Simmons brings expectations to Prairie View A&M
University’s new president looks to transform school
PRAIRIE VIEW — Emotion pulled at Ruth Simmons when she visited Prairie View A&M University’s campus last year.
As she considered taking charge of the historically black university, she remembered where she’d begun her academic path that would lead to the top rungs of higher education as president of Brown University, an Ivy League school.
She had been a poor student. She knew firsthand that historically black colleges could change lives. She saw Prairie View A&M’s students striving to move ahead, just as she once had. How meaning ful it is, she thought, to have this place.
At Prairie View A&M — hundreds of miles and worlds away from the elite private institutions she once led — Simmons thought she might do something significant.
There would be challenges. Unlike at Ivy League schools, poor students make up the majority of those who enroll. Many struggle to graduate in six years, let alone four. The last time a national spotlight focused on the university was in 2015, when alumna Sandra Bland’s death in a Waller County jail after a traffic stop brought national outrage.
But Simmons took her fears — of disappointing students, of failing to realize how difficult the job might be — as a sign to take charge. Now 72, she came out of retirement to accept the post.
“I believe in a way that my path to Prairie View was written in the heavens,” Simmons said in April at her inauguration as the university’s eighth president. “For how else can I explain the improbable way I came to this task? How can I turn away from doing for other young people what was done for me?”
Simmons has eye-popping goals for the 142-yearold institution that would be difficult for any president to achieve, even one with the nationwide reverence she inspires. She believes Prairie View can be among the best smaller universities in the country, and the best historically black college.
She wants to improve graduation rates by increasing scholarship aid and academic advising, to recruit and retain demanding faculty, to refocus efforts on humanities and social sciences and to raise funds to keep students in school.
It’s a big vision — one that will be watched closely on campus and across the nation.
“It’s kind of like Christmas,” said James Wilson, an associate provost. “You’ve been a good kid. You know you’re going to get something good. You just don’t know what it is.”
Making her mark
Best known today for a barrier-breaking academic rise that made her the first black president of any Ivy League university, Simmons’ early education in Houston proved formative to her eventual success.
She was born in 1945, the youngest of 12 children in Grapeland, a small town in East Texas. Her family moved south to Houston as agriculture technology began replacing sharecroppers’ work, she wrote in a 1998 essay published in the Texas Journal of Ideas, History and Culture.
A poor student from a rural area, Simmons felt isolated from city students, she said recently at Wheatley High School, her alma mater. She worked in school relentlessly. When she enrolled at the historically black Dillard University in the 1960s, she wrote, high school teachers gave her money and clothes to attend the New Orleans college.
She spent her junior year at Wellesley College, the elite all-women’s private school in Massachusetts. She thought she would fail one course taught entirely in French and told the professor she would have to drop the class. He wouldn’t allow it and told her to work harder.
Simmons said she was incensed, mortified and wanted to fly home. But she didn’t have the money, so she got to work. The experience, she said, showed her she could work through problems that seemed insurmountable.
“Many students don’t get that message,” she said. “From that moment on, I never looked at a grade. … It was all about the effort. It was all about what I could do.”
Simmons went on to earn a doctorate in romance languages and literatures from Harvard University. She held several academic appointments in New Orleans and California before moving to Princeton University in New Jersey, where she eventually became the university’s associate dean of faculty.
She left to work as the provost of historically black, all-female Spelman College in Atlanta, and then after three more years at Princeton, she became president of all-female Smith College in Massachusetts.
Her appointment drew national attention.
“FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT CHOSEN FOR A ‘SEVEN SISTERS’ SCHOOL,” the Washington Post reported.
“Smith College Makes History In Naming Its Next President,” wrote the New York Times.
She said she tried to tune out the noise and focus on the job. She knew that if she messed up, she wouldn’t be forgiven because she was the institution’s first black president.
“You have to do what every other president has to do,” she said.
When Brown University’s president abruptly resigned in 2000, Brown Chancellor Stephen Robert already had Simmons on his radar. He recruited her away, prompting a flood of angry phone calls from Smith trustees. He knew that Smith felt it needed Simmons, “but so did we.”
Her 11-year presidency at Brown was far-reaching. Simmons retired after raising $1.6 billion, launching a re-examination of the university’s history with the slave trade and investing in faculty.
She retired from Brown in 2012 but agreed in 2017 to serve as Prairie View A&M’s interim president, saying she was “too old” to be considered for the permanent role. In October, she texted A&M Chancellor John Sharp and asked to stay permanently. She was named the sole finalist the same month. And she’s ready to dig in. “I want to focus on our core mission, which is fundamentally academic,” she said. “We have to demand the most of our students. I love them. They’re so wonderful, but I don’t at the same time hold back in insisting to them on what they have to do in order to get the most out of their education.”
‘Keen eye’ on issues
Prairie View A&M’s residential campus sits on a former slave plantation in Waller County, where pristine grassy areas separate new and aging facilities.
Here, at the second-oldest public higher education institution in Texas, most students are poor, with about two-thirds of the campus receiving a federal grant reserved for low- income students. About half of the students are the first generation in their family to go to college — just like Simmons was.
Prairie View — like many universities that admit most students who apply — has struggled to graduate its students, in part because of such factors. Students take far more credit hours than needed to graduate, a sign that better advising could reduce time to graduation and therefore student debt.
Without a financial safety net, any minor setback can derail the path to graduation, and a lack of familiarity with the college environment can mean students will take longer to graduate.
But serving these students is inherent to the mission of historically black colleges and universities, created to educate those excluded from other campuses. Some research has found that black students at HBCUs perform better than black students at predominantly white universities when controlling for variables including income.
“These institutions, by virtue of their historical mantle and their contemporary mandate, see it as an institutional responsibility to not have choosiness exclude students who demonstrate potential,” said Crystal deGregory, a historian and director of the Atwood Institute at Kentucky State University.
For Simmons to succeed, she must improve student outcomes and funnel money and talent to student retention.
Marybeth Gasman, who directs the Center for Minority-Serving Institutions at the University of Pennsylvania, said successful college leaders find ways to keep students in school, including offering emergency funds or creating programming to help high school students transition to college life.
“You have to focus on it. I don’t know exactly day to day where that focus was, but more than likely she’s going to have a pretty keen eye on those issues,” Gasman said of Simmons.
Despite the challenges, Prairie View A&M doesn’t face the financial constraints of many other historically black universities because of its position in the Texas A&M University System and its multibillion-dollar Permanent University Fund.
And students are energized on campus. Historically black universities including Prairie View have seen growing freshman enrollment. The university’s band performed at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in November, and a new football stadium brought a greater emphasis on athletics.
The university spends more money than most public schools in Texas on research, and its honors program and STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — degrees send graduates to top companies and graduate schools across the country. Simmons has indicated to faculty and staff that she wants to expand that honors program and make faculty the leading authorities in their fields.
Students know she is a “celebrity” in higher education who made history in the Ivy League, said senior Carrington Johnson, 22, from Dallas.
But she has quickly earned their trust, and many call her by her first name. They discuss their aspirations for graduate school with her during weekly office hours, and students wore shirts at homecoming that read “Ruth the Truth.”
“It’s one thing being told what to do — it’s another thing (having someone) showing you how to do it,” Johnson said. “She inspires us to execute.”
Faculty and staff, meanwhile, know change is coming under Simmons. They call her leadership thoughtful, analytical and in pursuit of perfection.
“If you are going to remain competitive and remain vital in your service area, you have to ensure that you are constantly working on elevating your presence (and) increasing your services,” said Michelle Hill, who started in the fall as the university’s assistant vice president for enrollment services. “Within the higher education arena, Prairie View has had a place, but there is an opportunity to elevate.”
‘Building phase’
Walking back to her office after greeting students on a hot Thursday in April, Simmons characterized staff and faculty sentiment as in the “complaint phase” — she hears about what needs change.
“I’m looking forward to getting to the building phase,” she said. “Here are the ideas we have. Here’s where we can make our university better.”
In prior appointments, she said, the building phase has started with an energizing idea to show change is attainable. She hinted at her inauguration about potentially creating an African-American studies major, but she said in an interview that the process could take time.
She meets regularly with faculty and professors who feel they have a voice in the university’s governance, said Victoria Godwin, the faculty senate’s speaker.
Godwin, a communication professor, has also seen more name recognition for the college when she meets academics from around the country. She said she attended a conference earlier this year when a stranger saw her name tag and asked her about Simmons.
“I’m from Prairie View — that meant Ruth Simmons,” she said. “That meant ‘very cool.’”
Already, Simmons has hired new staff overseeing enrollment and development. Carme Williams, the new vice president of development, was a former Rice University fundraiser and filled a position vacant since 2011.
Williams said the university must begin recruiting for planned, major and principal funds, which are not now solicited. Prairie View also needs to build up annual fund participation, though Simmons declined to identify specific goals.
Just 2 percent of alumni give directly to the university, she said, and her office intends to increase that figure. More money comes to the university’s alumni associations and to its foundation.
Simmons’ network in higher education and in Houston has opened the university to new sources for donations, crucial for an institution that receives only a sliver of what the A&M flagship gets from Texas.
Simmons and Robert, Brown’s former chancellor, had dinner in New York after Hurricane Harvey. She told him Prairie View A&M students affected by the storm weren’t wealthy.
By the end of the conversation, he pledged to match a recent donor’s gift. H-E-B Chairman and CEO Charles Butt, who met Simmons at the company’s Excellence in Education Awards in Houston years ago, had donated $100,000 to Prairie View students affected by the storm.
At her inauguration, she pledged to donate $100,000 more in honor of her parents — matched by $100,000 from Sharp, A&M’s chancellor.
“It was a coup for Brown to get her, but it’s not as big in relation to Prairie View getting her,” Robert said recently. “She will probably have even more impact.”
Simmons’ former colleagues say she succeeds by cutting through red tape and, when necessary, addressing controversy headon. At Brown, for example, she launched a committee examining ties to the slave trade after the student newspaper published an advertisement criticizing the idea of reparations to black Americans. She addressed the divisions on campus in her inaugural convocation address.
“I think she would just drive a truck through any bureaucratic hurdles,” Robert said. “When she approaches, the Red Sea parts.”
Simmons said her work ethic comes from her mother, who worked as a maid and died when Simmons was 15.
“I hate dust bunnies,” she said. “If I see dust accumulating, it drives me crazy. … I can’t bear to have things like that. It’s the same proclivity. When you leave things unattended, they accumulate like dust bunnies. They get bigger and bigger and bigger. They don’t disappear.”
Looking to ‘next level’
Simmons takes charge of Prairie View A&M in an era of wavering state and federal support for higher education.
In the last legislative session, university presidents across the state forecast sharp cuts that they said could jeopardize teaching and research. Though the state’s flagships were relatively unscathed, regional public institutions were harder hit, but Prairie View’s funding was largely flat.
Meanwhile, Texas has set high expectations for what they want universities to achieve by 2030. The Higher Education Coordinating Board has pressured public university systems to improve retention and graduation outcomes, particularly among black male students.
Simmons says she’s optimistic to tell Texas lawmakers what “visionary” work they could do and plans to talk about the “innards” of what makes great institutions work.
“Those are the kinds of policy discussions I’m anxious to have,” she said. “I don’t have all the answers, but I have all the opinions in the world about how to do it, and I’m not hesitant to advance them.”
E. Gordon Gee, a seventime college president who held Brown’s presidency before Simmons, said leaders need to learn a new university’s culture, strengths and weaknesses when they move between jobs.
Public institutions are far more challenging to lead, he said.
“You have 25 million Texans, and you have the Legislature,” said Gee, who now leads West Virginia University.
Simmons’ goal to build Prairie View A&M into one of the best small or historically black universities in the country is a major venture. U.S. News & World Report ranked Prairie View at No. 25 in historically black universities, tied with Florida’s BethuneCookman University.
Prairie View A&M has a 38.6 percent six-year graduation rate, far below the statewide average of 60.9 percent for other public universities in Texas. Howard University, a top historically black university in Washington, D.C., has a six-year graduation rate of about 60 percent.
At her inauguration, Simmons pledged to recruit inspiring, dedicated and demanding faculty and to give them support to excel at high levels. “They in turn,” she said, “must demand the most of their students.”
On that day, a chilly April afternoon, in fine academic regalia, she affirmed the university’s mission: proudly and vigorously serving those whose ancestors were excluded from education.
By the time she departs, she said, she would like to have built structures to enable the institution to energize research, strengthen the faculty and raise money.
“Once you have the structure in place,” she said, “it’s easier for someone to take it to the next level.”