Spotlight
Barack Obama's historic candidacy for the presidency of the United States of America has aroused new possibilities for African-Americans, even as it has also inspired millions of others to support his promise of change. The breakthroughs that arrive on the coattails of his election may prove just the beginning of our understanding of the implications and longer term impact of his remarkable rise and run.
Growing up on a farm in East Texas, the youngest of 12 children, Ruth Simmons could easily recount the story of her life as one of deprivation and hardship. Her father was a sharecropper and her mother was a part-time maid. Yet she's more apt to remember it fondly. "My journey has not been all that arduous, contrary to the way that my life is often presented," she says. "I had this wonderful grounding by my parents, and then an extraordinary streak of luck."
Walt Disney once said, "It's kind of fun to do the impossible." Ask Dr. Ruth Simmons and she'll likely agree. Once told by a colleague that she would never become a president of an Ivy League school, Simmons shattered that glass ceiling last fall when she was unanimously elected president of Brown University. By doing so, she becomes Brown's 18th president, its first female president, and the first African American to lead one of the nation's prestigious Ivy League institutions.
Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice will investigate and discuss an uncomfortable piece of the University’s — and our nation’s — history. The Committee’s work is not about whether or how reparations should be paid. Rather, it will do the difficult work of scholarship, debate and civil discourse, demonstrating how difficult, uncomfortable and valuable this process can be.
Ruth Simmons, the newly installed president of Brown University and the first African American to lead an Ivy League school, is a throwback to the crusading campus leaders of old. She doesn't merely marshal funds; she invests them in the great educational causes of our day. With the more than $300 million she raised as president of Smith College from 1995 to 2001, Simmons established an engineering program (the first at any women's school) and added seminars focused on public speaking to purge the ubiquitous "likes" and "ums" from the campus idiom. At a meeting to discuss the future of Smith's math department, one professor timidly requested two more discussion sections for his course. Her response: "Dream bigger."
Ruth J. Simmons was sworn in as the 18th president of Brown University on July 3, 2001. She also holds appointment as professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Africana Studies. She was president of Smith College from 1995 until the time of her appointment at Brown.
