Brown University. Corporation

The authority and responsibilities of the Corporation, a bicameral body composed of a Board of Fellows with twelve members and a Board of Trustees with forty-two, are set forth in the Charter of the University granted by the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in 1764. "It is our fixed star; we can do nothing that contradicts its prohibitions or transgresses its grants of power," states Henry Wriston in The Structure of Brown University.

The Charter originally provided for a twelve-member Board of Fellows and a Board of Trustees of thirty-six1. It provided further that eight of the Fellows should always be Baptists and the rest "indifferently of any or all denominations." The President was always to be a Fellow and always a Baptist. Of the thirty-six Trustees, the Charter provided that twenty-two should be Baptists, five Quakers, four Congregationalists, and five Episcopalians.

...