the coast to find work, while “the women are left to fend for themselves and their offspring. That [pressure] accounts for the soaring infant mortality rate and high percentage of malnutrition.”

  After leaving Guatemala, John and Timothy moved on to Panama, where they were “introduced to life at the opposite end of the social strata.” The former foreign minister they stayed with introduced them to policy makers who lectured them on why Panama needed to repossess the Panama Canal. The canal, which opened in 1914, divided Panama into two parts separated by an American-controlled zone. Since then, US ownership of the canal remained a sore spot in the relationship between the two countries, flaring up in the 1960s with anti-American riots. In response, the two governments worked behind the scenes to try to solve the territorial issue. In August 1977 President Jimmy Carter’s new administration completed negotiations for returning the canal but faced an angry backlash from conservatives at home, who saw that decision as a cowardly retreat. The Panamanian government desired a settlement that would guarantee complete sovereignty and prevent US intervention, but Carter had to appease right-wing critics by asserting America’s right to defend the canal during a crisis.

  Amid these tensions, Panamanian officials informed John that the canal represented an affront to their national pride. Americans living in the Canal Zone were governed by a different set of laws, did not pay taxes, and tried local citizens arrested in the American zone in their own courts. Panamanians, John stated in his admissions essay, “felt betrayed and bewildered by the aloofness of America, their supposedly benevolent ally to the north,” which refused to even discuss renegotiating the treaty. Clearly influenced by the Panamanian perspective, John wrote smartly that the canal insulted locals, and he advocated giving Panama full ownership to help create a “self-sufficient economy independent of America.” He concluded his essay by saying that American policy makers needed to “reflect” on their policies in Latin America, noting that his firsthand experience “made me more aware of the numerous [responsibilities] the US has and had ignored.”

  The application material made public in 2017 did not include his transcripts from Collegiate and Andover or his SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores. But it is unlikely that scores and grades would have mattered. Brown needed John more than he needed Brown. Officially, the university denied trying to recruit John. “We did not go out in search of these kids,” claimed Robert Reichley, the executive vice president for university relations at the time John was admitted. “We did not cultivate them as you might a fine quarterback. They came in over the transom.” At the time, Director of Admissions James Rogers repeated the same story. Brown, he told The Providence Journal, had given “no special consideration” to John’s application. Rather, he speculated that John chose Brown because of its flexible curriculum.

  But in recent interviews, Rogers has admitted that Brown did actively recruit John, saying, “I personally, and other people in the office, worked very hard with Andover in this case.” Rogers had learned in August 1978 that John intended to apply to Brown and that, if accepted, he would enroll. “How academically weak is he?” Rogers asked the Andover guidance counselor. He learned that John was “a perfectly good student, not a great student, but a fairly good student.” The reality, however, is that “fairly good” students who had been held back a year in high school do not get accepted into Brown. Rogers understood acutely the power of John’s name and his ability to create “buzz” for the university. “I knew immediately that this was a case where we would gain publicity,” he said. “He was a national figure with reasonable grades.” When asked what quality he thought John would bring to Brown, Rogers responded: “recognition.” He anticipated that John “would be in the news, and next to his name would be an indication that he went to Brown.” The admissions office, he conceded, went “out of [its] way to admit students that were influential and would be followed by other students.”

  It is not uncommon for universities to admit students with an eye to securing donations from their wealthy parents. But what made Brown unique was that it recruited students with development potential as its top admissions priority, focusing on attracting not just wealthy families but also opinion makers. In this case, opinion makers often meant the children of celebrities, who could elevate the university’s prestige and stature. In addition to John, during my time at Brown, I taught William Mondale, the son of former vice president and 1984 Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale, and Donna Zaccaro, the daughter of Mondale’s running mate, Geraldine Ferraro. Over the next few years, Brown would admit the children of two Beatles, director Steven Spielberg, and actors Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, Jane Fonda, and Kevin Costner, among other celebrities.

  The strategy appears to have work
ed. During his freshman year, when word had spread that John was on campus, the university boasted a record number of applications, marking a 4.8 percent increase over the previous year and a 31 percent increase over the previous three years. Brown received more than 11,800 applications for its 1980 freshman class, while other Ivy League schools saw no significant increases in their applicant pools. The new applicants overwhelmed the admissions office, requiring staff to work evening hours. In 1983, the year John graduated, Brown received the most applications of any school in the Ivy League. The 13,250 applicants increased 13 percent from the previous year. Meanwhile, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Universities witnessed a drop in the number of students applying for admission. The New York Times declared that Brown had become the most popular school on the East Coast, reversing its image as a haven for students who could not get into more prestigious institutions. That same year, the university’s five-year campaign reached its ambitious goal of $158 million, becoming the largest fund-raising drive in Brown’s history.

  There can be little doubt that the buzz generated by John’s admission helped boost the school’s profile and its popularity. Brown’s decision to recruit and admit John despite his lackluster academic record accomplished exactly what the university had planned. By coincidence, I applied to Brown’s Graduate Program in American Civilization the same year that John submitted his application, and we both arrived on campus in the fall of 1979. Even his acceptance earned headlines in newspapers across the country. Once he enrolled, it was impossible to talk about Brown without John’s name coming up. Richard Gray Jr., who was recruited to play football at Brown the year after John enrolled, recalled that “everywhere I went, all I heard was that John Kennedy was on campus. If you told people you attended Brown, the first thing they would mention is that John Kennedy goes there.”