Prairie View taps renowned educator
Simmons broke barriers to lead Ivy League school
Ruth Simmons was retired. Absolutely retired. Until she met with Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp in Hobby Airport.
A renowned higher education leader, Simmons had led a swath of elite universities, breaking barriers, it seemed, with each appointment. She was the first black president of Smith College, a prestigious women’s college in Massachusetts.
From there, she hopped to Brown University, serving as the first black president of an Ivy League university for more than a decade before stepping down in 2012.
In retirement, she moved to Houston, where her family lives, and she
was peppered with job offers.
This time, it was Sharp’s turn to make a pitch: Prairie View A&M University’s longtime president was stepping down to focus on teaching. Would she come out of retirement to be our interim president?
She was speechless, she recalled Monday. And then — unlike every other time she’d been asked before — she said yes.
Simmons will start leading the historically black university on July 1 as it searches for a permanent president.
“To think of the young people who come from circumstances where they are striving to move ahead, it’s very emotional to me to be a part of that after having been president of an Ivy League institution,” she said. “It brings a certain balance to my career, finishing with something like this.”
Broke Ivy League barrier
Simmons, 71 and the daughter of a sharecropper, graduated from Phillis Wheatley High School in the Fifth Ward before matriculating at Dillard University, a historically black institution in New Orleans.
After graduation, Simmons enrolled at Harvard University, earning her Ph.D. in Romance languages and literature before starting to teach, first at the University of New Orleans and then in California.
A job at Princeton University brought her back east. She held administrative positions there and at Spelman College, a historically black college in Atlanta, before moving to Smith in 1995. She was elected to Brown’s presidency in 2000.
Simmons said she will serve until the university appoints a permanent president. She said she’s “too old” to consider taking the permanent job.
Still, she insisted to Sharp that she will be fully in charge as an interim president to avoid stalling the university’s progress. Former President George Wright introduced a strategic plan through 2020 to boost enrollment and improve the university’s image several years ago. Simmons wants to speak with him, she said, about that plan and make sure the university makes progress under her leadership.
Regents approved her appointment unanimously on Monday afternoon on a call.
Sharp said Simmons wouldn’t miss a beat, calling her “an important figure on the national stage for decades.”
“She has the credentials to be the president of any university in America,” he said in a statement. “I am so excited to have her join us.”
Prairie View A&M students don’t come from the same background as Brown students. Prairie View rejects about 15 percent of undergraduate applicants each year. Brown last spring accepted just 8.3 percent.
About two-thirds of Prairie View undergraduates receive Pell Grants, which benefit lowincome students. The median family income of a Brown student is more than $200,000, the New York Times reported.
Prairie View is a historically black university. In fall 2015, less than 7 percent of students at Brown were black.
Using herself as role model
Simmons said she wants to show Prairie View students that they can make it — as she did.
“I believe that there is an extraordinarily strong continuum across all of higher education,” she said by phone Monday. “We overly emphasize the so-called top tier, or the elite, as against community colleges ... at Brown, I talked about that continuum. I talked about the importance of community college students having access to the Ivy League. A student who goes to a place like Dillard, for example, can leave Dillard, as I did, and go to graduate school at Harvard.” She paused. “It’s rather troubling to me when those differentiations occur. The reality for the students is: if they go to Prairie View and perform well, they can go all the way to the top, just as a student who starts at Harvard as an undergraduate can. This is a message so few people get.”
At Brown, Simmons increased the faculty’s size by 20 percent and removed a student’s financial needs from consideration in the admissions process. In 2003, she created a committee on slavery and justice to investigate Brown’s relationship with slavery and the slave trade.
Marybeth Gasman, who directs the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Minority-Serving Institutions, said Simmons talked about graduating from a historically black college when she was Brown’s president.
That representation showed outsiders the achievements that graduates of these schools could go on to accomplish, Gasman said.
Her time at Brown also left her with “incredible connections” with higher education’s major players, including big donors. “The president ... is like the living logo of the institution,” she said. “That’s going to be great for Prairie View.”
Wright said Monday night that Simmons’s appointment was a “very significant step” for the university. The selection could boost alumni giving, he said, and would help the university’s enrollment grow.
“Can you imagine, for the students who are considering Prairie View?” he said. “They’ll be very excited to know the caliber of the person there.”