Digital Extras

RUTH SIMMONS

Brown University's 18th president is a woman with a mission. Almost 60, she says she's fearless.

Sunday, May 29, 2005

BY JENNIFER D. JORDAN
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Ruth Simmons is in a hurry. After four years as president of Brown University, Simmons knows precisely what she wants to do. She just wonders if she has enough time to get it all done.

Digital extra

Audio slideshow: An interview with Brown University President Ruth Simmons, narrated by Journal staff writer Jennifer Jordan

Simmons, who turns 60 this summer, says Brown will be her last job.

"I know I only have a certain amount of years to do this," she says.

"I am at the right stage in my career. I am not afraid of controversy. I am not afraid of the unhappiness of change. I am not afraid of the political machinations that abound on a campus. What I am here to do, I will do, irrespective of all of that."

She has become fearless, she says.

"That hasn't always been the case in my life. But it's true now."

When Simmons took over as Brown's 18th president four years ago, she became the first black president of an Ivy League university and one of a handful of females leading elite research institutions.

Brown's trustees embraced the historic symbolism of her appointment. They didn't stop there, however.

The university needed to surge forward, they told her, and shake off the period of uncertainty that had plagued Brown in recent years. The tenure of the previous president, Gordon Gee, was brief and unhappy. An interim president had stepped in for 18 months to maintain stability while a national search was conducted. Simmons came to Brown in 2001 after a six-year, successful presidency at Smith College, the prestigious women's college in Massachusetts.

Brown's trustees, known as the corporation, told Simmons they wanted vision, momentum and progress.

"The corporation made it clear they wanted me to hit the ground running. There were aspirations. I had to get things done," Simmons recalls. "I thought, 'Oh, I can do that.' "

She plunged in with an ambitious agenda -- expanding undergraduate scholarships and initiating need-blind admissions; boosting professors' salaries and creating 100 new faculty positions; improving the Brown graduate and medical schools; and laying plans for several new academic buildings and student facilities.

Under Simmons, Brown has offered more financial aid so that freshmen receiving scholarships no longer have to work during their first year. Graduate assistants have received a raise in pay and benefits. Faculty salaries have gone up, and by this fall, 50 new professors will have been hired.

A new dean of the graduate school was appointed earlier this month, and new graduate programs have been added, including a master's degree in public policy that begins this fall. Plans to strengthen the medical school and biomedical programs are under way. Several new buildings are in the works, including a cognitive and linguistic sciences building, a humanities center and a fitness complex for students.

Her agenda demands 12- to 14-hour workdays and hinges on her ability to woo donors. Brown has begun a seven-year, $1-billion-plus capital campaign, the largest in the university's 241-year history. Brown's current endowment stands at $1.6 billion.

"Brown doesn't get 100 percent of me; they get 300 percent," Simmons says. "At this point in my career, it's all about the work."

Today, Simmons' inaugural class will graduate.

The four-year milestone carries additional meaning for Simmons. University presidents generally expect to lead for 8 to 10 years. That puts Simmons at the halfway mark.

"She's a perfect fit for Brown," says Joel Payne, a graduating senior and president of Brown's student council.

SIMMONS' PERSONAL story underscores her professional success. Ruth Jean Stubblefield was born in Grapeland, Texas, the youngest of 12 children. Her father was a sharecropper and her mother was a maid with an eighth-grade education.

When she was 7, the family moved to a poor section of Houston. She remembers the racial slurs when she walked through town as a child.

The death of her mother when Simmons was 15 was the most powerful event of her life, and gave her the first inkling "that I won't always have life as it is today," Simmons says. "The people you love won't always be there."

Perhaps that loss intensified another bond established as early as kindergarten -- a connection to her teachers.

"The first person I came to admire was a teacher," Simmons says. "The most influential people in my life were teachers."

Her teachers believed in her. They encouraged her to apply to Dillard College, a historically black college in Louisiana, and helped her get the scholarships that enabled her to attend. A professor there gave her secondhand clothes, when she realized the young student didn't have money for a college wardrobe.

Because of them, Simmons says, she was able to succeed.

"I think I know better than most people the power that education can have in their lives," Simmons says. "To me, to be a teacher is the best. It is the most powerful position that exists."

As president of Brown, Simmons now has the chance to ensure more students -- especially poor and minority students -- are given the same opportunity.

Because of her background, she knows she has the power to surprise people. Simmons says the best part of her job is defying expectations.

"I like difficult challenges, especially when overcoming those challenges is accomplishing something good," Simmons says. Such as offering more scholarship aid, so Brown could start need-blind admissions. Starting in 2003, students are accepted to Brown regardless of their ability to pay.

"It's satisfying because it will do the students so much good. But it's also satisfying because people thought it couldn't be done."

Simmons thinks a moment.

"It's important to demonstrate to human beings they are capable of doing more than they think they can."

SIMMONS RECEIVED master's and doctoral degrees in romance languages from Harvard University in the early 1970s, while her husband, Norbert Simmons, attended law school at Boston University. Her husband's work as a lawyer and businessman led the family to various locations. In each place, Simmons found work, teaching at several colleges in the South and West.

Looking back, Simmons says she was so enthralled by the legal world, she would have gone to law school herself, had the young couple been able to afford it.

"I admired the activist lawyers who were protecting the weak," she recalls. "I would have been a crusading lawyer. But at the time, it wasn't practical."

When Simmons and her husband separated in the early 1980s, their son, Khari, and daughter, Maya, were in elementary school.

Simmons was working as an administrator at the University of Southern California, spending three hours a day commuting.

As a single mother, Simmons knew she must carve out a different life for herself and her children. She found that at Princeton.

"I was fortunate to be at a university with a family-friendly environment," she says. Simmons held top administrative positions at Princeton, where she revitalized the Afro-American studies program and authored a landmark study on racism at Princeton that was used as a national model. Princeton provided her with an on-campus residence, near her children's school.

"I was a minute away," she says. "My daughter's kindergarten teacher came to my house to introduce himself. I couldn't believe that. It was the perfect place."

Simmons' ex-husband eventually moved back East, to remain close to his children.

Simmons left Princeton for two years to become provost of Spelman College, in Atlanta, then returned to the Ivy League School to become vice provost. She left Princeton to lead Smith in 1995.

Balancing work and family has left little time for much else, a sacrifice Simmons acknowledges but does not dwell on. Leading an institution such as Brown is an all-consuming job, and one Simmons says she embraces at this point in her life.

"The deal I made was, I would not give up the family part, but I had to give up the friend part," says Simmons, who counts novelist Toni Morrison among her closest confidants. "They're annoyed, but they come to visit. Good friends understand, and give you a pass."

SIMMONS HAS given up other things since she became Brown's president. Going to the supermarket, for instance.

"I'll go when I retire," she says. She hopes to spend more time with her family, when her days at Brown are over.

"My daughter can't wait until I retire. She's always talking about it."

Simmons says Brown's corporation wants her to be fully focused on her job, which pays $450,000 a year. It pays for a driver who transports her -- morning until night. Simmons, who asks everyone to call her Ruth, also has a household staff that shops, makes her meals, and keeps the Georgian-style President's House, a few blocks from Brown's main college green, running smoothly.

Before Simmons leaves her office in University Hall each evening, her assistant, Marisa Quinn, and scheduler, Sara Tortora, make sure she receives a black three-ring binder that contains the next day's schedule. Meetings, luncheons, even phone calls are included, complete with background information on each event and conversation.

Simmons meets with Quinn and Tortora every other week to fine-tune her schedule. Fundraising trips have dominated lately.

Simmons' schedule has bookings through the summer of 2006, when she will travel to Asia and Europe for fundraisers.

"I used to get emotional, knowing my life was scheduled a year in advance," Simmons says. "Then I just let it go. I try not to think about it."

On this spring day, she has to.

Simmons, Quinn and Tortora review black date books for 2005 and 2006.

"We need those seven launch dates on here, for the campaign," Simmons tells them, as she glances through next year's agenda. "We need those dates before anything else."

The three turn their attention to this November, when Simmons will spend most of the month traveling, dashing from board meetings in New York City to fundraisers in California and Hawaii. She tries to get home to Houston, where her siblings, nieces and nephews still live, for all major holidays.

Simmons is protective of her children's privacy, but she mentions that she frequently sees her son, Khari, 32, a musician based in Atlanta, and daughter, Maya, 27, who lives locally. They also join her for holidays.

"November 11 is my daughter's birthday," Simmons murmurs.

They discuss the feasibility of Simmons flying in from the West Coast in mid-November, attending a Goldman Sachs meeting in New York, and still fitting in a meeting of Ivy League institutions at the end of the month.

Could she also manage a fundraiser in Florida, too, she wonders?

"I suppose I could miss Thanksgiving in Houston," Simmons says slowly, her eyes glued to the agenda book, which is filled with pencil scrawl. But Quinn and Tortora cut their boss off.

"No, no," her two assistants say.

Simmons suddenly looks up from the date book. She has discovered an open morning in her book.

"Sara, you've put in a shopping day in New York!" The three women laugh.

"MOVING THE NEEDLE," as Simmons calls her agenda to improve Brown, is a laborious process, filled with competing interests, diplomatic minefields and potential conflicts.

In a controversial move, Simmons appointed a Slavery and Justice Committee to examine Brown's history. Some of the university's first benefactors, a branch of the Brown family, were slave traders. In fact, University Hall, where Simmons works each day, was partly built with slave labor.

"We live in a society where people don't really even know where to begin a conversation about slavery and its legacy," says James T. Campbell, an associate professor of history who chairs the committee. "The moment you begin to even broach the subject, very quickly tempers can get very short and the debate can become narrowed to monetary reparations."

Once that happens, Campbell says, many people "stop listening and start yelling at one another."

Simmons wanted the conversation to begin, Campbell says.

"This isn't about her being an African-American woman, or a quote-unquote descendant of slaves," Campbell says. "Her decision to appoint this committee reflects a profound belief in the capacity of universities to provide intellectual and moral leadership in our society."

Some on campus have grumbled that the external demands of Simmons' job -- fundraising -- have dominated too much lately, diverting her attention away from the inner workings of the university.

But Simmons dismisses that complaint.

"A lot of people think it is 75 percent of the job, but that's completely untrue," she says. "In a normal year, it's about 25 percent. If you're making a big push, it's more, but it never exceeds 50 percent."

Last summer, liquor importer Sidney Frank donated $100 million dedicated to scholarships for needy undergraduate students -- the largest single gift in Brown's history.

"Every president dreams of getting that phone call," Simmons says. "Then, last summer, it happened to me."

HISTORY PROFESSOR Evelyn Hu-DeHart, who runs the university's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, considers herself a Simmons' supporter.

But Hu-DeHart said some faculty are worried that the university's new focus on research and improving the graduate and medical schools may replace Brown's hallmark -- undergraduate teaching.

Hu-DeHart says she is disappointed that Brown has not hired more minority faculty, in spite of a recent announcement that 17 percent of faculty are "diverse." Hu-DeHart points out that many are scientists from Asia or humanities professors from Europe, not minority professors from the United States.

Nevertheless, several trustees, administrators, faculty and students say that despite these debates, Simmons benefits from a wellspring of support and goodwill on campus, which in turn has allowed her to take risks and forge ahead.

"It is amazing how much support she has from faculty and students," Hu-DeHart says. "She really understands Brown, how it is very old, steeped in tradition and a sense of self. Yet, she understands how Brown also projects an image of progressive social justice."

Her supporters also credit Simmons with reinvigorating the university and guiding it with a laser-beam focus.

"This place is energized today," says Elizabeth Huidekoper, Brown's executive vice president for finance and administration, who left her job at Harvard to work with Simmons. "I think she's inspirational and she sets the bar very high -- and that gets the best out of people. I am probably working harder than I've ever worked."

Payne, Brown's student council president who is black, and Hu-DeHart, a refugee from China, both say they came to Brown because they identify with Simmons.

"Ruth is a personal magnet to some of us," Hu-DeHart says. "Ruth represents all of it. She's a woman, she's a minority, she comes from humble origins in the segregated South. And she transcended all those barriers."

THE MEETING is winding down, and one president turns to another for advice.

Undergraduates are apathetic about the student council, 22-year-old Payne tells Simmons.

"We're having a hard time with credibility," he says, mentioning a negative article about student government in that day's Brown Daily Herald.

Simmons leans forward.

"In leadership today, I'm sorry to say, you have to expect that and not get caught up in it," she tells him. "Don't get dragged down by the noise."

Forget about pleasing everybody. You start down that path, she says, and you cannot be a leader.

"I know it's very hard," Simmons says. "But good works outlast those stories."

Every spring, whoever is the Undergraduate Student Council president voices similar concerns, Simmons tells Payne. She assesses him from across the conference table in her office, a room that, like Simmons herself, is both austere and welcoming.

"It looks very glamorous, because after all, you get to do things and you get a lot of attention." Payne nods as she speaks. "But what you are doing is subjecting yourself to other people's judgment on a day-to-day basis. You are saying, 'I am going to assert that I have a better idea. That I can get from here to there. That I can represent you.'

"So you can't be disappointed when people judge you. Because that's what you're inviting them to do, in a leadership role."

Simmons' face relaxes into an almost-smile.

"If you're doing something significant with your life, you have to be attacked," she tells him. "It's required."

Simmons has learned how to protect herself and her mission. She says she rarely, if ever, lowers the shield she has built over the years.

She is careful to project a calm and upbeat image.

"I learned when my kids were small that if I was worried, they would be worried, too," she says. "Because the child is always watching the face of the mother, to see if everything in their universe is OK."

IN RECENT MONTHS, Simmons has undertaken a new task. On her infrequent free evenings at home, she sits in her second-floor study, her refuge, and sifts through old letters, papers and photographs.

She is writing a book about her youth. Delving into the past, however, has been painful.

"Why go back and think about your mother's death?" she asks. "I mean, who would do that?"

Yet Simmons has come to recognize the power her story has on others. These days, she frequently weaves it into speeches.

Rabbi Leslie Gutterman, who served with Simmons on a panel two years ago that investigated the fracas between state police and the Narragansett Indians, says that because of her past she is able to move gracefully between different worlds.

"It was interesting to see that she's comfortable in the world of the privileged, yet she is completely unimpressed with trappings of wealth," he recalls.

"She made it clear that she understood what it was like to be humiliated, and that she understood that when people feel humiliated, they feel like they don't have a full share in society."

Today Simmons is confident that she is doing the right thing with her life.

"I haven't always been as peaceful as I am now, at peace with where I am, at peace with my goals, with where I sit in relationship to other people," she says.

But there is a sense of urgency and exuberance about her. She knows where she comes from, and what it has taken to get here.

The weight of what is left to do presses on her. She will not, she says, waste a moment.

Staff writer Jennifer D. Jordan can be reached at jjordan@projo.com