Ruth J. Simmons

October 14, 2001, was an extraordinary day in the halting history of American racial equality. Ruth J. Simmons was inaugurated as the president of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and for the first time ever the president of an Ivy League University was Black. Formerly the president of Smith College, Simmons was a scholar of French language and literature with an extraordinary backstory that she recently told in her memoir Up Home.  

She had grown up in exceedingly modest circumstances, the youngest of 12 children, in rural Grapeland, East Texas. Her father, Isaac Stubblefield, was a sharecropper—he rented the land he worked. The family lived not in their own house but in a shanty on someone else’s farm. Her brothers and sisters worked as farmhands, placing bolls of cotton that they picked into sacks. In Up Home, Simmons describes her family’s situation not as unhappy but thoroughly impoverished: “From year to year, ours was subsistence living at best.”  

Being the youngest had its advantages. Ruth was not so quickly put to work as her siblings had been. And after the family moved to the nearby town of Latexo, she began attending school, an innocent farm girl crossing the threshold into a new world. 

“I walked into my first classroom,” she writes, “with thick, unstraightened plaits; large, bulging eyes; a homemade, ill-fitting dress; and the odor of the bacon fat my mother had smeared on my legs to treat my ashy skin.” Yet Miss Ida Mae, the teacher, greeted her so warmly that young Ruth came to think she was the princess of the school.  

School was a kind of love at first sight, and the love was reciprocated. Teachers believed in Ruth Stubblefield. They became her allies. They saw the path forward before she did. At a junior high school in Houston, to which the family had moved in 1952, teachers gave her extra assignments and found books outside the curriculum for her to read. As a student at Phillis Wheatley High School, she immersed herself in theater while grieving the loss of her mother. She discovered her own voice. Through acting and a little bit of acting out, she became something of a local character. But her potential remained obvious. Her teacher then, Vernell Lillie, wanted Ruth to go to college and contacted her alma mater, Dillard University, an HBCU in New Orleans, to ask them not only to admit this promising young student but to give her a scholarship.  

As Dr. Simmons told NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo) in an interview in Humanities magazine, “She made a way for me to go to college. Unbelievable.” At Dillard, her passion shifted from theater to literature and languages (French and Spanish), and the broader world opened up to her. Wanting to improve her Spanish, she found a way to use her scholarship to pay for a summer studying in Mexico. And without even applying, she was selected for a program for visiting students at Wellesley University in Massachusetts, where she would study for a year at no cost. 

Education furnished an increasingly beautiful counterpoint to the unequal, segregated world in which Ruth Stubblefield had been raised. As Simmons writes in Up Home, “To be born in an environment in which one is legally designated subhuman is a defining experience.”  

But there were obstacles ahead. As a graduate student at Harvard, her professional ambitions were answered with skepticism. “After all, what was a black girl to do with a PhD in Romance Languages in 1970s America?” she recalls.  

After a Fulbright Fellowship, Simmons joined the faculty of the University of New Orleans as a professor of French before becoming an associate dean at the University of Southern California. Wanting to work with undergraduates, she accepted a position at Princeton University, where she became the head of a struggling program in African American studies. Soon enough Simmons was building a department of Black intellectual royalty, recruiting Toni Morrison, Cornell West, and a host of other exceptional Black scholars and thinkers to come to Princeton.  

Simmons was named the president of Smith College in 1994, and her rocket of a career was now achieving liftoff. Henry Louis Gates Jr., a National Humanities Medalist and one of the great humanities innovators of these decades, told the New York Times, “Ruth Simmons is the Jackie Robinson of college presidents.”  

At Smith, Simmons introduced the first-ever engineering program at a women’s college. A poetry center was built, bringing celebrated poets to campus. A program guaranteeing every Smith student at least one paid internship was established. Major capital campaigns and construction also showed the college growing in the usual ways. 

At Brown, too, Simmons attended to the fundamentals of student experience while addressing major issues of institutional well-being. A project to examine the university’s connections to slavery produced an extraordinary and influential reckoning with the past. Ambitious fund-raising goals were announced and met. But in talking about those years, Simmons is just as likely to emphasize the personal connections she made when she showed up in the dining halls to check in with students, who formed a line to receive their share of hugs and encouragement. 

In her final tour of duty as a college president, Simmons became the head of Prairie View A&M, an HBCU in Texas. These were the years of Covid and the murder of George Floyd, difficult times for all Americans but especially Black Americans. Again, President Simmons asked what the school was doing for its students and looked to do more, announcing a center for Black studies and a program to bring distinguished orators to campus. A letter she wrote to the student body the week of Floyd’s murder went viral online and was reprinted in the Washington Post. She wrote it herself, of course, having long known how to make herself heard. 

Among many honorary degrees and awards, Simmons delivered the 2023 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, produced by the National Endowment for the Humanities and presented at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

—David Skinner