Police rope off the scene as they continue to search for the suspect of a shooting at Brown University.

Brown University is 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 several Ivy League colleges, including a gun death at Harvard University in 2009 and a 2021 killing of a Yale graduate student, there have been no active-shooter incidents with multiple fatalities.

USA TODAY, along with the Gun 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 a shooting on 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 its final examination period before the end of the Fall 2025 semester when the shooting happened.

The Ivy League, technically the name of an athletic 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 a shooting 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 a campus shooting at Florida State University.

In 2023, three Michigan State University students 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?

Reporting by Bailey Allen, USA TODAY NETWORK - New England / The Providence Journal

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