Best Practices: Five Decades On, Brown-Tougaloo Partnership Still Thrives

Partnerships between universities usually have a limited shelf life. Unforeseen conflicts sometimes doom such relationships, but more often, interinstitutional partnerships fade away when priorities evolve or key individuals change. So when an intercampus partnership—international or domestic—is still going strong after five decades, that’s worth a closer look for any institution looking to work productively and sustainably with another.

The partnership between Brown University, an Ivy League institution, and Tougaloo College, a small historically black college in Mississippi, dates back to 1964, in the civil rights era. Today, the partnership is active and thriving.

Officially, the mission of the partnership is to “enrich both campuses through student and faculty academic and cultural exchanges, collaborative research ventures, and administrative level engagements.” In practice, that has meant a steady stream of students and faculty flowing to and from Brown and Tougaloo, especially its Early Identification Program in Medicine (EIP), which offers top premed students at Tougaloo a path to early admission at Brown’s Alpert Medical School.

One student whose life has been transformed by the Brown-Tougaloo partnership is Waynesha E. Blaylock. As a sophomore at Tougaloo, she was accepted into the EIP program at Brown and spent a semester there during her junior year—her first foray north of the Mason-Dixon Line. At Brown, Blaylock took courses that were not available at Tougaloo, including feminist philosophy. She credits that semester exchange with helping her develop as a person and informing some of her decisions as a young adult.

Today, Blaylock is a first-year medical student