Brown University’s generous gift of 12,000 graphing calculators to the Providence public-school system is a downpayment on a larger gift that Brown has promised.

The gift forms the first installment of a program of atonement for slavery’s role in Brown’s founding. The Brown family participated in the slave trade and owned slaves. Slaves helped erect early campus buildings. A memorial and a slavery-research center, plus a $10 million endowment to help the Providence public schools, form Brown’s tripartite program in this matter. Members of racial minorities make up a large percentage of Providence public-school students.

The $118,000 worth of graphing calculators — devices that make graphs and perform calculations involving variables — is the first outlay from the proposed $10 million fund. Brown President Ruth Simmons announced the gift at Vartan Gregorian Elementary School in Fox Point. Mr. Gregorian was Brown’s president from 1989 to 1997; he now runs the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

“We say,” Ms. Simmons said of the Brown community, “ ‘We are the elite. We are the professors.’ Well, that doesn’t serve us well.” But it does serve Providence well. A civilized society needs an educated and intelligent elite. Brown has provided such an elite as a gift to its host city and state for 245 years.

Rhode Islanders should applaud the gift of Brown’s current “elitists,” professors and others, and note Brown’s atonement for a great historical wrong. Still, we also urge it to refrain from self-abasement –– after all, no one now at Brown had anything to do with slavery, and we don’t believe in racial or ethnic guilt, be it for Americans or for those people living in Africa now whose ancestors captured and sold other Africans into slavery to Western traders.