Dr ruth simmons biography for kids

Home / Political Leaders & Public Figures / Dr ruth simmons biography for kids

 It was not an easy adjustment, but their family support was there.

Ruth Simmons was the first African American president of an Ivy League university. 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. Her parents were Fanny and Isaac Stubblefield. The goal was to raise $1.4 billion to make Brown's academic programs even better.

On December 4, 2017, she was officially chosen as the eighth president of Prairie View A&M University. This was the largest single gift Brown had ever received.

In 2006, Simmons said she was not interested in becoming president of Harvard University.

But her potential remained obvious. 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.

Simmons is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves on the boards of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Alley Theatre, The MacArthur Foundation, Morehouse College, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Holdsworth Center, and Hines Global Income Trust.

She is a member of important groups like the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  Her parents like many, moved to the city in search of new work,  but also greater opportunities. This committee was asked to study the university's past connections to the transatlantic slave trade. 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.

 In fact when she told her mother that she was interested in College as a young girl, her mother was just concerned as there was no way they knew to bridge that divide and pay for any aspect of the education. Under her leadership, Prairie View was reclassified as an R-2 Research University and Brown made significant strides in improving its standing as one of the world’s finest research universities.

A French professor before entering university administration, President Simmons held an appointment as a Professor of Comparative Literature and Africana Studies at Brown.

She was the youngest of 12 children. Texas Instruments, Director. She completed her master's in 1970 and her doctorate in 1973.

Career Highlights

Early Roles in Education

After finishing her studies, Simmons worked as a professor of French at the University of New Orleans from 1973 to 1976. 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.

This is an HBCU in her home state of Texas. She worked in the graduate studies department, helping students who were working on their master's and doctorate degrees.

In 1983, she moved to Princeton University, another Ivy League school.