Episode 205: A Conversation with Ruth J. Simmons

Ruth J. Simmons/ Gittings Photography

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On This Episode

The scholars and university leaders Ruth J. Simmons and Tomiko Brown-Nagin discuss Simmons’s recent memoir, Up Home: One Girl’s Journey (Random House, 2023). Along the way, they consider her personal journey, her pioneering work researching and sharing publicly universities’ historical ties to slavery, and her perspectives on the future of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and higher education in light of recent Supreme Court rulings.

This episode was recorded on November 14, 2023.
Released on March 21, 2024.

Guests

Ruth J. Simmons is a distinguished presidential fellow at Rice University and senior adviser to the president of Harvard University on engagement with HBCUs. She served as president of Prairie View A&M University until March 2023. Prior to joining Prairie View, she was president of Brown University from 2001 to 2012 and president of Smith College from 1995 to 2001.

Tiya Miles is a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Michael Garvey Professor of History at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She leads the audience Q and A in this episode.

Guest Host

Tomiko Brown-Nagin is dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and a professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Credits

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial manager at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI), where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Jeff Hayash is a freelance sound engineer and recordist.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.

Special thanks to Kevin Grady and Max Doyle from Radcliffe’s event streaming team for their invaluable contributions to recording this podcast episode.

Transcript

Ivelisse Estrada:
Hello, welcome back to BornCurious, coming to you from Harvard Radcliffe Institute, one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary exploration.

Heather Min:
This podcast is, like its home, about unbounded curiosity. I am your cohost, Heather Min.

Ivelisse Estrada:
And I’m your cohost, Ivelisse Estrada. Today on the program, we have the rare pleasure of listening in on a conversation between our own dean, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, and the legendary Ruth J. Simmons, scholar; author; former vice provost of Princeton; and former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M University, Texas’s oldest HBCU.

Heather Min:
The context for their conversation is the publication of Simmons’s 2023 memoir, Up Home: One Girl’s Journey. It has been described by the New York Times as “an evocative account” of Simmons’s “remarkable trajectory from Jim Crow Texas, where she was the youngest of 12 children in a sharecropping family, to the presidencies of Smith College and Brown University.”

Ivelisse Estrada:
Just one last note before we dive in. In editing this event for the podcast, we eliminated an introduction by Tiya Miles, who is a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Institute and the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard. As is typical of Tiya Miles, it was a thoughtful and generous introduction, so we encourage you to watch it. A link to the event video is in our show notes. Let’s jump in.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Well, good afternoon, everyone.

Crowd:
Good afternoon.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
It’s wonderful to see you, and I am just thrilled to have the opportunity to be in conversation with the great Dr. Ruth Simmons about her wonderful memoir. And I have my copy here. It’s a little worn already. The dust cover’s torn because I’ve been carrying it around for weeks and been inspired by it. And I will say that not only was I inspired, the book really touched my heart. And I read a lot of books, and I can’t recall saying that any book touched my heart. And so the first thing I want to say to you, on behalf of all of us, I’m sure there are many in the audience who were similarly inspired and touched, thank you. Thank you for writing this book for us.

Perhaps I can start the conversation by asking you why you wrote the memoir, and whom did you see as your audience, and what did you hope they take away?

Ruth J. Simmons:
Thank you, and thank you for having me here. And I just want to say how delighted I am that Adele and Larry [Bacow] are here. So wonderful to see old friends.

Over the years, in a life that was often puzzling to me—meaning my life—I struggled to explain to students, or rather to answer their questions, because it was always, “How on Earth did you do X, Y, and Z?” And over time, I grew more and more perturbed about the way that my students were thinking about my life, because I did not want to be seen as someone who had done anything so miraculous. I wanted them to understand how simple it was to me to build the life that I had.

I often recall, when I was at Smith, I was driving along a road on campus, and a Smith student was limping along on crutches. And it was on an incline. So of course I stopped my car and said, “Get in. I’ll take you to wherever you need to go.” And she said, to my dismay, “Oh, no. President Simmons, if you could do what you’ve done, I can certainly get up this hill on crutches.” Well, I didn’t want students feeling that way. And so although I tried to answer how I went from A to B to C in my life, I found it still that I keep getting the questions. And so I thought I’d save myself the trouble and just tell people, once and for all, how it happened, and maybe the questions would go away.

I didn’t imagine, as I started to write it, how difficult it would be to talk about the circumstances of my youth, and particularly things like the death of my mother and the impact that that had on me, and so on. And so there were moments when it was a true struggle to relive those moments. But I always felt that it would be worth it if my students could understand, again, how a life evolves, because their notion of—they’re very formulaic often in the way they think about things. “Okay, now, Ruth, you did this and then that. So how do I go about imitating your path?” And of course, we know it’s not about that at all. And so I wanted to emphasize the importance of learning, of being open-minded about caring about other people, about embracing fully the opportunity to learn and so forth, and also to care about the rights of other people. And if I could do that, if I could instill that in the students who have come to me, I thought it would be well worth writing the book.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Wonderful. Again, thank you for doing so. It sounds like it’s a way of mentoring students.

Ruth J. Simmons:
Yes.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Yes. Close and afar. Well, let’s talk about the home in Up Home. And I want to read a passage from the book. You write that you were “born at a crossroads, a crossroads in history, a crossroads in culture,” and that over the course of your life, you were “constantly trying to return to the place of my childhood.” I wonder if you could speak a little bit about your home, your family, community, and how they all shaped your personal journey.

Ruth J. Simmons:
Well, of course, rural Texas in the late ’40s and ’50s was a very particular thing. Oh, okay. I guess you get that. If you were Black and lived in rural Texas—East Texas, where I come from—there was a certainty to your life. You were going to toil in fields. You were not going to be educated. And you were not going to have any rights whatsoever. And it’s very hard for young people today to imagine a world in which, if you went into town, you had to step off the sidewalk so that whites could pass. It’s hard for them to imagine the ways in which we accepted not being able to go in the front door of an establishment, or to drink from certain fountains, or to have any of the amenities that people have become accustomed to. It’s very hard to imagine that, but that’s the way it was.

And thankfully, our parents understood that we lived at a dangerous time, and that if we were in town and we showed any arrogance—they called it uppity, at that moment—that we could be summarily disciplined by any white person, because it turns out that every white person had certain rights over us. So that’s the environment, generally, that we were in. Day-to-day life was basically spent in the fields, working. And the thing about that is that everybody went to work in the fields. So it didn’t matter if you were a child. As soon as you could do that physical labor, you were in the fields. But of course, what that meant is that we were all together, so my parents were there, all of my sisters and brothers were there, and I was too young to do any labor, serious labor, and so they dragged me along on cotton sacks. But we were all together. So we were together at home, we were together in the fields. We were together all the time. And so as you might imagine, in that kind of environment, which was isolated, we were a very close family. And that marked my childhood, and it’s marked my entire life, to be perfectly honest with you.

I met with a group of students today, and they wanted to know, looking at my life, what impelled me to be able to do things that were unpopular, and how did I stand up to people who were criticizing me or who were saying that I was making a serious mistake?

And I found it a little odd when they asked me that because I’ve never, ever, ever had any doubts, really, about who I was and whether or not there was a ballast back there because of my family. And my mother taught me so much. She had an eighth-grade education, but she would always teach us as she was doing her chores. And my favorite scene that I recall is sitting on the porch. Our houses were basically four rooms. It was a bedroom for the girls, a bedroom for the boys, my parents slept in the front room, and then there was a kitchen. And so there was no room in the house to do any work. And so usually the porch provided that extension.

And so my mother would sit on the porch, and she would do whatever she needed to do. She’d do ironing, she’d do food prep, and so she’d be sitting and shelling peas. How many of you have ever shelled peas? Oh, come on. I don’t believe that for a second. You have not shelled peas. I don’t mean Bird’s Eye that you buy in the frozen aisle. And that was one of the chores that was arduous. So she’d be shelling peas. But as she’s shelling peas or preparing corn, she’s also talking to us about life. And she’s saying, “Your family is very important. Don’t ever, ever separate from your family.” She’d say, “Never think you’re better than another human being.” She was very generous and very giving.

We were desperately poor, of course, and we remember our childhoods put us—we were really hungry all the time. There was never enough food for all of us. And my mother would do the darndest things. People would come to visit us and she’d offer them our food, and we were mortified by this. But that’s the way she was. She thought that she had to share. Whatever we had she had to share. But the darndest thing is that whenever we’d go to somebody else’s house, she would not permit us to have anything from their house because they might need it more. It was really very puzzling to me at the time.

But she had certain values that she taught us to live by, and that helped me enormously as I grew up and as I made my way through my career, because nothing has ever been as important to me as the values that I was taught. And I’ve held onto them more than I’ve held onto anything else really in my life because it rooted me and it gave me the ability to stand up to pressure and to do the things that I thought were right, as opposed to the things that people wanted me to do.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
And let me ask a follow-up. You write so beautifully about your closeness to your family, and yet of course, your life was one of exploration, of traveling far away from home. And it’s very poignant the way you describe the sense of almost mental distress of wanting to go and explore while at the same time wanting to remain close to your family. And I imagine that there are many students who have a similar kind of distress at becoming who they are here at Harvard or other institutions and staying in touch with home. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Ruth J. Simmons:
I began to understand, at a fairly young age, that the life I was living was a lie. I did not believe that it was true that Blacks were unworthy of equality. I did not believe it was true that my mind was inferior. I did not believe it was true that I had to be consigned to a life separated from every other human type on the face of the earth. And so the fact that I knew that was a lie meant that I needed to find places that represented a better reality from what I knew as a child.

And so I began to explore different worlds through reading, initially, imagining what life might be like without all of the racism and discrimination that we faced. And then as soon as I could, I left the country to see what was elsewhere. And so, I think when I was 17, my Spanish teacher said, “You might go to Mexico to accelerate your language learning of Spanish.” And so I got on a Greyhound bus—didn’t tell my family where I was going because they would’ve been, again, very upset about it. Nor did they understand the journey I was on. None of them left home—none. And so I went off to Mexico to live with a Mexican family and study Spanish. And then I really continued that, and I studied French and went off to France. And my goal was to see the world and understand something about why we do the things we do to each other as human beings. I was on a quest to understand the history of my family and why we’d been treated the way we were. But most of all, I never wanted to repeat the errors that I saw as a child. I didn’t want to be a racist myself. I didn’t want to think that other people who were different from me because they looked different, because they had a different religion, were less than me. So I was preparing myself to be a full human being, even though I couldn’t have expressed it that way as a 17-year-old. But that’s actually what I was doing.

And of course it was all important to me, but at the same time, I couldn’t talk to my family about it because, first, I knew that they would not understand and they would discourage me from doing that. They thought I was just weird, and I am a little bit, but not as much as they think, anyway. So this whole idea of wanderlust was something that they didn’t understand.

But here’s the most important thing: the class issue was the hardest because how do you say to your family living at the poverty line, toiling every day in factories, that you’re having high tea on a college campus? How do you say that to them in a way that they can understand? How do you say to your family when they cannot even afford to go to the next town for holiday, that you’re off in France, bicycling in Southern France? You can’t.

And so I hid most of what I was doing, and I felt bad about it in some ways because I knew how privileged I was. And I never thought I was better than my family, ever. I just knew it was something that I needed to do and that they wouldn’t understand. But I also had a conviction that over time what I was doing was ultimately going to benefit them. And that has come to fruition is exciting for me because I’ve been able to make their lives better and probably nothing gives me more joy than the fact that finally I’ve been able to demonstrate to them that the learning that I was involved in as a young child, really redounded to everybody’s benefit, not just mine.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Wonderful. Well, you talk about the wanderlust and the travel, but I want to go back for a bit to discuss the remembrances in your memoir of particular schools or teachers, from Ms. Ida Mae Henderson’s classroom when you were six years old through your graduation from Dillard, and then your acceptance at Harvard. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about the lessons that those teachers, those institutions imparted, and how they influenced you over time?

Ruth J. Simmons:
Well, imagine now if you are on a sharecropper’s farm, living in crowded conditions and being in fields, you don’t think of yourself as having any importance. It was actually not until I went to school that I began to feel that I mattered somehow. Teachers are wonderful, but they also lie to us, and that’s a wonderful thing that they do.

And so my first teacher, when I walked into that first classroom—now keep in mind I’m wearing clothes made from discarded flour sacks, barely shod, my hair all over my head. I’m the ultimate country bumpkin. And this teacher says to me, “Good morning, baby. How are you? I’m so happy to see you. Here’s your desk and your books and your writing utensils,” and so forth. “I think you’re just going to do wonderfully here.” First of all, she’s talking—her talk, her speech is just magical because I’m used to the way that farmers talk—mumbling, and you can barely understand what’s coming out of their mouths—and here’s this woman who is speaking clearly and with an intonation that suggests that there’s something marvelous and wonderful happening.

And so I’m thinking, “What is this?” Well, I mean, it’s transformational is what it is. And so this woman, Ms. Ida Mae, encouraged me. And everything that I did was a marvel, which of course was not true. But nevertheless, she heaped praise on me.

And now, what I concluded from this first experience is that education must be something extraordinary, and I wanted to be a part of it forever because of that experience, which is why I say to everybody who teaches, be very careful when you walk out in front of young people, or anybody else for that matter, because you cannot have a down day. You can’t, you can’t afford—because you don’t know what influence you’re going to have on somebody that very day, and so you must be hopeful, ever hopeful, because they steal that from you. I lived in a time when I could not be hopeful. There was no reason to be. I was going to become a maid, and my life was going to be very ordinary, perhaps, and I couldn’t hope for anything better than that, how would I have? And yet teachers hoped for a different future, and I got that hope from them. So be hopeful always when you’re talking to young people because they may need it, because they may not be able to envision that for themselves.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Let me ask you about a really striking sentence in your book. On page 195, you write, “Rejected by Yale, I was admitted to Harvard.” And this is for graduate school?

Ruth J. Simmons:
Yeah.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
I wonder why you include that anecdote. You go on to talk about how it shook your confidence. Why did you include that, and what did you hope people would take from it?

Ruth J. Simmons:
So many students just imagine a perfect upward trajectory with every success possible. That’s the way they imagine their paths forward. And I wanted always for people to know that that certainly has not been my life. I’ve had disappointments. And as I say, most of the time those disappointments led to something fantastic for me. And so, I mean, I have my favorite ones—that one, Yale was one. I mean, how dare they turn me—

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
[LAUGHS] Exactly.

Ruth J. Simmons:
I remind them of that, of course.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Yes, of course you do.

Ruth J. Simmons:
And then I was once a candidate, somewhat reluctantly, for the presidency of Oberlin. And I went through the process and then they didn’t select me. And I decided, “Well, that’s fine because I don’t like this presidential stuff anyway, and I’m never going to aspire to be a president.” And so I settled back into what I was doing, and within months, Smith came and asked me to be president.

And then I thought about it, “Oh my God, I could have become president of Oberlin, in Ohio.” And that didn’t happen—thank God it didn’t happen because I became president of Smith. And that’s the way life is. I mean, you think that something has happened to you, so horrible, so horrible, and then you are in a cul-de-sac, and then suddenly something else arises that you never would’ve done had it not been for the path having been closed to you. That happened repeatedly to me, and mostly because of my own errors. I was very difficult as a child. I was difficult as a teenager. I was difficult as a young adult because I always forcefully expressed my opinion to people who were not interested in it. And as a consequence of that, a lot of doors closed for me early on, and yet I was rescued somehow.

So my first year at Dillard, I got there, and oh my goodness, it’s a religiously affiliated college, and I discovered that they had a chapel requirement—a chapel requirement. I had to go to chapel and listen to a sermon. Well, I said, “This is not appropriate.” And I said, “It makes no sense for a college to have a required chapel requirement, because what about Muslims and Jews and Catholics? Would they have to go to Protestant service?” And so I said, “Well, I’m not doing it. I’m simply not going to honor your requirement.”

Yeah, it’s hard to believe, I know. When I was a senior, they wrote home to inform my family that I could not graduate because I had not satisfied the chapel requirement in my senior year. My family was very, they were shocked by this because they didn’t know about my shenanigans. But still, I was fiercely advocating my opinion about how unjust it was to force that on people. And so I managed, though, in my spring semester after they wrote to my family, news came that Harvard had admitted me and that Fulbright was awarding me a Fulbright. And the college couldn’t figure out what to do because they couldn’t announce that unless I graduated, and so they allowed me to graduate without satisfying the requirement.

But here’s the sweetest thing of all to me. Last week, I went to Dillard to do a book talk. And when I arrived—they’ve always been nervous about me because of my mouth—and when I arrived, the chaplain met me and said, “I want you to know that we did not stage this in the chapel, we’re doing it in the auditorium instead.” They still think back to that time, but here’s the thing: that it’s so important to impress upon people that they stick to their values because they disapproved, of course, of what I was doing. But today, of course, I get lauded because I’m so wonderful today because I represented the university well. These kinds of hypocritical things take place all the time, but we don’t have to be subservient to them. We can be who we fully are. And I believe that as a 17-year-old, I’ve believed at every moment of my journey, and it’s okay with me when people punish me for being outspoken, but they will live to regret it if they do.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
So let’s talk about gender. Your memoir grapples with limited conceptions of women and women’s roles you grew up with, and yet of course, you became the president of Smith and you’re a pathbreaking woman educator. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the foundational experiences that allowed you to appreciate that you, too, could lead.

Ruth J. Simmons:
Well, I grew up in those patriarchal environment imaginable. My father was a tyrant. He dictated everything in the household. My mother was completely subservient to him. And by extension, all of my brothers, all seven of my brothers, were the princes, and so all of the girls were secondary. We had no rights, basically. They were taken care of first. And including—if some of you have been in the South, you may remember this—men had to be served first, and so women ate afterwards and so forth. So that was the environment. But I had two very strong older sisters who fought against that. And they were tremendous models for me that I didn’t have to accept the leavings all the time, and that I didn’t have to stand back and not have a voice. But ultimately, I would say it was not until—and by the way, in Black culture, coming through the civil rights moment, as well as afterwards, Black women were expected to stand back and let Black men lead. And so it was always considered very bad form if, as a girl, you were smarter and you showed that because you were supposed to let the Black boy be smarter and so forth, so unbelievable. But it was not until I got to Wellesley during my junior year and saw Margaret Clapp that I understood what was possible, because I think she was the first very powerful woman that I had ever seen in person. But to know that she was running that institution as president meant everything to me. I never forgot that. And so, I think girls are in a much stronger, obviously, much different position today, but there are environments in which women still cannot quite believe that they have the right to be a full equal. So we still have work to do in making sure that that is clear.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Thank you. Now, let’s talk a bit about your one-of-a-kind leadership in higher education. You were the president of Smith, the women’s college. You were president of Brown, the first Black president in the Ivy League, and then you’re president of Prairie View A&M, which is an historically Black college, which is just a tremendous career: singular. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the accomplishments at those institutions that you’re proudest of.

Ruth J. Simmons:
Oh, that’s still awkward.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
A few.

Ruth J. Simmons:
A few. Okay. In terms of a strand, I would say the proudest accomplishment that I had in all three institutions is that my students loved me.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Aww.

Ruth J. Simmons:
They were so generous to me in every regard. And to me, it was always about leading young people to a place where they could maximize their talents and their intelligence and aspire to be whole human beings that will add something to the world.

And I wanted to model that in the way that teachers had modeled it for me, so I cared an awful lot about what I did, about how I appeared to my students. And in terms of making difficult decisions, in terms of explaining who I was, in terms of asking them for their help and establishing relationships with the students—that’s probably the thing that I am proudest of, because you know how your students come back years later and they want you to meet their children? That’s the greatest compliment really. If it weren’t for the age, the obvious problem with making you feel old.

But aside from that, I have been on this journey in higher education for a long time. And naturally, I’ve been on it during a time when higher education has been undergoing needed change. When I came into the profession, there were very few African American faculty, and one of my tasks was to try to address that. And so, some of the work that I did before I became president was much more important than what I did as president.

And so at Princeton, for example, at a time when women on the faculty were very—there was a very modest number of women on the faculty, particularly in engineering and sciences. And when there were very few African American faculty, that’s a problem that I tackled, and I tackled it by being disagreeable.

And that’s why I never thought I would go anywhere in my career, because I was such a nag. I remember once at Princeton, I thought, “I’ve got—something that has to be done about this problem.” So, I decided I’d do a white paper. Well, nobody asked me to do a white paper, but I stayed at my office late at night and I finished this white paper.

And of course, I marched it down the next morning to the president’s office and to the provost, who happened to be Neil Rudenstine at the time, and said, “Here, I want you to read this, because it’s very important that we do something about this problem.” And I left it with them. And naturally I thought, “Oh, thank goodness I’ve done that, and my job is over.”

So Neil called me the next day or so to his office. So, I thought, “Okay, this is it. I’m going to be fired.” But he said, “Okay, we’ve read your paper, and we agree with you.” I said, “Oh, that’s wonderful.” And he said, “Then now go do it.” And so, the paper that I had written made the case for a huge investment in hiring women. And I said, “If we needed a new chemistry building, we wouldn’t hesitate to put hundreds of millions of dollars into it.”

And yet our more serious problem right now is that we have all these women students and we don’t have women faculty. And if we took that same amount of money that we would put into a chemistry building and we spent it to attract faculty, imagine how Princeton would be changed. That was my argument.

And so, they gave me the ability, that moment, to hire as many faculty as I could find departments willing to hire. Math, at the time, had no women at all. They didn’t sort of believe it in women in math. There were no women’s restrooms in the math building.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Oh my goodness.

Ruth J. Simmons:
Well, why have a women’s restroom? And the math department said there were no women who were fit to be appointed to the faculty in math. So, I had a conversation with the chairman of math, and I said, “Okay, well, I certainly understand that. And you don’t want to appoint anybody who’s unqualified. However, if you can find women to appoint to the faculty in math, no matter how many it is, I’ll give you the money to do it. And you don’t have to use one of your faculty lines.” That year, they asked for six faculty lines.

So one of the things that we have to do is puncture people’s lame excuses for not doing the right thing. And one of the ways of doing that was to say, “Okay, I’m going to test this. So if I give you the resources, let’s see what you can do.” And that really was incredible. And similarly, with African American faculty, I tried to do the same thing, and that is I approached them about—I wanted to start at the top to teach a lesson to departments. So, I thought about the people at the top who should be recruited first. And so, my first one was Toni Morrison, and I thought, “Okay, this is a very excellent writer.” Well, that was a problem because Toni Morrison didn’t have a PhD, and she was at SUNY Albany. Princeton doesn’t recruit from SUNY Albany.

So a lot of what I was trying to do is to demonstrate how impoverished the reasoning is for excluding people. And I thought she’d be a good example of that. In any case, so I asked her to apply, she refused, because being Toni Morrison, “Are you kidding me? Why would I apply for anything if they know who I am?” That was the way she said it.

So I then asked the search committee, “Would you consider Toni Morrison?” They said, “Well, we won’t if she won’t submit her materials.” Yeah. So, I did the logical thing, and I went upstairs and typed up her résumé and submitted it.

That was a process, of course, but still the English department wouldn’t budge. The English department wouldn’t budge because she wasn’t a literary critic. And then the writers in creative writing rebelled because they said, “Wait a minute, we are very famous writers, and we have lecturer positions, and you’re going to bring in Toni Morrison as a professor, and a chaired professor at that?” So they rebelled.

But in one of the most extraordinary things that I ever saw, the president of Princeton marched over to creative writing and promised them faculty appointments just to bring Toni Morrison to Princeton. And so, she did come, and luckily she won the Pulitzer Prize that year, and then the Nobel Prize. And then it became, of course, we knew all along. Right?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Of course.

Ruth J. Simmons:
Yeah, of course. But not only that, it’s very funny. When you go to Princeton today, what do you see? You see a Toni Morrison Hall, right? It’s Toni Morrison all over. And imagine the experience that so many people have had as a consequence of breaking through that.

And, for example, MacKenzie Scott was her student. And look at the good that MacKenzie Scott is doing, including giving $50 million to Prairie View. That’s all from Toni Morrison. So I’ve sort of tried in my career to push against those conventions that keep us from honestly assessing people’s work and their potential, and that’s what I’m proudest of.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Wonderful. Thank you so much. We would like to get some audience questions, and so I’m going to ask Professor Miles to come up to the stage. She’s going to moderate Q and A. And while she’s coming up, I want to ask you a quick question about one of your accomplishments at Brown, and that was when you established the committee that explored Brown’s relationship, involvement in slavery. That was very risky. Another thing that you did that was risky but a wonderful example of your leadership. I want to quickly ask you, why did you do that?

Ruth J. Simmons:
To me, it was very simple, and I don’t like people making a lot of it because it was actually quite simple. Because of what education has done for me, I believe so much in the power of education and in the importance of universities, because I know what good it does for the world.

And when people ask, “Well, what is the relationship between the transatlantic slave trade and the founding of Brown?” I thought that was a simple question that needed to be answered. And so, I just wanted to tell the truth, basically. And again, going back to what my—the worst thing you could do in my family was tell a lie, the worst. And so I thought for people to respect universities, we have to be true to the values that we promulgate. And so we talk a lot about people relying on universities for the truth, for facts. And yet, if we’re unwilling to do that with our own history, what must people think of us? So that was the reason. Everybody thought I was crazy at the time, but I just thought it was a basic principle that we needed to follow.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Well, thank you for standing your ground. A lot of universities, including this one, owe you a debt of gratitude because they followed your example. Thank you.

Tiya Miles:
This dialogue between you two has been so mesmerizing that we listened right past the time. It was so wonderful to hear many of the hacks and strategies and tactics you shared. President Simmons, there’s somebody who writes in saying that he is a Black male librarian, that there are so few Black male librarians. How would you suggest that he deal with imposter syndrome in his area of work?

Ruth J. Simmons:
By not being an imposter. That’s why I’m so grateful to people in my childhood who framed this for me, and that is every part of who you are contributes to your uniqueness and to your advantage in a sense as a human being.

See, that’s the thing. I was talking to Larry—if I may say this, Larry—about sort of similar things that we experience as children. And one of the things that’s most important is that you find out who you are, and you come to terms with that, and that you have some capacity to understand what assets you bring.

There was never any question in my mind that coming from the fields of East Texas, experiencing the Civil Rights Revolution, having been desperately poor, all of that, I thought is wonderful for informing my leadership, because I can understand things I know some other people can’t understand, right? So I knew that, and because I knew that, I wasn’t concerned with trying to borrow from other people. I didn’t want to be them. Now, it’s true that when I was a student, especially the year that I was at Wellesley, I felt pretty impoverished because I was surrounded by wealthy women, and they were taking fancy vacations, doing all kinds of things, and it would’ve been possible for me to develop an affectation around that identity. But what held me back from that was the deep respect I had for the path that my grandparents and my parents had traveled. And I thought, what a disservice to them it would be, somehow, if I traded that, the wealth of what that is, to be something that I’m not. And so I mean it seriously when I say don’t be an imposter, because it usually doesn’t work out well. Nobody wants to follow an imposter.

The other thing that I discovered was I thought that I would be prevented from doing certain kinds of things because I had strong views, which I articulated constantly. I had strong beliefs, and so on. And I thought, well, nobody really wants that. But it turns out I was wrong about that. And so because I began to understand that Smith came to me because women’s education was at a point where they were concerned about whether or not women would choose enrollment at places like Smith. So they were looking for something different and a way of thinking about what Smith could be for young people going forward. And so a contrarian was what they needed. And I had not been a contrarian, I probably never would’ve become president of Smith—or president of Brown, for that matter, because although I really suspected when Brown asked me to become president that they really didn’t know who I was.

So I met with them and I said, “I don’t think you know who I am.” I try to describe the fact that I was a troublemaker, that I was not going to be swayed by them to do what they wanted if I didn’t agree with it. And I had this very serious conversation with the chairman of the board to say, “I want you to know what you’re getting into if you have me as president. I can only do what I think is the right thing to do. Are you willing to do that?” So you do want to hew to who you are, but you’ve got to do some work on that because you’ve got to know what that is, and you’ve got to test those values and make sure that they’re beneficial in some regards. But that’s what I would say.

Tiya Miles:
Thank you. There are a number of questions, and they’re still coming in, about what it’s been like to be a Black woman as you have lived your life, about stereotypes, about microaggressions, how you handled those. I feel that you are showing us a living example right now of how to do that, but would you want to speak to that a little bit more?

Ruth J. Simmons:
Forthrightly, I mean—it was the only way I knew how to do it. I had a very dear mentor in Aaron Lemonick, the dean of the faculty at Princeton, and I admired him so much. He was just terrific person, but he was fierce, very scary. The faculty were scared of him. But I was the associate dean of the faculty, number two in the office, and we had an associate dean for research, who was a male. And when Aaron left for the summer, he was a physicist, and he would go to Three Mile Island to do some research. And when he was away, I ran the dean of the faculty office. And so that meant that I saw everything. And one day, I happened to open the mail and discovered that it was a list of salaries. And of course, it was too late for me to ignore it because my eyes fell on my salary and then on my colleague’s salary.

And my colleague had no PhD and certainly was not as good as I was. No, honestly, he wasn’t. And I was the senior person, and yet he was making $10,000 more than I. And I thought about that, I was shattered. I thought, oh my God, I didn’t know if it was because I was Black that I was getting paid less or because I was a woman or maybe both. But then I had to figure out what to do about it. And then I just went completely to my heart and decided to talk to him.

So when he came back, I made an appointment to meet with him, and I said, “I want you to know that I was opening the mail, and it happened to be salaries, and I discovered that you’re paying this person $10,000 more than me. I’m going to tell you something, and I don’t want to talk about it, but I want you to know what I have to say.” And what I said simply was, “I know you know that this is entirely unjust because I’m far more qualified than he, and yet you’re paying him more money, and I want you to know that because of this, I will never feel the same way about working for you again.” And then I left.

He needed to know that it wasn’t just about the salaries, it was about the confidence that I had in him and the respect that I had for him as a fair person, and that was shattered. Within a day, they increased my salary, too, but that wasn’t the point, really. And so he was without question the most important man to me in that part of my career, and he is responsible for my becoming a college president, this man who did that to me.

And one of the things I had to do is to learn to forgive him for that and to think about how I could use that to help with faculty salaries and so on. And so we instituted a process of reviewing women’s faculty salaries, and I was given responsibility for doing that. So there were good things that came out of it as a consequence, but still, there’s no substitute for standing up for yourself because I think it’s generally true that if you allow people to roll over you, you probably deserve to be walked on. Well, that’s a little harsh, okay. But I think the point is that standing up for yourself is the beginning of people beginning to acknowledge you as an equal, right? Yeah.

Tiya Miles:
One more question. This is a combined question for many people. They would like to know your view of higher education today. In particular, what are the biggest challenges higher education faces? What do you say to your students who think, “Why do I need a college degree now? I don’t have faith in institutions”? And how has COVID affected higher education? So any one of those that you would like to address.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin:
Small question.

Tiya Miles:
That was one.

Ruth J. Simmons:
From what I can see, and I range pretty widely. I mean, I’m chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in Houston. I work with the corporate groups all the time. I work with community groups. From what I can see, the best value today is education, without question. I have no hesitation in saying that at all. But I am not one who believes that everybody needs to go to Harvard. And what my career has tried to demonstrate is that you can go to a small college like Dillard and then go to Harvard, and then you can work at a college like Spelman and then work at Princeton, and you can be president of a Prairie View and be president of an Ivy League university. So I’m trying to blur those lines enough for people to understand that they don’t have to look for the costliest option to be educated.

And I work with community colleges all the time and believe that that’s a very good option for people. And so I just think that I would always advise young people: learn as much as you can in whatever setting you can learn it, because what you put into your mind is going to give you the best returns in the long run, for sure. In terms of education—the challenge of education, I mean—we are mired in all kinds of disputes right now, and there are two ways to look at that: One is to do what some misguided individuals do and to say, “Okay, that just shows how bankrupt universities are because they ought to toe the line and they ought to make sure everybody is doing things a certain way.” That’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is there is no place left that I know of in this country where you can have a conversation about anything controversial without—did you see the story, by the way, today of the congressman who challenges the head of the union, and he wants to have a fight on the floor? I mean, this is where we are. And so we have an opportunity in universities still to make it possible for us to model how to get along in a diverse society in which we are of course going to have different views. We’re of course going to be unable to reconcile those views in the final analysis, but the process that we undergo in working through those things is so vital to who we are as a democracy. And so to me, that’s the most valuable role of the university today, is that societal role. If we can lead in that space and lead with vision and integrity. Whatever happens today, tomorrow is going to be stronger for us because we have held to our values and promoted the best that we can do as human beings in reaching across difference and in solving problems together.

Tiya Miles:
Thank you. Thank you so much.

Ruth J. Simmons:
Thank you. Thank you.

Heather Min:
That concludes today’s program.

Ivelisse Estrada:
BornCurious is brought to you by Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Our producer is Alan Grazioso. Jeff Hayash is the man behind the microphone.

Heather Min:
Anna Soong, Kevin Grady, Marcus Knoke, and Max Doyle provided editing and production support.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Many thanks to Jane Huber for editorial support. And we are your cohosts: I’m Ivelisse Estrada.

Heather Min:
And I’m Heather Min.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Our website, where you can listen to all our episodes, is radcliffe.harvard.edu/borncurious.

Heather Min:
If you have feedback, you can e-mail us at info@radcliffe.harvard.edu.

Ivelisse Estrada:
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Heather Min:
Thanks for learning with us, and join us next time.