Brown Universityis the first Ivy League school in recent history with a mass shooting that led to multiple deaths.
While there have been isolated fatal shootings at severalIvy League colleges, including agun death at Harvard University in 2009anda 2021 killing of a Yale graduate student, there have been no active-shooter incidents with multiple fatalities.
USA TODAY, along with theGun Violence Archive (GVA), defines a mass shooting as an incident in which a minimum of four or more people are shot (injured or killed), not including the shooter, within a single event.
On Dec. 13, at least two people were killed and eight were injured in ashootingon Brown University's campus in Providence, R.I., according to the city's mayor. As of 8 p.m. on Dec. 13, Rhode Island Hospital six patients are in critical but stable condition, one patient is in critical condition and one patient is in stable condition.
The university, founded in 1764, had just begun itsfinal examination periodbefore the end of the Fall 2025 semester when the shooting happened.
TheIvy League, technically the name of anathletic conference, is made up of eight elite East Coast colleges and universities: Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University.
The group is widely renowned for its academic prestige and exclusivity.
While this is a first for the Ivy League, a few fatal shootings have taken place on college campuses in 2025.
Days before the Brown shooting, one student was killed and another critically injured in ashooting at Kentucky State University. A 48-year-old parent of a student at the university was arrested and charged in connection.
Back in April, two people were killed and several were injured in acampus shooting at Florida State University.
In 2023, threeMichigan State Universitystudents were killed in a campus shooting. Five others were critically wounded.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal:Brown University mass shooting: Is this the first at an Ivy League school?
