SENIOR PROFILE: Rich Brown

It’s hard to say what Rich Brown’s claim to fame is.

It might be his role in the 2007 hunger strike, as one of several students who refused food and water for several days to demand administrative reform and a more diverse Core Curriculum.

Or maybe he’ll be remembered as the adventurous anthropology major who hitchhiked with immigrants in New Mexico and couch-surfed his way through Amsterdam.

Or, if you live in upstate New York, you might have seen him plummeting to the earth “bare-ass naked” on a recent nude skydiving expedition.

Born in South Africa, he’s lived in Virginia, Belgium, Estonia, and Egypt with his mother, who works for the U.S. Embassy. He calls her and several of his anthropology professors his greatest influences in life.

At the end of all of Brown’s stories, he has something to say about social justice, sustainability, activism, or living consciously. Brown is the hopeful activist, proud of his generation and lashing out at the system that he said seeks to contain and control the best and the brightest.

“We’re bred for success, not happiness,” he said, revising a quote from the German philosopher Albert Schweitzer.

Brown started his career at Columbia as a premed student, but said he spent more time gazing out his dorm room window than he did solving problem sets.

“I switched out of premed after I realized that everyone treated it as a science, not a series of miracles, which is what it is and how I saw it,” said Brown, who has an atom tattooed on his chest.
Last year, Brown spent the summer working on houses that ran on sustainable energy in a job he found through World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, an organization that arranges for volunteers to work on organic farms around the world.

He’ll spend this summer road-tripping back to his host family in New Mexico, where he said he had more of an eye-opening, cross-cultural experience than he did during the semester he spent in the south of France.

Brown and his friends don’t talk much about his three-day hunger strike, but he said he was still proud to have been a part of it and remains interested in the concept of mind over body.
“It was a wonderful mental exercise, at the very least,” he said.

Brown said that while Columbia has given him a world-class education, there’s still much left to learn, and he added that he believes young people are capable of more than what college challenges them to do.

“My plan after college is basically to drop out,” he said.

It’s not the normal route a college drop-out would take, but Brown is the type who takes the scenic route.