The Claiming Williams evening keynote will feature an on-stage conversation with Ruth Simmons, author of this year’s Williams Reads selection, Up Home: One Girl’s Journey. Simmons is currently serving as a President’s Distinguished Fellow at Rice University and has previously served as President at Brown University, Smith College and Prairie View A&M University. Dr. Simmons will be in conversation with Leticia S. E. Haynes, Vice President for Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Williams College. This event is free and open to the public. 7:30 pm in Chapin Hall.
View a recording of this event.
“As an academic leader, Simmons believes in the power of education to transform lives. She champions the university as a haven of reasoned debate with the responsibility to challenge students intellectually and prepare them to become informed, conscientious citizens. She has spent her career advocating for a leadership role for higher education in the arena of national and global affairs.”
Ruth Simmons was president of Smith College from 1995-2001, the largest women’s college in the United States, where she launched a number of strategic initiatives to strengthen the college’s academic programs and inaugurated the first engineering program at a U.S. women’s college. Simmons then served as Brown’s president from 2001-2012, making her the first Black woman to lead an Ivy League institution. She also held a position as professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Africana Studies. She is a former director of African American studies at Princeton University and past chair of the Harvard University Visiting Committee for African-American Studies, and in 2003 she led the Slavery and Justice Initiative at Brown. In 2012, she left Brown to become president at Prairie View A&M where she served from 2017-2023.
A native of Texas and a 1967 graduate of Dillard University in New Orleans, Simmons 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 David Diop and Aime Cesaire.
In 1983, after serving as associate dean of the graduate school at the University of Southern California, Simmons joined the Princeton University administration. She remained at Princeton for seven years, leaving in 1990 for two years to serve as provost at Spelman College. Returning to Princeton in 1992 as vice provost, she remained at the university until June 30, 1995. In 1995 she became president of Smith College, the largest women’s college in the United States, where she launched a number of strategic initiatives to strengthen the college’s academic programs and inaugurated the first engineering program at a U.S. women’s college.