The Good Fight
Prairie View A&M President Ruth Simmons on social progress, building an endowment and paying it forward
Prairie View A&M University President Ruth Simmons’ Texas roots run deep. Born in Grapeland, Simmons moved to Houston’s Fifth Ward with her family when she was a child. Having received a bachelor’s degree from Dillard University in New Orleans before receiving her master’s and doctorate in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University, Simmons was named president of Smith College in 1995.
Six years later, she became the first Black president of an Ivy League institution when she started her 11-year tenure as president of Brown University.
Simmons was appointed president of Prairie View A&M in 2017. Last December, Prairie View, one of the country’s historically Black colleges and universities, announced that it received a $50 million gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Q: What’s Prairie View A&M’s primary mission right now?
A: Our first commitment is to make sure our students are wellinformed so that they can use their intellectual facets that will be important to them to lead productive lives. Prairie View, for example, is very strong in engineering at a time when there are so few Blacks in engineering. We take our mission to serve our community to heart, whether it’s something like nursing – it is so important to Texas to have qualified nurses.
But, culturally, HBCUs can’t be held harmless from the work we have to do in this country. If I appoint someone, I can’t simply say, “That person has to be an African American.” What sense does that make? We have to teach our students that, just because we’re long-suffering, that’s not the way it should work. We do the same things here that we should be doing everywhere to emerge from a history of bigotry and a history of denying opportunity. We have to fight for anti-racist people.
Q: How do you think the African-American college experience has progressed?
A: It’s a mixed picture. When I decided to go to college, getting into most colleges wasn’t an option for me. We’ve come all the way from that reality – where the presumption was, if you were Black, you shouldn’t aspire to go to a major university – to a place where the average African American
knows they have the option to apply to a diversity of institutions. Overturning that presumption is a powerful one.
But let’s look at the practicality of African Americans in those institutions. The first phase meant the presumption that the doors would be open to a select few, but they had an obligation to fall in line and accept things as they were. That was the flavor of those early days. Institutions would make little effort to try to examine themselves about whether or not people coming in would have a fair chance at an equal education. That was the first wave, and a lot of that had to be deconstructed by protests, and those really challenged universities. Some were violent and very aggressive, and it took a fair degree of mediation from universities to settle things down. So you’d find integration of staff and faculty as a consequence of these demonstrations, not as a consequence of self-examination.
That continued through the 1980s. Then, you had post-civilrights babies entering universities who had different expectations. They came to college expecting everything to be equal, but they found a lot of reasons to think these institutions were still profoundly racist, and they be
gan to call that out. Now, you’ve got a very fervent group of young people who are identifying those problems.
There’s no question that there’s been progress, but if you ask yourself today whether we can relax and say, “job well done,” it’s not. We still have a good deal of work to do.
Q: How important is it for you to improve Prairie View A&M’s graduation rate?
A: It’s important for students to graduate. We’re a credentialed culture. At the same time, there are a number of factors that we keep in mind. Every year that you’re in college, your prospects for a successful life increase. So our aim is to keep students enrolled as long as possible. We serve a population that’s often first-generation (college students) that are doing all kinds of things at the same time that they’re going to college. Some people pack up and have the amazing four years where all they have to do is live on campus, finish their studies and graduate in four years. That’s a lovely thing, but there are people who don’t have that.
Our students are often dealing with intense pressures, including financial pressures their parents face. They’re going through college on a shoestring, and one day, they say, “I can’t make it work anymore.” If you go to Princeton, they’ll make it work, but for those of us who don’t have that kind of endowment, it’s difficult. That’s the issue at most HBCUs.
Q: So how do you address those difficulties?
A: We have two fundamental priorities. One is the quality of instruction. The second is the quality of support we offer our students. Every spare resource we get, we put into financial aid. When we received $50 million from MacKenzie Scott, the first thing we did was put $10 million into financial aid to help students get through the pandemic. I
didn’t have a dime to go to college, yet the provision of a scholarship for me to allow me to focus on my studies made all the difference in the world. That’s what I want for our students, and I say to those who make it through that your obligation is to reach back and help others make it through. You have to restock the pool.
We also suggest other options to save money, like starting in a community college and transferring into a university. Some people are offended by that, but one of the best ways to make college affordable is (taking) the first two years of general-assignment classes (at a community college). When you go into your major, that’s where you want to invest those resources (at a university).
Q: How do you get your message across?
A: We’ve invested a lot more in advising and financial-aid counseling. We remodeled a building to put every conceivable thing that a student would need in that single building so that they wouldn’t have to run around. How would a student or parent who has no experience with any of this be able to sort things out with the loans, course sequence, academic adviser? It’s pretty daunting. We’re trying to make it friendlier.
All of those things drive the graduation rate. The big gap we’re dealing with in earnings and wealth accumulation between Blacks and others is a consequence. We need to have people earn more money and pass assets down to their children, so that they start out on better footing. You can do that if you persist and stay on track.
People are very impressed that a Brown or a Princeton has a 99 percent graduation rate, but you really shouldn’t be impressed. As an adviser when I was at Princeton, if I was aware of a student having difficulties, I blanketed that student with attention. It’s virtually impossible to fail in those institutions because you’re watched constantly.
Q: How big is Prairie View A&M’s endowment?
“There’s no question that there’s been progress, but if you ask yourself today whether we can relax and say, ‘job well done,’ it’s not. We still have a good deal of work to do.”
A: It’s small. I felt absolutely compelled to put as much of MacKenzie Scott’s gift into the endowment as possible. My hope is that we can get the endowment up to $200 million, which is still modest, but it would put us at the top of the range of
HBCUs. I’m trying to encourage the habit of thinking more of what’s good for the long-term health of the university and thinking less about what I call “curlicues” — nice things to do in the moment, but once they’re gone, they’re gone. Universities are full of stuff that we don’t need to do. Universities are going to be the most important sector for this country going forward.
Q: How do you mean?
A: We have the ability in this country to go off the rails. We have so much freedom, and that can take us over the edge. What’s going to bring us back from going over the edge is universities. If you look at the leadership of the country and the people HBCUs are producing — imagine what this country would be like with no HBCUs? There’d be no civil rights movement. So preserving the capacity of these institutions to build intellectual capital is enormously important.
I’m very hard on alums. I remember saying to an alum who was driving an S500 Mercedes, “You can drive a much less expensive but nice car, and give more money to Prairie.” There’s nothing wrong with saying that. I’m also building up a campaign that can torture people and say, “Don’t come around me wearing Louboutin shoes if you haven’t contributed.”
Everything we invest in students has immense returns for us and the country.
Q: Have events like the Black Lives Matter movement or HBCU graduate Kamala Harris’s election as vice president impacted student applications and donations?
A: We saw a tremendous jump (in applications) before COVID, but right now, it’s hard to tell what’s happening. In terms of donations, it’s a different world entirely. There are so many well-meaning individuals who’ve come forward. There’s no question we’re in a particular window, but that window is probably going to close.
How much can we imprint on the consciousness of the nation in this moment to make certain that these institutions continue to be supported? I would also turn it around and say that we are neither flawless in our approach nor impervious that we need improvement. The help we get is dependent on how well we tell our story. I’m trying to tell our story in a way that draws people in and doesn’t shut people out.