Ruth Simmons made a big news splash a decade ago when she was named president of Brown University, making her the first Black president of an Ivy League institution. She made another splash three years later by naming a committee to investigate Brown’s role in the slave trade and to make recommendations on possible reparations.
Reflecting on her tenure as she prepares to retire in June, Simmons, 66, does not mention her historic appointment in 2000 or the daring “Slavery and Justice” report among her most significant accomplishments as president of the prestigious university in Providence, R.I. Instead, her top three are Brown’s full adoption of need-blind admissions, 20 percent growth in the number of faculty, and a new second campus, where expanded laboratory space has increased the flow of federal research dollars.
Brown adopted need-blind admissions for undergraduates in 2002 and in 2008 stopped including loans in the financial aid packages of those whose families earn less than $100,000. Slightly more than 40 percent of Brown undergraduates receive need-based grants, about a third are minorities, and 16 percent are first-generation college students. The number of faculty has increased to 687 this year, up by 98 since 2001. Additions have been made across academic disciplines. At 19 percent minority, the faculty is more diverse, with Asians accounting for much of the growth.
“We had stagnated for a while with a faculty that really had been capped in size,” Simmons explains. “New fields develop, opportunities arise, and having a cap on the faculty is one of the worst things that you can actually do. So the cap was removed.”
The campus had no room to expand on College Hill, so Simmons oversaw the development of a second campus less than a mile away. Nine renovated buildings house molecular research laboratories, a public health program, a mathematics research institute and the Alpert Medical School, which relocated in August.
“I think, of all the things I have done at Brown, that will probably have the longest-term consequence for Brown because it will enable us to have more research space, enable us to expand the size of the faculty,” Simmons says. “It will enable us to do the things that a research university inevitably has to do to be competitive.”
The new campus already has produced dividends. Research funding from all sources has jumped by 83 percent since 2000. Medical research grants from the National Institutes of Health make up most of the increase.
