As Reunion 2025 preparations began this winter, organizers had a stark realization: For the first time, they would need to create a 50th Medical Reunion Class banner for the procession down College Hill. That’s because the MD Class of 1975—the first graduating class of the modern era—is celebrating its golden anniversary.
Being the first is nothing new for reunion planning committee members Pardon R. Kenney ’72 MMSc’75 MD’75 RES’80, P’03, and Glenn Mitchell ’67 ScM’69 MD’75. Kenney was one of the 34 students who entered Brown in the fall of 1968 expecting to complete a master’s of medical science degree and then go on to complete medical school elsewhere. But there were “whispers and hints” that by the time his undergraduate class was ready, there would be a four-year medical school and he could stay at Brown.
“It’s important to understand that, for a lot of us in the spring of 1968, it was a leap of faith,” Kenney says.
Mitchell was enrolled in the engineering PhD program at Brown, but had to withdraw with a master’s degree due to the Vietnam draft. After completing his draft obligations, he decided to go to medical school. “Brown offered me the chance to actually change my graduate major from engineering to an MMSc. I knew there were rumors of a medical school in the offing,” he says. Not having been pre-med, Mitchell saw it as his best route to medicine.
That leap of faith paid off. Despite strong opposition from numerous campus-based faculty, expansion to a four-year medical school was approved by the Brown Corporation in March 1972 and Kenney, Mitchell, and their classmates became the first students in the new medical school. The full curriculum, including clinical clerkships, was organized as the class progressed—truly assembling the airplane while flying it.
Fifty-eight students received their medical degrees on June 2, 1975, pledging a Physician’s Oath that members of the class had written and is still used today. “We had the ego to say we needed a different medical oath from the Hippocratic,” Mitchell says. “But we made a particularly ‘Brown’ oath.”
Kenney says they expect more than 30 classmates to attend the 50th reunion. “If they all show up, it will be a world record for our class,” Kenney says. Eleven members of the class have died.
A special luncheon is planned for the class on the Saturday of Reunion Weekend. Members of the class have endowed a medical student scholarship. In Kenney’s estimation, the Medical School is “one of the most important things that Brown University has ever done for the state of Rhode Island, to vastly improve the quality of medical care. That there is today a health system called Brown University Health would [have been]completely inconceivable to us and to our faculty.”
“It’s hard for students and residents, and certainly faculty today, to understand how far this school has come from an entity that was literally on a shoestring,” he adds. “You acquire a real sense of pride for your school.”