Ruth Simmons

Newsweek, December, 2001 by Barbara Kantrowitz

Throughout her nearly three decades in higher education, Ruth Simmons has always found people eager to advise her on how to succeed in academia. Work your way up through the faculty ranks, they said. Don't get pigeonholed by focusing on affirmative action or African-American studies. Ditto for women's issues. Good advice, maybe, but Simmons, 56, the new president of Brown University, never paid much attention to it. "My career," she says proudly, "has always been about things I care about." She moved rapidly up the administrative ladder at several institutions after only a few years in the classroom. Then, at Princeton in the 1980s, she ran the African-American studies program and pushed for hiring such prominent faculty members as Cornel West and Toni Morrison. In the early 1990s,...

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