President Roger H. Brown
	Photo by Phil Farnsworth

When Berklee College of Music President Roger H. Brown assumed his post at the college in 2004, he brought a rich palette of professional and life experiences to the job. Skills accrued playing recording sessions as a drummer in New York, administering United Nations humanitarian operations in Southeast Asia and Africa, and founding a company with his wife that became a corporation valued at over $1 billion and employing 16,000 people have contributed to his effective leadership at the world's largest college of contemporary music.

Music has been a compelling theme reprised in all of Brown's pursuits. He honed his drumming skills in high school and by playing with bands as an undergraduate at Davidson College. Immediately after earning his bachelor's degree in physics from Davidson, Brown spent a year in Kenya teaching math. While there, he moonlighted by playing drums with an award-winning Kenyan gospel choir. Upon returning home, he enrolled in an M.B.A. program at Yale, but interrupted his studies to help alleviate a humanitarian crisis on the Thai-Cambodian border. Brown administered the Land Bridge food distribution operation under the auspices of CARE and UNICEF. The effort that Brown, his future wife Linda Mason, and others masterminded was the largest famine relief program ever attempted at the time. The program fed 25,000 people per day and within six months had averted starvation for countless Cambodians.

While in Southeast Asia, Brown also helped provide nourishment for the spirits of the people by making recordings with refugees in camps to preserve their traditional Cambodian music that Khmer Rouge rulers had suppressed. Subsequently, Brown and Mason cowrote a book about the operation titled Rice, Rivalry, and Politics.

After returning to the U.S. and finishing his studies at Yale, Brown and Mason heeded the call to serve as codirectors of a Save the Children Federation initiative for famine relief in Sudan. The innovative program served more than 400,000 people and is estimated to have saved over 20,000 lives. The operation Brown, Mason, and the humanitarian community successfully executed became the blueprint for future large-scale U.N. relief undertakings. Brown's penchant for seeking opportunities for further immersion in cultures different from his own prompted him to play drums with Sudanese musicians during his stay.

After spending nearly five years outside America, Brown returned home in 1986 with a desire to serve American families. To that end, Brown and Mason secured venture capital and launched Bright Horizons. Their company provided quality child care and early education for the children of working parents by opening facilities located near large corporations. Within a decade, Brown and Mason had built a multi-million dollar, publicly traded company that operated centers for universities, hospitals, and corporations around the U.S. and the U.K. In 1996, Brown and Mason received the Ernst & Young/USA Today Entrepreneur of the Year award. Other accolades and awards, including the White House's Ron Brown Award for Corporate Leadership, followed.

Brown utilized his musical talents within the company to write, produce, and perform on six CDs of children's music that featured Ziggy Marley, Vinx, Raffi, and others. The profits from the discs went to a foundation aiding homeless children. After 16 years of successfully leading Bright Horizons, Brown decided to turn his sights to higher education and accepted the position as Berklee's third chief executive.

In 2007, Brown launched Giant Steps, the college's first capital campaign with a goal of raising $50 million. He has initiated Berklee's Presidential Scholars and Africa Scholars programs that provide full-ride scholarships to give top musicians around the globe a Berklee education. He has overseen the expansion of the City Music Program beyond Boston in an effort to provide educational opportunities for talented but economically disadvantaged urban youth. The program now has partners in cities across America. As well, Brown has led Berklee to adopt a more selective admissions policy that requires an interview and audition for all applicants to the college. In tandem with that effort, Brown's leadership has led to the creation of a model advising program to support all entering students, utilizing both faculty and trained upper-semester student advisors.

Brown has helped the college enhance the student experience by establishing semester-abroad programs in Greece and Germany, and by expanding the Boston campus facilities through real estate acquisitions. Brown signed a partnership with the city of Valencia, Spain and the Spanish Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers to build a Berklee satellite campus in Valencia that will offer graduate studies programs in a variety of music and music technology areas beginning in 2012.

Over the past four years Brown has presented honorary doctor of music degrees to a range of high achievers representing many disciplines. The list includes McCoy Tyner, Aretha Franklin, Ornette Coleman, Clint Eastwood, Melissa Etheridge, Steve Winwood, Earl Scruggs, Philip Bailey, and Gloria and Emilio Estefan, to name a few. Brown himself has been recognized for his accomplishments at Berklee with the Cruz de Honor from the provincial government of Valencia, Spain and the March of Dimes Franklin Delano Roosevelt Humanitarian Award.

Brown sums up his aspirations for Berklee in a few far-reaching sentences. "Berklee has produced artists who have won a collective 172 Grammy Awards, composed some of the great film scores of our time, written jazz and rock standards, and transformed the way people play their instruments and teach contemporary music. We have the opportunity to be a powerful force in the world to help train the next generation of leading music entrepreneurs, teachers, and artists."