Brown University is responding to Decembers deadly campus shooting with a new healing and recovery campaign that raises fresh questions about the schools priorities and its reliance on diversity bureaucracy in moments that demand hard security expertise.
The Ivy League institution has unveiled Brown Ever True, a campus-wide initiative that promises to ensure a sense of physical security and expand psychological services for students. According to the Washington Free Beacon, the program will be overseen by Matthew Guterl, the universitys vice president for diversity and inclusion and a professor of Africana Studies, whose office will also coordinate educational sessions held for staff and faculty.
University president Christina Paxson announced that Brown Ever True will provide meaningful opportunities for students to offer feedback about security infrastructure, suggesting a process-heavy, consultative approach rather than a straightforward security overhaul. The initiative is being coordinated by an operational team led by Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion Matthew Guterl, embedding the project firmly within the schools DEI apparatus rather than its public safety or medical leadership.
Guterls official biography at Brown highlights his extensive expertise in the history of race-relations, civil and human rights, and empire, but does not list any background in law enforcement, emergency management, or clinical trauma care. He is the author of a 2023 memoir, Skinfolk, about growing up in a multiracial adoptive household and is presently working on a global biography of the queer, cosmopolitan, human rights activist, Roger Casement, and his bio notes that he continues to be interested in writing about Neverland Ranch.
The decision to place a diversity administrator at the helm of a security and recovery initiative comes as Brown and local authorities face intense scrutiny over their handling of the shooting itself. Critics have pointed to the universitys sluggish and confused response as evidence that the institutions leadership was unprepared for a real-world emergency despite years of rhetoric about safety and inclusion.
When gunfire erupted, Brown took nearly 20 minutes to send an alert to students and never activated its emergency sirens, leaving many on campus unaware of the immediate danger. Administrators then compounded the confusion by telling students that a suspect was in custody shortly after the attack, only to retract that claim, and Paxson later asserted that campus sirens would not be used in the case of an active shooter, even though the siren systems own webpage indicates otherwise.
The shooter remained at large for five days, during which time he traveled to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he murdered a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor before fleeing to a storage facility in New Hampshire and killing himself. Law enforcement initially detained a former Army infantryman who turned out to be uninvolved, and it was ultimately a homeless man, 48-year-old Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who pointed police in the right direction after posting about the suspect on Reddit.
In the aftermath, Brown has come under federal scrutiny, with the Department of Education reviewing the universitys response to the shooting. The school has placed its head of public safety, Rodney Chatman, on administrative leave, a move that underscores the seriousness of the failures but does little to explain why a DEI official is now being tasked with leading the recovery effort.
Observers are left to wonder why Paxson did not appoint a professional with direct experience in trauma, emergency medicine, or campus security to guide a healing and recovery initiative rooted in a violent crime. The Brown University Community Council, which will serve as the advisory body for Brown Ever True, includes just 3 health-related faculty members out of 10, with the remaining professors drawn from fields such as Gender and Sexuality Studies rather than disciplines more closely aligned with public safety or clinical care.
Neither Guterl nor Brown responded to requests for comment about the rationale behind his appointment or the specific metrics by which the initiatives success will be judged. The silence reinforces the perception that the university is more comfortable speaking in the language of diversity and process than in addressing hard questions about accountability, preparedness, and the limits of its own ideological commitments.
Guterls elevation is consistent with his broader vision for reshaping higher education through the lens of DEI. When he assumed the vice presidency of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion in March, he told the Brown Daily Herald that he would steer diversity efforts with fearlessness, imagination and the support of the entire campus community, and he emphasized Browns ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion in response to President Donald Trumps executive orders targeting racially discriminatory policies in higher education.
Those policies have already reshaped key parts of the university, including its medical school. A February Washington Free Beacon report found that Browns medical school gave diversity, equity, and inclusion greater weight than excellent clinical skills in its faculty promotion criteria, and Guterls Office of Diversity and Inclusion is now partnering with the medical school to organize the Brown Ever True educational sessions, further entwining DEI priorities with institutional decision-making.
Alongside the DEI-led initiative, Browns interim head of public safety, Hugh Clements Jr., has announced more traditional security measures, including new surveillance cameras, panic buttons, and expanded public safety training that will emphasize rapid and effective communications during emergencies.
Whether these concrete steps will be allowed to take precedence over the universitys ideological commitmentsor whether they will be filtered through the same diversity framework that has come to dominate so many aspects of campus liferemains an open question for students, parents, and taxpayers watching an elite institution struggle to balance safety with its progressive agenda.
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