Chris Brown Brings Classroom to Life

Students in M. Christopher Brown's courses never know what to expect from this dynamic teacher and scholar. He does not shy away from topical, controversial issues and expects the same courageous exploration from his students. The course he taught here for the School of Education, "Legal Aspects in Higher Education," is a required course designed to provide students with enough background in law to cope with the legal issues that arise in most universities. For that reason, although Brown considers himself a law scholar as well as a scholar of higher education, he focused this course more on the legal issues, and less upon the law itself. "This is a class the students need; in it, I try to make them good consumers of law, not scholars of it." He had his students analyze the effects of certain legislation upon higher education in an effort to help them understand the practice as well as the theory behind educational lawmaking.

Brown brings this same focus upon the issues of law to his scholarly endeavors as well. His area of special focus is the historically black public college and university, a subject of much legislative interest of late, and one where letter and the spirit of the law are often in conflict. As Brown says, "The law informs policy, but politics implements policy." His forthcoming book, a development of his dissertation entitled The Quest to Define Collegiate Desegregation, focuses upon this question of how law becomes policy. Through this study and others he is currently constructing (including an edited volume of different scholars' viewpoints called Black Colleges at the Millennium), Brown hopes to illuminate the ways to determine a linear progression from legal educational objective to practical policy. Such a study requires a comparison of different universities' policies of desegregation and the laws that regulate those practices.

In addition to these extensive teaching and research responsibilities, Brown has been in the process of moving from his visiting position at the University of Missouri at Kansas City to a permanent one at the University of Illinois. Thus, although his stay here in Bloomington has been hectic, he has found the experience highly productive and stimulating as well, and Indiana and the School of Education are grateful for his contribution to the Minority Faculty Fellowship Program.