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Ebony and Ivy
How a passion for learning took Ruth Simmons from the poverty of Houston’s Fifth Ward to the presidency of Smith College.
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“We have had the strongest fundraising years in the college’s history since I’ve been president,” Simmons said. “Alumnae have reacted well, and that’s an opportunity for every private institution to feel encouraged that race is not an impediment to leadership.”
Simmons was the first choice of Smith’s presidential search committee, according to Elizabeth Spelman, a professor of philosophy who was on the committee. “No one else we interviewed had such a vigorous, such a loving understanding of the meaning of education,” Spelman said. “No one else so boldly delineated the place of educational institutions in the national and international context.”
According to Spelman, the students are equally enthusiastic about Simmons because she never plays favorites. “Everyone can assume both that they will get a fair hearing from her and that they will be subjected to tough questioning,” she said. “At the same time, she is a person of unmistakable warmth and disarming humor.”
Before becoming president of Smith, the alma mater of Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush, Simmons was vice-provost of Princeton University, in New Jersey, and provost of Spelman College, in Atlanta, America’s oldest black women’s college, and she taught French literature at both. People often seem surprised that she has come so far, she noted, and she considers that a bad sign. “It’s almost inconceivable to people that it’s possible to succeed,” she explained. “In a sense, Americans don’t believe their own hype. In this country we say that if you work hard and persist, you can do anything, and that’s what we believe as a country, isn’t it? That ought not to be surprising unless we believe that there’s corruption in our system and that you have to be well connected in order to get anywhere—and if we believe that, then we really need to reexamine the society we’ve built.”
Simmons worked hard and persisted. And when it came to rising through the ranks of academia, she found that being black was less of an obstacle than being a woman. Her ascent would have been much more dramatic, she said, had she been a man: “When you reach a certain level and you are trying to lead, it’s harder to be a woman because people still find it difficult to be led by women. My sense is that in the academy, men, if they have ability, are much more likely to be able to make it.”
How, then, does she explain her success? “Leadership is about staking out an area where you can do a good job and caring enough about that job to take chances, to put your skills on the line, to put your viewpoints and vision on the line and then seeing what works,” she said. “Often women and minorities think they have to imitate to be successful. They think they have to do what their white peers are doing or they have to be invisible and quiet and that will get them someplace. If there’s anything that marks my career, it is that I never believed that and I never cared about that.”
Before Simmons decided to accept the directorship of Princeton’s Afro-American studies program in the eighties, friends and colleagues advised her against it because she might typecast herself. “I did it anyway because I cared about Afro-American studies and I wanted to demonstrate how important it was to take seriously the study of other cultures,” she said. “There’s no question that they asked me because I was African American and because they thought I could do the job, but I was a novice. I had to learn as much as I could about the field and try to revive the department.”
Simmons transformed the marginal program into one of the strongest in the country by recruiting such high-profile black scholars as novelist Toni Morrison, philosopher of religion Cornel West, and biographer Arnold Rampersad. Her 1993 analysis of racial problems at Princeton, known as the Simmons Report, became a national model. It concluded that the problems on campus grew out of natural misunderstandings on the part of both black and white students. White students, for example, resented the way black students segregated themselves on campus, and blacks resented being stigmatized because of their skin color. Some of the report’s recommendations—such as establishing an office of conflict resolution and setting up a campus climate committee to defuse ongoing misunderstandings—have been adopted by other universities around the country.
Smith is among the nation’s strongest liberal arts colleges, both financially and academically, but it is struggling to recruit more minority students and faculty. It has no scholarships specifically designated for minorities, and Simmons admits that her one disappointment so far is that she has been unable to focus on bringing more minority students to Smith. As of November 1998, there were only 100 black students out of a student body of 2,650. Among the 262 faculty members, 11 are black. “The amount of time I have to deal with that issue is nil because my time has been taken up with long-term strategic planning and fundraising,” Simmons said. “I’d like to spend more time personally recruiting, being on the road, speaking with students, and encouraging them to apply. I already speak at high schools and college fairs, but I’d like to do more of that.”
Meanwhile, she takes an active interest in the minority students currently enrolled at Smith. “I have a strong bond with them,” she said. “They often invite me to special events and they make me an honorary member of their clubs and they give me a lot of support. They give me advice about policies and tend to be outspoken, so they are helpful to me about what needs to be done to assist students in their work. They keep my feet to the fire.”
During a pre-orientation program for minorities in the fall of 1995, Simmons befriended DeKia Henderson, then a freshman from Dallas. “I had come a long way from home, and she came up to me and asked why I was sitting by myself,” says Henderson, now a 21-year-old senior majoring in biology. “She encouraged me to get involved in the student community.” Henderson went on to join the Black Student Alliance and become involved in student government.
“President Simmons inspires me because we come from the same background and she’s gotten this far,” Henderson says. “I think if she can do it, I can do it.”
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