Take a trip down memory lane with you pals from the Brown Class of 1980. Try to answer the following questions without resorting to the Internet or your scrapbook. After you're done, click here for answers.

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1. What is the name of the artsy punk rock group pictured on this page? And what was the name of their first big national hit?

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2. What is Josiah Carberry's middle name? And what is his field of study?

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3. What Rhode Island-based group wrote and performed the cult classic song, "Complex World"? Hint: Their astoundingly erudite lyrics include:

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"Should I be a math teacher, or an actor?
Should I drive an XKE or a tractor?
It's a complex world --
Sometimes I feel like a ch-ch-ch-chimpanzee."

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4. Which of the following people did NOT graduate from Brown?

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• Ted Turner

• Emma Watson

• John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

• John Krasinski

• Fritz Pollard

• Janet Yellen

• John Sculley III

• Lisa Loeb

• John Heisman

• John F. Kennedy, Jr.

• Horace Mann

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5. What Brown graduate hosted "This American Life" on National Public Radio?

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6. True or False: Brown University was originally named “The College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” but was renamed after Nicholas Brown donated $5,000 to the school in 1804 when tuition was only $5.

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7. True or False: Brown was the first Ivy League university to accept students regardless of religious background.

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8. What female blues singer performed at Brown during Spring Weekend 1979?

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9. When did Josiah Carberry first appear on the Brown campus?

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10. What famous singer-songwriter was temporarily barred from re-entering the Brown campus during a concert at which he was scheduled to perform?

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11. True or False: Princess Diana of England once spent a night in Metcalf dormitory at Brown following her divorce from Prince Charles (now King Charles III)?

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12. Was the closure of the East Campus Dining Center (ECDC) one of the greatest tragedies in the history of human civilization?

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13. True or False: The legal drinking age in Rhode Island in 1976 was 18 years of age.

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14. True or False: Novelist Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, received an honorary degree from Brown during the 1980 Commencement ceremonies.

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15. True or False: St. Mary's, Rhode Island's oldest Roman Catholic parish was founded in 1828. The church is best known as the site of the wedding of Jacqueline Bouvier to John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1953.

 

16. What was the freshman curse involving Brown libraries?

 

17. What was the name of the revolutionary bookstore on Thayer Street during our time at Brown?

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​18. Also, what is the meaning of Josiah Carberry's bookplate (motto) "Dulce et Decorum Est Desipere in Loco"?

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19. How old was John Travolta when he starred in "Saturday Night Fever" and what year did that movie appear?

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20. True or False: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams publicly acknowledged Roger Williams as the originator of the principles reflected in The First Amendment. Among those principles were freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of public assembly. 

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21. Why does Brown use the abbreviation "A.B." instead of "B.A." on diplomas?

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22. What is the name of Josiah Carberry's "future wife"?

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Click here for the answers. Good luck!