I remember college as a place of possibility.
We protested — yes — but we did so with sit-ins, with leaflets, with raised voices and locked arms. We marched and we sang “We Shall Overcome Someday.” We believed, perhaps naively, that collective courage and moral clarity could bend institutions toward justice, and that the struggle for change did not require the threat of death.
I never once feared that going to class might cost me my life.
Today, I watch a very different reality unfold — most recently at Brown University, and at campuses across this country — from the vantage point of someone who has lived long enough to see what has been lost. I write not only as a former college student, but as a grandparent of three current college students and one high school senior preparing to step onto a campus next year.
The violence at Brown is not an isolated incident. It is part of a pattern that now follows students from kindergarten through college. Lockdown drills. Emergency alerts. Calls that begin with, “Are you safe?” Many are hyperaware of exits and escape routes. They are still reckoning with the aftereffects of COVID-19 — years of isolation, disrupted learning, loss and uncertainty.
What is particularly sobering are reports that some Brown students had already lived through other school attacks. That kind of repetition reshapes a person’s sense of safety. It alters how young adults move through the world.
The loss of life at Brown stands on its own. Two students were killed. Nine others were wounded. Nothing contextualizes that pain.
Alongside that shared horror, many Black families carry an additional, familiar burden — one that does not replace this grief, but sits beside it.
Long before our children step onto a college campus, Black parents and grandparents are having the talks. How to comport yourself. How to de-escalate. How to survive encounters others never have to anticipate. How to navigate a society that too often reads threat where there is none.
Those conversations now also include how to navigate racism that does not announce itself loudly.
This summer, during a college visit, my high school senior encountered what she later described — accurately — as a microaggression. She named it without drama, as a fact to be managed. The fact that a 17-year-old already has language for this says a great deal about the environment young people are preparing to enter.
So in addition to preparing our children for physical danger, we are preparing them to navigate subtle slights, coded language and moments of isolation — often simultaneously.
Historically Black colleges and universities are not more dangerous places to learn. But they have been deliberately targeted. HBCU campuses — sanctuaries of affirmation and excellence — have faced bomb threats, lockdowns and harassment intended to disrupt and intimidate. Fear is imposed on institutions built to nurture and protect.
This cannot be allowed to become normal.
In moments like these, “thoughts and prayers” are often sincere. Too often, however, the shock fades before conditions change. Students return to classrooms carrying fear they did not choose.
College campuses were once defined primarily by intellectual risk. Increasingly, they are shaped by security briefings, emergency alerts and contingency plans.
I question why repeated violence still fails to trigger sustained prevention. I question why campuses are expected to manage the consequences of decisions made far beyond their control. I question why students are asked to adapt to fear rather than being protected from it.
Students are not asking for perfection. They are asking for protection. For honesty. For adults willing to move beyond condolences toward solutions — even when those solutions are difficult.
Prevention must matter as much as response. Early-warning systems, threat-assessment teams and sustained mental health resources should be standard. Federal leadership must do more than react. And when campuses are targeted because of who they serve, those acts must be named plainly.
College should still be a place where ideas collide — not bullets.
Families at Brown University are grieving. They deserve more than attention in the moment. They deserve change.
So do the students who were wounded. So do classmates who will walk the halls altered by what they witnessed. So do families across this country who now measure each school year in terms of risk.
This is not inevitable. It is not acceptable. And it cannot be normalized.
This has to stop.
Dr. Frances Murphy Draper is CEO and publisher of The AFRO-American Newspapers.