Brown University President Ruth J. Simmons, a noted figure in higher education and the first African-American president of an Ivy League institution, will be the featured speaker at Union’s Commencement, set for Sunday, June 15 at 10 a.m.
Simmons, who will receive an honorary doctorate in humane letters, is noted for her commitment to diversity and engineering, two key initiatives that are also integral to the Union campus.
“I am absolutely thrilled that Ruth Simmons will be our Commencement speaker,” said President Stephen C. Ainlay. “She has been an important leader in American higher education for many years, and we are honored that she has accepted our invitation.”
Simmons became president of Brown in 2001. She has created an ambitious set of initiatives for the Providence, R.I., school, with a focus on strengthening the faculty; increasing resources for undergraduate, graduate and medical students; improving facilities; and ensuring that diversity informs every dimension of the university.
Earlier, Simmons served as the president of Smith College, the nation’s largest women’s college. While there, she created the first engineering program at an American women’s college.
Simmons is a native of Grapeland, Texas, where her family worked as sharecroppers in the cotton fields during a period of segregation and “very quickly became socialized into believing I was worthless,” she recalled in a 2006 interview. “Grapeland was the kind of small, east Texas town where blacks got murdered if they stepped out of line.”
When she was seven, Simmons’ family moved to Houston, where opportunities opened up and “people bothered to insist I went to school and I loved it.
“There was a calm and order that was missing elsewhere in my life,” she said in the interview. “But, above all, there were books. My parents were deeply suspicious about my reading, but for me it opened a window into a different reality, where it was possible for someone like me to be accepted.”
Simmons is a 1967 graduate of Dillard University in New Orleans. She received her Ph.D. in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University in 1973. She is fluent in French and has written on the works of poets David Diop and Aimé Césaire.
She also has served in various leadership positions at the graduate school at the University of Southern California, Princeton University and Spelman College.
She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Council on Foreign Relations. She serves on a number of boards, including the Howard University Board of Trustees, Texas Instruments, and the Goldman Sachs Group.
She holds honorary degrees from numerous colleges and has received many prizes and fellowships, including the German DAAD and a Fulbright Fellowship to France. In 2007, she was named one of U.S. News & World Report’s top U.S. leaders and, for the second time, a Glamour magazine Woman of the Year.