File this one under things I never would have guessed (via Slate):

When did douche become an insult?

In the 1960s. The Historical Dictionary of American Slang traces the epithet douche to a 1968 collection of college slang compiled at Brown University, which defined the word as “a person who always does the wrong thing.” The insult douchebag is somewhat older. The 1939 novel Ninety Times Guilty includes a pimp named Jimmy Douchebag, and the Historical Dictionary of American Slang traces the epithetical usage to a 1946 journal article about military slang, which offered the definition “a military misfit.”

Suddenly that GQ ranking from 2009 makes a lot more sense.

Paxson, right, toasts Krugman for his Nobel

Brown University’s new president, Christina Paxson, is leaving a department studded with star professors.

Paxson, 52, is currently dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, the Ivy League institution where she has spent her entire career since arriving there in 1986.

Among the economists who worked with Paxson at Princeton: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who left Princeton in 2002 to join the central bank, and Paul Krugman, the influential New York Times columnist who won a Nobel Prize while Paxson was chair of the department.

“Person for person, this is the finest economics department in the world and I’m happy to be a part of it,” Krugman told Bloomberg News after winning the Nobel in 2008.

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By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Providence Mayor Angel Taveras says he’s “making good progress” in negotiations with Brown University over how much the Ivy League school should increase its contribution to the city budget.

Taveras and Brown President Ruth Simmons have met face-to-face twice in the last two weeks and spoke by telephone on Monday, the mayor told WPRI.com. “We’re planning to meet again soon,” he said. “She’s personally involved.”

Taveras met earlier this month with the CEOs of Providence’s large hospitals to plead the city’s case with them. “We’re pursuing that, as well,” he said. “Those conversations are ongoing.”

The mayor has asked Providence’s largest tax-exempt schools and hospitals to contribute an additional $7.1 million to the city budget as he tries to keep the state capital out of bankruptcy. An exclusive new WPRI 12 poll set for release Tuesday at 6 p.m. will show whether Rhode Islanders think the state should keep the city out of Chapter 9.

Taveras will meet Saturday morning with city retirees to ask them to accept voluntary reductions in their pension benefits. “You have to have structural change,” the mayor said Tuesday. “You cannot simply rely on more revenue to solve this problem.”

• Related: Moodys: Cities must balance tax-exempts’ cash, contributions (Feb. 15)

(photo: Ted Nesi/WPRI)

In my Saturday column (you read it, right?) I highlighted a recent Ezra Klein piece that argued Wall Street, Teach for America, the law and management consulting are all “taking advantage of the weakness of liberal arts education” to recruit Ivy League Millennials into their professions.

Well, not one but two of Klein’s readers who described themselves as Brown University graduates emailed him after the piece was published and made points he thought were worth follow-up posts of their own. Here’s the first response:

I’ve seen these stats thrown around a lot, but I would love it if someone would investigate what percent of all grads go into finance — not just those who have a job before graduation!

I’m sure mine is a skewed sample, but the majority of people I knew at Brown did not have a job lined up at graduation. I suspect those going into finance are far more likely to have that settled, considering the very ordered, systematic recruitment process of big finance (and consulting) companies. Those going into, say, journalism, are more likely to figure that out in the months following graduation.

So the story here could just as well be: College grads going into finance figure it out earlier.

That’s possible, though I remember frantically and unfruitfully searching for journalism jobs throughout the second semester of my senior year. Here’s the second response:

I graduated from Brown last year and jumped right into law school back home after a couple of internships here and there over the summers. I quickly became disillusioned when I learned about the starting salaries in every other industry. It just never made mathematical sense for me to choose a career pathway that wasn’t going to help me reap the returns of my family’s financial investment, at least in the near future.Every Brown grad feels the need to try out consulting (Bain takes like apps from one of every three or four graduating seniors), whilst the rest of us will most definitely shoot our resume over to Goldman and Morgan Stanley even if we spent our college lives condemning Wall Street (as Brown kids are naturally inclined to do, despite the fact our President was on GS’s Board of Directors). All my friends are in investment banks/consulting/law/medicine.

Having said that, I think you might be reading TFA the wrong way. As much as I think there is something great about the scheme, I think TFA is not very different from banking. While it doesn’t have such great returns early, I honestly feel that TFA is just a way for most talented college grads to try to grab hold of something that’ll improve their chances of making bank in the future. I might be totally wrong, and I’m sure there are some wonderful people in TFA, but I wouldn’t say they were all motivated by the fact that it’s a more “socially-responsible” choice. Leaving this here for your perusal: http://www.laprogressive.com/teach-america/

I know there are a number of current and former Brown students among the regular readers here – what do you think?

The headline numbers in the new Brown University poll are bad – really bad – for Congressman Cicilline and Governor Chafee. But there are other ways to analyze the results that look slightly better, though still pretty bad, for the two incumbents.

Political practitioners have long complained about “the science” of surveys that generate job approval ratings by asking voters to rate an official’s job performance as either “excellent,” “good,” “fair”/”only fair” or “poor.” Their argument is that while “only fair” isn’t a huge vote of confidence, it’s not necessarily a sign of out-and-out disapproval, either.

Evidently, Brown disagrees – the university lumps together “excellent” and “good” to create the metric it calls an approval rating. But by digging into the detailed breakdown of the poll, we can take another look at the numbers and what they say about local leaders’ standing among voters.

One way to do that is to strip out three of the four ratings and just look at the share of voters who describe each politician’s job performance as “poor,” which is clearly negative. While that probably understates the level of disapproval, perhaps Chafee (45%) and Cicilline (43%) can take solace that a majority don’t think they’re doing a poor job:

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• Analysis: Poll’s possible silver lining for Chafee

Cicilline’s job approval rating has sunk to just 15% among all Rhode Island voters, down from 24% in December, according to a new Brown University poll released Thursday morning. Chafee’s approval rating isn’t much higher at 22%, down from 27%.

To put those numbers in perspective, President Richard Nixon’s approval rating was 24% a week before he resigned over Watergate in 1974. Slightly more voters rated Chafee’s job performance as poor (45%) than said so about Cicilline’s (43%).

Cicilline’s successor, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras, is the most popular elected official in Rhode Island based on Brown’s polling. The mayor’s statewide job approval rating is up to 60%. Treasurer Gina Raimondo comes next with 58% approving of her job performance.

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Those who watched Mayor Taveras’s State of the City speech on Monday night may recall that, not long after he criticized Brown University and the other tax-exempts for failing to contribute enough to Providence’s city budget, the mayor pulled the classic Ronald Reagan move of telling a story about someone in the audience:

Marc Nixon was unemployed and needed a way to support his two young children. He enrolled in a program at Building Futures and started an apprenticeship that led to an opportunity with Local 271 last year. Marc now has a good paying construction job and – more importantly – a career.

His story exemplifies the power of the Building Futures model, connecting Providence residents in need to meaningful careers in the construction trades. These are the types of success stories that will be replicated through our Emerald Cities Providence initiative. Marc is here tonight. Please stand and be recognized.

It’s a great story. But who hired Nixon for the “good paying construction job” that Taveras described? As it turns out, the same Ivy League institution the mayor has roundly criticized of late:

Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the large words “Honor Labor,” Marc Nixon can’t help but smile when he thinks about his time in the spotlight. Monday night, the 35-year-old Providence resident was recognized by Mayor Angel Taveras during the State of the City address as a career “success story” — something that seemed out of reach just two years ago.

The father of four, Nixon was working a “dead-end job” in a thrift shop when he came to the Building Futures program in 2010. Building Futures is an initiative that aims to help low-income workers move into careers in the construction trade through an apprenticeship program. Since 2007, 147 Building Futures trainees have successfully completed the pre-apprenticeship training program and 100 workers have been successfully placed into apprenticeships at construction sites around the city, including 13 separate projects at Brown.

It’s not a huge surprise that Nixon got a job at Brown; the school is, after all, Providence’s largest employer. But it serves as a reminder of the delicate balance Providence must strike in balancing its need for revenue from the tax-exempts with its reliance on them as economic engines.

(photo: Frank Mullin/Brown University)

Moody’s Investors Service thinks Providence and other cities could reap significant rewards from pushing local tax-exempt institutions to fork over more money. But they should guard against killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

Payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTS, “represent a potential revenue boon for local governments with high concentrations of tax-exempt properties in their tax bases, many of which are in the Northeast,” Moody’s analysts wrote in a research note Tuesday that singled out Boston as a successful example.

“Though far from immanent, greater PILOT revenue comes with long-term risks for some local governments should PILOTs grow so large that they impair not-for-profits’ ability to create jobs and stimulate the economy, or encourage them to move elsewhere,” Moody’s said, adding: “In general, local governments are still far from that tipping point.”

“Efforts by local governments to bolster PILOTs appear to be shaping into a trend,” according to Moody’s. In addition to Providence and Boston, Scranton, Pa.; Worcester, Mass.; Framingham, Mass.; and Newton, Mass., have all sought larger voluntary payments recently.

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Providence Mayor Angel Taveras is set to announce later Wednesday a new agreement with Johnson & Wales University to increase the school’s voluntary contribution to the city budget. It would be the first deal the mayor has finalized with one of the large tax-exempts he’s targeting for $7.1 million.

One of the big questions will be, how is the agreement structured and how much more is JWU going to pay? All four private colleges in Providence – Brown, JWU, PC and RISD – already began making yearly payments to Providence under a 2003 deal struck with then-Mayor David Cicilline.

In JWU’s case, the 2003 deal calls for the school to pay Providence a total of $6.34 million from 2004 through 2023. This year’s payment is $308,890 and next year’s is slated to be $313,523. For comparison purposes, the other payments this year are $1.2 million from Brown; $264,262 from PC; and $175,784 from RISD.

The mayor is also expected to meet with Brown President Ruth Simmons on Wednesday to renew their talks.

Update: Still waiting for a more detailed description of the structure of the agreement, but here’s how the mayor’s office described what JWU will pay in a statement Wednesday:

The agreement at least triples JWU’s annual contributions to Providence, increasing the university’s annual payment from $308,890 this year under an existing 2003 memorandum of understanding to at least $958,000 each year with the potential for as much as $1.45 million annually.

In all, JWU will directly contribute an additional contribution of as much as $11.4 million to the City of Providence over the next 10 years, bringing the university’s total contribution to as much as $14.5 million over 10 years.

The agreement is structured with an upfront contribution from the university of as much as $5 million in accelerated payments to the city.

• Related: Taveras hammers retirees, tax-exempts in grim State of the City (Feb. 13)

By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – The Taveras administration acknowledged Saturday that Providence has no clear plan for closing the $22.5 million shortfall in the city budget, amid warnings of bankruptcy and with less than five months left in the fiscal year.

“Since taking office the administration has worked to close the gap on a $110 million structural deficit that was identified,” Taveras spokesman David Ortiz told WPRI.com. “Despite how far we’ve come, there is a $22.5 million shortfall remaining that is not within our ability to fix without help.”

“We are in conversations at the State House and with the City Council about the crisis that Providence is in, and at this point it’s not entirely clear how we get into the next fiscal year without facing the possibility of a supplemental tax increase or bankruptcy,” he said.

Brown University President Ruth Simmons, who’s been at loggerheads with Taveras since December over the school’s payments to the city, said in a statement Saturday there are “now productive and positive discussions with the city and state leadership to determine the exact nature of the University’s contributions.”

Read the rest of this story »

Brown University President Ruth Simmons recently told Bloomberg the $5 million additional annual payment to the city that Providence Mayor Angel Taveras wants would be “crippling for the university.”

No one disputes that $5 million is a lot of money. But it’s also less than 1% of the $781.6 million that Brown spent in the 2009-10 academic year, according to the school’s most recent income tax filing. That raises the question: How does Brown spend all that money annually?

The biggest share by far is employee compensation – salaries, benefits and executive pay – which accounted for a combined 46% of the school’s spending in 2009-10. Grants and assistance come in a distant second at 13.6%. Here’s a breakdown of Brown’s spending in 2009-10 based on its tax returns:

You can’t really see them at the bottom, but Brown spent $603,692 on promotions and advertising; $346,083 on meetings, conventions and conferences; $325,000 on accounting; $245,930 on fundraising; and $148,850 on lobbying. The Corporation is meeting this weekend and will likely approve Brown’s 2012-13 budget.

Update: Brown spokeswoman Marisa Quinn wrote in to put some context around those numbers:

It is no surprise that the largest portion of the university’s budget is salaries and benefits. The work of the University is performed by its people – the faculty who teach and perform research and the staff who support this mission working with students and faculty, and ensuring that the university operates well and efficiently. This includes research assistants, construction managers, police and security, student life deans, dining services, librarians, coaches, etc. Brown is the 6th-largest employer in Rhode Island, and with 3,800
employees, is a stable employer even in uncertain times.

Brown University’s 54-member board probably won’t vote this weekend on whether to increase its voluntary payments to the city of Providence because a formal proposal isn’t on the table yet.

“We are continuing discussions with the mayor at this time and do not expect action coming out of the Corporation because those discussions have not yet produced a proposal for the Corporation to consider,” Brown spokeswoman Marisa Quinn told WPRI.com, using the board’s formal title.

The Corporation, whose members include Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan and Providence Equity Partners chief Jonathan Nelson, meets three times a year and usually approves the university’s budget in February. Talks between the school and Providence Mayor Angel Taveras resumed last week after deadlocking in December.

“We look forward to meeting with the mayor and the other nonprofits to discuss fair and constructive opportunities to strengthen Providence,” Quinn said.

Separately, a spokesman for the Rhode Island Supreme Court said the five justices would not issue an order or make any other announcement on Thursday about whether they’ll agree to an expedited review of Providence’s appeal of a lower-court decision blocking the city from moving retirees to Medicare.

• Related: Mayor Taveras hopeful Providence can avoid bankruptcy (Feb. 6)

Is Providence biting the hands that feed its residents?

Providence Mayor Angel Taveras and his aides certainly don’t see it that way. But the seven tax-exempt institutions they’re targeting for a bigger contribution to Providence’s budget employ one in five workers there, making each of them one of its main employers, city documents show.

The gang of seven are Brown University, Lifespan (Rhode Island and The Miriam hospitals), Care New England (Women & Infants and Butler hospitals), CharterCARE (Roger Williams Medical Center and St. Joseph Health Services), Providence College, Johnson & Wales University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Those seven tax-exempts employed 20,837 workers in Providence in 2011, which was 19.5% of total city employment, according to R.I. Economic Development Corporation data city auditors prepared for bondholders. Brown is the city’s No. 1 employer with 5,162 workers, or 4.83% of total city employment.

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Of course, she did so in The Onion:

From coast to coast, town to town, and in nearly every public meeting place and private residence across America, millions have been captivated, inspired, and in some cases moved to tears by presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who now finds himself campaigning before a nation in the throes of full-scale Romneymania. …

“Simply put, when Mitt Romney speaks, he inspires people to be better,” said political scientist Deborah Klein of Brown University, adding that given his effusive charisma, people are likely to follow the Republican candidate anywhere. “Anytime he meets factory workers on the campaign trail or stands at the podium in a debate, his reputation as a highly relatable man of the people is indisputable.”

“It’s easy to see why Americans can’t get enough Mitt,” Klein added.

Take that, Wendy Schiller!

Taveras, Chafee clap for Simmons last August

Governor Chafee is trying to broker peace between his capital city and his alma mater.

Chafee met Thursday afternoon with Providence Mayor Angel Taveras, Brown University President Ruth Simmons and Brown Chancellor Thomas Tisch to seek a resolution to their financial dispute, Brown spokeswoman Marisa Quinn told WPRI.com.

The governor graduated from Brown in 1975 and one of his children is a student there now. He convened the 1 p.m. meeting in his State House office because he “believes in collaboration and believes we all have to work together to solve our city’s and state’s problems,” Chafee spokeswoman Christine Hunsinger said.

“I’d characterize the meeting as going well,” she added.

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(photo: Pathikrit Bhattacharyya / Brown Daily Herald, used with permission)

Brown University and the Taveras administration are at loggerheads over how much the school should increase the annual payment in lieu of taxes it makes to Providence’s city budget.

The numbers at issue sound big – the city says the original deal that Brown backed out on was for $5 million a year, and the university is now offering $3 million. The lower amount would be “a substantial contribution and comparable to what any U.S. university contributes to its local community,” Brown President Ruth Simmons wrote in an email to the university community last week.

Still, in the context of Providence’s city budget ($614 million), Brown’s consolidated operating budget ($834 million) and Brown’s endowment ($2.5 billion), even $5 million is a drop in the bucket:

Every year, the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition hands out more than $100,000 in prizes to the people with the best ideas for new firms, with one of the goals being to seed new Rhode Island companies.

The New York Times reported this week on one of the competition’s success stories: Runa, a startup selling drinks made from an Amazonian leaf. The team of Brown University students behind Runa got $45,300 in 2009 when they won the Business Plan Competition’s student track.

Runa’s revenue totaled $277,000 last year and is on track to top $1 million in 2012, The Times says, and the company now has five full-time employees. Unfortunately, they all work in Brooklyn.

“We’re a consumer packaged goods company and the opportunities in New York City are infinitely greater than Rhode Island when it coms to distribution opportunities, media, and business development,” Tyler Gage, Runa’s cofounder and president, told WPRI.com in an email.

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By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Gov. Lincoln Chafee acknowledged Thursday he’s frustrated by his anemic approval ratings but said he remains confident good governance and an economic rebound will help him win over Rhode Islanders.

“We have to do a better job of communicating with the people – no question about that,” Chafee told WPRI.com in a telephone interview Thursday. “I’ve never seen, in my long career, those kinds of disapproval numbers.”

Chafee’s comments came hours after a new Brown University poll showed just 27% of voters think he’s doing a good or excellent job as governor, down from 32% in Brown’s March poll and the 36% share he took to win last year’s election. Two-thirds of voters gave him bad marks, with 41% saying he’s doing a poor job.

“It’s definitely of concern,” Chafee said. “I want to make sure we’re effectively communicating the good things we’re doing, which I think are very, very evident – Central Falls being one of them, and certainly Department of Motor Vehicles, my role in the pension reform – so we do have to do a better job on our communication.”

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The new pension law is popular among Rhode Islanders – but the glow of its passage only seems to have benefited Treasurer Gina Raimondo.

A new Brown University poll released Thursday morning found 60% of Rhode Island voters support the pension overhaul signed by Gov. Lincoln Chafee last month and only 28% oppose it, with 90% calling it important to the state’s economic future. A majority of Republicans (64%), independents (64%) and Democrats (58%) all support the new law.

But the legislation did nothing for Chafee’s approval rating, which dipped to 27% this month from 32% in March. His support is highest among Democrats, at 39%, and lower among independents (22%) and Republicans (15%).

By contrast, Raimondo’s approval rating jumped from 40% to 52% over the same period, but her support is weakest among members of her own Democratic Party (38%) compared with 61% among Republicans and 60% among independents. She ties Providence Mayor Angel Taveras, also at 52% approval, as the state’s most popular politician.

The news is grim for Congressman David Cicilline. With less than a year to go before he faces reelection, Cicilline’s approval rating is just 23% in the 1st Congressional District. The redistricting commission will hold a hearing tonight on a new map that would redraw the district to make it safer for Cicilline. A vote is set for Monday.

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America’s job market is facing big long-term challenges, and that’s a particular concern for young workers who are having trouble kicking off their careers. One recently minted Brown University alum found greener pastures in the world’s largest democracy, The New York Times reports:

Born and raised in Minneapolis, Win Bennet traveled extensively with his parents growing up, part of a family that enjoyed exploring different cultures.

When he graduated from Brown University with a major in economics and international relations in 2009, the American job market was less than welcoming, to say the least — so he looked to India. …

Mr. Bennet landed a job as an analyst at ICICI, India’s largest private bank, and has lived in Mumbai for the past three years.

With the economy at home showing no signs of improving, an increasing number of recent graduates from the United States are job-hunting in India.

That’s one way to bring down the unemployment rate.

Paterno, right, with Coach Engle and co-captain Scott

The legendary and suddenly embattled coach was a member of Brown’s Class of 1950, the NYT reports:

Paterno came to Penn State in 1950 as a 23-year-old assistant coach making $3,600 a year. He planned to stay for two seasons, to pay off his student loans from Brown University, where he earned a degree in English literature.

Joseph V. Paterno ’50 was quarterback and co-captain of Brown’s 1949 football squad, “considered to be Brown’s finest,” which finished the year with an 8-1 record – one short of their goal, “9 for 9 in ’49.” They finished the season “with a spectacular victory over Colgate, coming from behind to score three touchdowns in the last four minutes for a final score of 41-26.”

Paterno received the Brown Alumni Association’s Williams Rogers Award in 1998 – which “honors an alumnus or alumna whose service to society illustrates the words of the Brown Charter: living a life of ‘usefulness and reputation’” – and delivered one of the university’s annual Commencement Forums in 2000. In 1996, one of his fellow alums donated $1 million to endow the Williams/Paterno Chair in Football at Brown.

Paterno isn’t Brown’s only famous football alum. John Heisman of Heisman Trophy fame was in the Class of 1891. But apparently Heisman didn’t do anything on the gridiron here in Providence. “There were no [football] games between 1886 and 1889, when Brown might have made use of a student named John Heisman 1891, who stayed for only two years,” the Encyclopedia Brunoniana says.

Update: One of my wise readers – a Brown alum himself – points out the 1915 football team appeared “in what is referred to as the first annual Rose Bowl game,” a factoid backed up by Encyclopedia Brunoniana. Who knew?

(photo: Brown University)

At least that’s one way to understand some new research out of Providence’s Ivy League university:

Online daters are reluctant to use partisan politics to attract a potential mate, according to new research co-authored by Brown political scientist Rose McDermott. The study, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, shows that singles are more likely to admit they are overweight on their online dating profiles than to say they are politically liberal or conservative. …

“Because we know that long-term mates are more politically similar than random attachment might predict, we were interested to see how people seeking a mate end up with people who share their political values,” said McDermott. “This is particularly important because political ideology appears to be in part heritable, and so mates pass their ideology on to their children.”

(Left-leaners, don’t be offended by my headline – “conservative” and “moderate” just didn’t fit.)

He visited the Jamestown Historical Society this month, The Jamestown Press reports:

The speaker for the evening was Eugene Lee, who has won three Tony Awards for his production design work on Broadway. He has also won an Emmy Award for his television work on “Saturday Night Live,” where he has worked for 37 years.

Lee, who has a home in Jamestown, is currently the resident designer for Trinity Rep in Providence. He has a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale Drama School and a bachelor’s degree from both the Art Institute of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon University. Currently he is an adjunct professor at Brown University and has three honorary Ph.Ds.

Powerbrokers, gathered at Brown

For a day, at least, it didn’t seem crazy to be optimistic about Rhode Island’s economic prospects.

A who’s who of the state’s political, business and nonprofit leaders gathered midday Monday to witness the opening of Brown University’s $45 million new medical school building in the heart of the Jewelry District. The former Nemo jewelry factory on Richmond Street is now a state-of-the-art marvel; each future doctor is equipped with an iPad, and there are no books in its library.

Two hours after the Brown ribbon-cutting, a surprisingly large number of movers and shakers – again including Gov. Lincoln Chafee and Providence Mayor Angel Taveras – crowded into the mayor’s office to see Jim Bennett, a businessman and former gubernatorial candidate, introduced as the capital city’s new economic development director.

Despite year after year of double-digit unemployment and growing fears of another recession, the mood at both events was bullish and buoyant. And perhaps for good reason. As often as we talk about the game-changing possibilities for the land freed up by moving I-195, it was eye-opening – and exhilarating – to look out from the upper floors of Brown’s new building and take in the potential of those 41-plus acres.

Then again, Rhode Island has always had potential. What it hasn’t always had are leaders wise enough and shrewd enough to harness that potential for the greater good. Ian Donnis summed it up well a few years ago when he reviewed years of efforts at organized economic development: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

That makes the redevelopment of the 195 land a true test of Rhode Island’s elite. It gives this generation of local leaders a nearly blank slate they can use to put their stamp on Providence, which is why Chafee called this “a catalytic moment” in the state’s history. They have a chance to position the city and the state to thrive for decades, and a powerful new commission to get it done. Are they up to the job?

One factor that could help is that the state’s political leaders seem to be on the same page. Brown President Ruth Simmons got a round of applause when she said “I thank God” for the state’s four-man congressional delegation, all of whom attended today’s ceremony. They are dogged in their pursuit of federal funds for their home state, and U.S. Sen. Jack Reed’s position on the Senate Appropriations Committee is key on that score.

Chafee and Taveras also have a good working relationship – they sat next to each other at Brown, and Bennett stood between them when he was introduced – as do their respective administrations. That kind of cooperation and coordination is vital in a tiny place like Rhode Island, which is economically a city-state centered around Providence. Bennett, who owned a business in Warwick and was active in Republican politics, already knows Chafee and his team and was tapped by the new governor to oversee the convention center.

Bennett’s remarks were energetic, if light on specifics. He cast himself as a salesman for the city, a roving economic ambassador who’s job is to sell the private sector on Providence and bring together the right people, and emphasized the development of the port (“200 miles closer to Europe than any other eastern port”) and changes to zoning rules. But Bennett will face fierce headwinds from a sputtering national economy and the city’s financial mess, including its woefully underfunded pension system – Taveras’ next big priority.

The medical school will be an important anchor for the Jewelry District (now dubbed “the Knowledge District”). It’s already surrounded by biomedical companies with ties to the university, including NABsys and Isis Biopolymer, and it could eventually have a fitting neighbor in URI’s planned nursing school. A group of first-year medical students, who started classes today, said they were excited to finally have a real campus after 37 years.

“Providence is on its way back, and so is Rhode Island,” Mayor Taveras said this afternoon. Let’s hope so.

Tim White contributed reporting. Nesi’s Nightcap will return on Tuesday.

(photo: Ted Nesi/WPRI)

That’s according to this timeline of college tuition prices from the website Best Colleges Online:

1870: Tuition at Harvard was a mere $150 per year.

For half that, just $75, students could attend Brown University for a year. While a pittance today, this was still a fair amount of money at the time (about $3,000 in today’s dollars), and many lower class families would never be able to afford college without scholarship support.

Brown charged $39,928 for tuition this past year – though most undergraduates receive financial aid.

Gordon Gee had a brief but stormy tenure as president of Brown University from 1998 to 2000. A decade later he’s now the president of Ohio State University, and the highest-paid public school president in the nation.

ESPN The Magazine reports Gee is in trouble again over an ill-advised comment about Jim Tressel:

As Gee backed away from the mic, a reporter started to ask whether dismissing Tressel had ever crossed his mind.

“No – are you kidding?” Gee interrupted. He sputtered for a second, searching for a one-liner to break the tension. “Let me be very clear,” he said. “I’m just hoping the coach doesn’t dismiss me.” …

Gee had aired his profession’s worst-kept dirty little secret: that presidents can’t really control athletics. Although every infractions case reveals as much, nobody had ever simply admitted it.

Everyone’s loves a good list, so here’s one passed along by a colleague: Brown University is No. 21 on Forbes magazine’s annual ranking of America’s best colleges. It placed fourth-highest among the eight Ivies.

Further down the list are Providence College (#156), the University of Rhode Island (#375), Roger Williams University (#477), Johnson & Wales University (#542) and Rhode Island College (#571).

The list is prepared for Forbes the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington, D.C. Here’s how the group comes up with its rankings:

The rankings are based on five general categories: Post Graduate success (30%), which evaluates alumni pay and prominence, Student Satisfaction (27.5%), which includes professor evaluations and freshman to sophomore year retention rates, Debt (17.5%), which penalizes schools for high student debt loads and default rates, Four Year Graduation Rate (17.5%) and Competitive Awards (7.5%), which rewards schools whose students win prestigious scholarships and fellowships like the Rhodes, the Marshall and the Fulbright.

Update: Rankings, rankings everywhere – Providence College’s new spokesman, Steve Maurano, writes in to say his school has been named a “Best Buy” for 2011 by the Fiske Report, which is widely used by guidance counselors.

If you want a good deal on a college education in Rhode Island, go to RIC.

U.S. News & World Report is out with a new look at the cost of a bachelor’s degree at the nation’s institutions of higher education, and it offers more evidence of the jaw-dropping sticker price for tuition and fees these days.

Whether you’re an in-state or out-of-state student, Rhode Island College offers the cheapest route to a BA around here. In fact, an in-state student could spend nearly six years studying at RIC for the same amount of money it would cost for one year at Brown University.

The figures also show one way the University of Rhode Island is dealing with deep cuts in taxpayer support – hiking the price of admission for students from outside the state. It’s more expensive for a non-Rhode Islander to attend URI than the private Johnson & Wales, according to U.S. News.

Here’s how much tuition and fees will set you back this academic year at Rhode Island’s nine four-year schools:

• Brown: $40,820
• RISD: $38,295
• PC: $34,435
• Bryant: $33,357
• Salve: $31,450
• RWU: $29,718
• URI (out): $27,182
• JWU: $24,141
• RIC (out): $16,878
• URI (in): $10,476
• RIC (in): $6,986

Of course, none of that says anything about the actual value of a college degree. News stories “always focus on an over-educated bartender, and they are always wrong,” Education Sector’s Kevin Carey argues in The New Republic.

(photo: Rhode Island College)

The Sunday Times of London ran a magazine profile of the “Harry Potter” star over the weekend where she opened up a bit about her time in Providence – and shot down rumors she was bullied here:

“It made me so sad when all this stuff came out that I left Brown because I was being bullied. It made no sense at all. Brown has been the opposite. I’ve never even been asked for an autograph on campus. I threw a party for nearly 100 students and not a single person put a photo on Facebook.” She rolls her eyes.

“Anyway, even if I was being given a hard time, I wasn’t going to wuss out of university because someone said ‘Wingardium leviosa’ to me in a corridor, or ‘Ten points for Gryffindor’. I’ve been dealing with the media since I was nine. If I can’t stand up to a few people giving me a hard time, it’s a bit pathetic, really. I’ve had so much worse.”

I guess I’ve lost my chance to get her on “Newsmakers.”

(photo: Joella Marano/Wikipedia)