The enduring legacy of the Royce Fellowship

A man with a vision

Established in 1996, through the generosity of Charles Royce ’61, P’91, P’94, P’08, GP’26, the Royce Fellowship was intended to promote intellectual growth, reward the creativity and depth of character Mr. Royce saw throughout Brown’s student body, and incorporate social responsibility into the undergraduate experience.

“One of my goals in establishing the Royce Fellowship was to create this environment where students learn how to adapt to any creative process and not get stuck,” says Mr. Royce. “Over the past 25 years, I have been pleased to see how each Royce Fellow has pursued their fellowship — either completing it as they originally planned or pivoting and learning through doing.”

Mr. Royce is an emeritus member of the Brown Corporation, and his philanthropy has been instrumental in reinforcing the distinctive nature of Brown’s undergraduate experience through both the fellowship program and the Royce Professorships in Teaching Excellence. He also currently serves on the College Advisory Council.

“The Royce Fellowship has an extraordinary alumni group, and it is thrilling to think of what they have achieved,” he says. “Many have gone on to have other prominent forms of advanced scholarship and careers, and their accomplishments are a wonderful testament to the intellectual rigor and creativity of a Brown education.”

In fact, 36 Royce Fellows have later received Fulbright awards, and two — including Alexandra Ali Martínez ’22 — have been named Rhodes Scholars.

Building on the Open Curriculum

The ability to pursue a self-directed project is irresistible to Brown students, many of whom arrive on campus with multiple interests and seek to take advantage of the University’s Open Curriculum.

“When we ask students about the most impactful elements of their Brown education, they mention three things: creating knowledge in partnership with faculty, sharing knowledge in close collaboration with their peers, and applying knowledge in service to communities around the world,” says Dean of the College Rashid Zia ’01. “The Royce Fellowship allows them to do all three.”

jesús hernández '03, associate director of engaged scholarship at Brown’s Swearer Center for Public Service and director of the Royce Fellowship Program, stresses that students feel supported, but not directed, in their endeavors. Crucially, there is no pressure to specifically produce an academic text at the end of their project.

“We have an expansive view about what research is and what the end goals or end products of research can be,” he says. “Sometimes Royce Fellows produce a chapter of their senior thesis. But, sometimes the result is a one-woman show or a community health survey. The key is that the projects have some sort of public purpose or create some sort of public good.” 

Jasmine Beach-Ferrara ’98, who was a member of the first cohort of Royce Fellows, came to Brown through the Program in Liberal Medical Education, which combines undergraduate education and professional studies in medicine into a single eight-year program. Her interests spanned creative writing, hospice care, processing grief and loss, and LGBTQ issues.

Her fellowship project, working with University Chaplain Janet Cooper-Nelson, provided her with the time, the resources, and the guidance she needed to explore the intersections among those topics. 

“You don't always understand in the moment how different pieces of your life connect,” says Beach-Ferrara. “Looking back now, I understand how the experience I had as an undergraduate at Brown — the academic work, the relationships, the service work, and the fellowship — created a foundation that has allowed me to pursue my dreams.”

Beach-Ferrara chose not to attend medical school in order to pursue an MFA in fiction writing. She wrote a book of short stories that grew out of her Royce project and completed a Master’s of Divinity at Harvard. In addition to serving as an ordained minister, she currently directs the nonprofit Campaign for Southern Equality that works for LGBTQ equality and is running for Congress in Western North Carolina. 

“All of these things are directly connected to what I did during my Royce Fellowship,” she says.

The benefits of community 

What truly sets the Royce Fellowship apart from other engaged scholarship opportunities at the Brown is the cohort system and the lifetime membership in the Society of Royce Fellows, which is conferred upon a new group of scholars each year. 

“Mr. Royce could have expressed his generosity to Brown in innumerable ways,” says Arthur Samuels ’00, whose Royce Fellowship project focused on the 1871 Ku Klux Klan hearings and violence during the Reconstruction era. “But there was a real genius in creating this particular program to imagine a space for entrepreneurial undergraduates. Mr. Royce not only funded it, but then created a space to nurture it, and let students and faculty share their work with each other and push each other and explore and build on it. That’s visionary.” 

“It is one thing to be an achiever in an academic setting,” says Mr. Royce. “But it’s quite another to be a part of a community that by its definition is a sharing environment focused on engaged scholarship and discourse.” 

The cohorts meet throughout the course of the year to learn about each other’s projects and discuss their progress. Hernández points to this experience as possibly the most valuable aspect of the fellowship.

“These students want to go through the experience of doing research while also considering the ethics of that research. They get to do that in conversation with other students who are thinking about similar questions,” he says. “You might not have that if you’re in a lab by yourself or doing an independent project without a cohort.”

Zac Townsend ’08, whose fellowship project explored the creation of Brown’s Open Curriculum in 1969, says he is still in contact with members of his cohort and enjoys seeing the ways in which they have succeeded post-graduation.

“Having this cohort of people who are struggling in ways both similar and different to you allows you to build a cross-disciplinary community that persists,” he says. “There really is nothing else like that at Brown.”

The legacy lives on

In 2016, Mr. Royce expanded the Royce Fellowship Program to ensure that more undergraduates could take part in the experience. The most recent cohort, inducted into the program on April 18, 2022, includes 24 students with projects related to colonialism in India, autism spectrum disorders, nanotechnology for drug delivery, and maternal and child health.

“I am so proud of the opportunities that the Royce Fellowship offers to Brown students and the accomplishments of Royce alumni,” he says. “I am looking forward to what future fellows will dream up during their time together at Brown and beyond.”

The more than 600 Royce Fellows throughout the Brown community are not at all surprised that the program continues to thrive a quarter of the century later.

“I always felt like the Royce Fellowship went hand-in-hand with what I understood the mission of Brown to be,” says Beach-Ferrara. “That is, pushing students to find the thing that lit them up and to shape it into a pursuit. It was truly a game-changing experience.”