Brown  used to represent the pinnacle of American education. Just saying that name, “Brown,” meant serious scholarship, fierce competition, and students who had fought with their smarts to earn their place among the brightest minds in the country.

Families pay a jaw-dropping amount of money for that reputation because a Brown degree is supposed to prove something to the world.

But lately, that prestigious reputation has been taking a brutal beating, especially after this latest cheating scandal… more on that later.

So, why has Brown gone from glistening, well-respected ivy to dusty, second-class weeds? Well, there are probably a lot of reasons, but the main one has to be these three letters: DEI.

Brown has spent years making diversity and inclusion a central part of its academic mission. Excellence has taken a backseat to their new purpose: charity.

Brown’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion describes itself as a “critical leader.” The university says DEI is essential to advancing knowledge and understanding. Of course, they can’t explain how accepting people based on skin color or sexual preference over excellence and IQ is advancing knowledge.

But Brown made a choice. They placed all of their eggs in the DEI basket, and now, they’re paying the price.

As a matter of fact, when President Trump signed an executive order targeting these unfair, dangerous programs, Brown administrators were reportedly prepared to fight any action they believed compromised the school’s very important mission.

Brown has made it very clear what it considers worth defending.

What isn’t clear is whether academics, integrity, and actual learning have been protected with the same level of passion or if any of that is even part of the mission these days.

And that brings us to the cheating scandal now blowing up at Brown. It started in one of the university’s toughest economics classes, where the difference between what students could do at home and what they could do sitting in a classroom (without AI) was quite a shocker.

The take-home midterm average was 96 percent, and forty students got perfect scores.

That’s pretty impressive, right?

Well, when Professor Roberto Serrano decided to move the final back into the classroom, eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, nine students didn’t show up, and the class average crashed from 96 percent to a horrific 48 percent.

As it stands now, Brown is looking like a wildly expensive “credential factory” that just got caught selling the appearance of Ivy League excellence.

Did the universities’ DEI culture and DEI students and staff cause students to cheat? Probably, but honestly, that’s not the argument here.

The story here is less about the students cheating and why and more about these once well-respected institutions revealing their true priorities through the things they fight hardest to protect. Brown has feverishly defended DEI as part of its actual “academic mission.” Meanwhile, the professor at the center of this scandal says the administration’s response to very obvious mass cheating has been pretty weak.

So, how did all of this go down?

It started after a deadly shooting on Brown’s campus. Professor Serrano decided to make the spring midterm and final take-home exams.

Serrano noticed that many of the answers were technically correct but strangely written. When he and his grad students dug deeper, it was clear that ChatGPT was likely the culprit.

Professor Serrano didn’t throw out the midterm right away. He gave the students a chance to prove the scores were legit. He moved the final back into the classroom and told them it would only count if their results were somewhere in the same ballpark.

That’s when the whole thing blew up.

The course… typically attracts few students, but very good ones. [Serrano] has never had more than 30 students enrolled at a time, and on some occasions he had only eight. This semester, probably because of the new evaluation system, 86 students signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was administered on March 5, were extraordinary, with an average score of 96 out of 100. Forty students scored a perfect 100.

This was indeed extraordinary, because as Serrano told Inside Higher Ed, “Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because… take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time.”

Beyond the numbers, many of the answers, even when correct, felt slightly off. They had a “very convoluted style,” Serrano said. When he and his grad students ran the exam questions through ChatGPT, they received similar results.

A suspicious Serrano decided that he would make the final exam in-person; he would see if students did similarly well on it. He emailed his class, telling them, “I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong. That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”

Among those who took the test, the average score plunged—from 96 all the way down to 48.

Maybe these students aren’t a bunch of dummies. Some of them might be really clever. But being smart and actually learning something aren’t the same thing. This scandal makes it look like plenty of students figured out how to work the system without ever really learning the material.

Brown didn’t suddenly develop this crisis because ChatGPT popped on the scene. AI exposed how much of the university’s “celebrated excellence” is based on grades, credentials, and appearances rather than academic excellence.

The professor who exposed all of this understands something about genuine academic work that his students don’t.

Serrano went blind from retinal dystrophy when he was seventeen. He could’ve decided that was the end of his academic future, but he didn’t. He learned Braille, kept going, and made it to Harvard… on his smarts and merits, not DEI.

That probably explains why he couldn’t shrug off what happened in his classroom.

TBDH:

After a short-lived crisis, he decided [blindness] would not stop him. He learned Braille, and his excellent academic record opened up the doors of Harvard. “Of course it affects my life, but one shouldn’t over-dramatize. We economists understand reality as a set of people responding to optimization problems with restrictions. I view my disease simply as one more restriction that I have to deal with, and I optimize based on that,” he says.

DEI is a major part of this collapse in excellence. It helped create a university culture that fixates on how students feel inside the institution, but does Brown care nearly as much about what those students can actually do?

Brown’s own research shows that students know AI is weakening them, yet they keep using it anyway.

More than half of the undergraduate students surveyed said they intentionally use generative AI either daily or weekly. Graduate and medical students reported even higher usage.

Great, so medical students are skating by on AI. That’s good to know.

The students know the shortcuts are making them less capable, but the pressure to compete, save time, and protect their grades keeps pulling them back to it.

So we have to ask: Are these exceptionally smart students who are under a lot of pressure, maybe a little lazy, and looking for a shortcut? Or are these DEI students, admitted under lowered standards, who are now in way over their heads and using AI as a life preserver just to stay afloat?

TBDH:

As a university, Brown is grappling with hard questions about AI use at the moment. It recently released a provost-led report (PDF) on “Generative AI in Teaching and Learning,” which found that it’s not just professors who have concerns.

Even though “56 percent of undergraduate respondents [at Brown] and 67 percent of graduate and medical student respondents reported intentionally using GenAI tools daily or weekly,” the report notes that large majorities of students also have “concerns about the impact of GenAI use on their learning” and a “fear of negative consequences for their cognitive capacity.”

Serrano shares those concerns, and he wants universities as a whole to stand up for human thought. That’s why he’s not letting this story go, despite what he contends is a fairly tepid reaction from Brown administrators.

“We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is okay,” he told Inside Higher Ed. “That leads to a declining society, to a failed society.

“We cannot choose to become idiots.”

One could argue the university’s DEI mission is creating a whole bunch of idiots.

Brown has fought hard to make DEI part of the school’s front-and-center identity. It’s spent years talking about making students feel welcomed, valued, represented, and empowered. That all sounds great in a brochure.

But an Ivy League school is supposed to expect something from the students lucky enough to be there. It should care about honesty, effort, excellence, and big consequences when students cheat.

Sure, Brown still has the Ivy League name, the prestige, and the massive price tag.

But excellence and high-achieving greatness have been diluted by DEI, AI, and cheating scandals.