I remember college as a place of possibility.

We protested — yes — but we did so with sit-ins, with leaflets, with raised voices and locked arms. We marched and we sang “We Shall Overcome Someday.” We believed, perhaps naively, that collective courage and moral clarity could bend institutions toward justice, and that the struggle for change did not require the threat of death.

I never once feared that going to class might cost me my life.

Today, I watch a very different reality unfold — most recently at Brown University, and at campuses across this country — from the vantage point of someone who has lived long enough to see what has been lost. I write not only as a former college student, but as a grandparent of three current college students and one high school senior preparing to step onto a campus next year.

A Generation Raised on Lockdowns

The violence at Brown is not an isolated incident. It is part of a pattern that now follows students from kindergarten through college. Lockdown drills. Emergency alerts. Text messages from parents that say, “Please answer.” Calls that begin with, “Are you safe?”

This generation is already carrying more than any before it. Many are hyperaware of exits and escape routes. They are still reckoning with the aftereffects of COVID-19 — years of isolation, disrupted learning, loss, and uncertainty at precisely the stage of life meant for formation.

What is particularly sobering are reports that two of the Brown students who survived this latest incident had already lived through other school attacks. That kind of repetition reshapes a person’s sense of safety and expectation. It alters how young people — and young adults — move through the world.

The loss of life at Brown stands on its own. Two students were killed. Nine others were wounded. Nothing contextualizes that pain. Nothing competes with it.

The Burden Black Families Carry

Alongside that shared horror, many Black families carry an additional, familiar burden — one that does not replace this grief, but sits beside it.

Long before our children step onto a college campus — long before move-in day and freshman orientation — Black parents and grandparents are having the talks. Not one conversation, but many. How to comport yourself. How to de-escalate. How to survive encounters that others never have to anticipate. How to navigate a society that too often reads threat where there is none.

Those conversations now also include how to navigate racism that does not announce itself loudly.

This summer, during a college visit, my high school senior encountered what she later described — accurately — as a microaggression. She named it without drama, as a fact to be noted and managed. The fact that a 17-year-old already has language for this, and knows it will be necessary, says a great deal about the environment young people are preparing to enter.

This does not diminish what happened at Brown. It underscores how many layers of vigilance students are now expected to carry at once.

So in addition to preparing our children for physical danger, we are preparing them to navigate subtle slights, coded language, lowered expectations, and moments of isolation — often simultaneously. These pressures do not disappear when students arrive on campus. They shape how students and young adults experience college, wherever they enroll.

Are HBCUs Safer?

Historically Black colleges and universities, for example, are not more dangerous places to learn. But they have been deliberately targeted.

HBCU campuses — created as sanctuaries of affirmation, culture, and excellence — have faced bomb threats, lockdowns, and harassment intended to disrupt and intimidate. Students have been evacuated. Classes interrupted. Fear imposed on institutions built to nurture and protect. These acts say nothing about the institutions themselves. They speak instead to a willingness to unsettle Black spaces wherever they exist.

For some families, the violence unfolding on campuses represents a rupture. For others, it confirms long-held concerns.

This Cannot Be Allowed to Become Normal

In moments like these, “thoughts and prayers” are often offered sincerely. Too often, however, the shock fades before conditions change. The headlines move on. Students and young adults return to classrooms carrying fear they did not choose.

College campuses were once defined primarily by intellectual risk. Increasingly, they are shaped by security briefings, emergency alerts, and contingency plans.

I question why repeated violence still fails to trigger sustained prevention. I question why campuses are expected to manage the consequences of decisions made far beyond their control. I question why students are asked to adapt to fear rather than being protected from it.

Students are not asking for perfection. They are asking for protection. For honesty. For adults willing to move beyond condolences toward solutions—even when those solutions are difficult.

Prevention must matter as much as response. Early-warning systems, threat-assessment teams, and sustained mental-health resources should be standard, not optional. Federal leadership must do more than react; it must set clear, enforceable safety expectations and help institutions meet them. And when campuses are targeted because of who they serve, those acts must be named plainly. Silence and euphemism only embolden intimidation.

College should still be a place where ideas collide — not bullets. Where protest is loud but nonviolent. Where disagreement sharpens the mind, not endangers the body. Where parents and grandparents can send their children off without rehearsing worst-case scenarios.

As this is written, families at Brown University are grieving the loss of two students, and the campus is struggling to absorb what should never have happened. They deserve more than our attention in the moment. They deserve change.

So do the students and young adults who were wounded. So do the classmates who will return to lecture halls altered by what they witnessed. So do families across this country who now measure each school year in terms of risk.

This is not inevitable. It is not acceptable. And it cannot be normalized.

This has to stop.

Dr. Frances Murphy Draper is CEO and publisher of The AFRO-American Newspapers.