Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. It was chartered in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, shortened in common usage to Rhode Island College, and ranks as the seventh-oldest degree-granting institution in the United States and one of the nine colonial colleges established before the American Revolution. Its founding charter was unusually broad in matters of religion for the period: it kept sectarian doctrine out of the college's public teaching and opened admission to students irrespective of denomination. The present name was adopted in 1804, marking a benefaction from Nicholas Brown Jr.

The feature that most distinguishes Brown is the Open Curriculum, introduced in 1969 after a student-led review of undergraduate teaching. The university sets no distribution or general education requirements: undergraduates assemble their own course of study, choose among roughly eighty concentrations, may take classes on a satisfactory/no-credit basis, and do not carry unsuccessful courses on their transcripts. Teaching is organised through the College, the Graduate School, the Warren Alpert Medical School, and the schools of Engineering, Public Health and Professional Studies. Less conventional routes include the eight-year Program in Liberal Medical Education and the dual-degree study run jointly with the neighbouring Rhode Island School of Design.

Brown has belonged to the Association of American Universities since 1933 and holds the Carnegie classification for doctoral universities with very high research activity. Graduate degrees have been awarded since 1887, and the university maintains the oldest applied mathematics programme in the country together with the oldest engineering programme in the Ivy League; international and public policy work is gathered in the Watson School of International and Public Affairs. The campus covers about 143 acres on College Hill, a district of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture on the federal register that looks down on central Providence. Enrolment stands near 11,000 students, taught by some 850 faculty.