Brown Challenge Fountain
A shrine to fundraising at Southwestern, claimed by students for a different purpose.
During late 1996, an announcement was made to the Southwestern campus that by Spring 1997, there would be a new fountain built on the Academic Mall. The main reason for building the fountain was to commemorate the impact of the Brown Challenge, a twenty-year grant established by the Brown Foundation Inc. of Houston that has a significant impact on the built environment of the University as well as its financial infrastructure.
When the Brown Challenge was built, the fountain was meant to serve as a reminder of the importance of philanthropy to the Southwestern experience for the community. Beyond that, the Brown Challenge Fountain was also meant to create a social place where students could gather while sitting on the bench that oversees the Mall, facing the Chapel.
In my time here, I have never seen anyone use the fountain as it was intended. Currently the Fountain mainly serves as the connecting sidewalk for the Sarofim School of Arts and the Smith Library. Aside from serving as a pathway for students to get where they need to go on campus, Today, the fountain’s purpose is purely aesthetic, as the memory of the impact of the Brown Challenge has cycled through after all of the students who directly witnessed the effect of the grant graduated from the University. If anything, people avoid the fountain because of its poor design: for years the slick granite stones marking its entrance were a slipping hazard, and the pool below the fountain is usually choked in debris from the latest storm.
However, there is one longstanding tradition bearing the same name as the fountain that has kept the name of the Brown Challenge alive on this campus, despite having no resemblance to the intention of the original fundraising challenge. The Brown Challenge, as recent SU students know it, involves streaking across campus all the way to the Brown Challenge fountain and jumping in.
Although there have been many streaking incidents on campus throughout history, I was not able to trace the first instance in which a student completed the challenge establishing it as a campus tradition. Student mythology says that it was originated as a prank by a member of one of the four fraternities. It has now expanded to involve those beyond Greek life, with students from all over campus completing the challenge every semester.
Despite being intended to be a marker of the Brown Foundation and its influence to the Southwestern infrastructure that we have come to know, the fountain has achieved its job as a memory marker on campus. Whether you see it and remember the fundraiser or completing a bet that a friend made with you, the Brown Challenge Fountain has created intergenerational collective place memory, which connects students back to Southwestern’s culture.
