Former Prairie View president Ruth Simmons blasts Texas A&M system over its handling of the HBCU
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Posted By: S. Moore on April 03, 2023 Ruth J. Simmons is still trying to unpack her last days as president of Prairie View A&M University. And now, more than a month after her departure, she's explaining in the greatest detail yet why she left the job early. In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, Simmons said she moved up her planned departure date after a member of Chancellor John Sharp’s staff insisted she could not make high-level appointments as the HBCU awaited its next leader. After a 50-year career in higher education – during which she led Smith College and served as the first Black president at any Ivy League school – Simmons felt something was awry. She fears that the Texas A&M University System, which Sharp has led since 2011, has long neglected its second-oldest institution, shortchanging the vital role of the campus located on a former plantation 40 miles northwest of Houston. It enrolled 7,565 full-time undergraduate and graduate students in fall 2022, and about 84 percent of them are Black. “The opportunity that they had to make use of my experience and judgment was completely missed by a proclivity to constantly downgrade Prairie View,” she said. Simmons, 77, added that she won’t be working with the system’s current administrators, as some former presidents do. She has kept busy, writing a book about her childhood as a poor student in Houston and her path to higher education. In April, she begins a position as Rice University’s President’s Distinguished Fellow. In June, she'll also begin serving as senior adviser to the president of Harvard University on Harvard's HBCU partnerships. In her sit-down with the Chronicle, which took place at Rice, Simmons recounted her six years at Prairie View – and what ended them – choosing her words carefully. Simmons said serving as president at Prairie View was one of the most rewarding experiences of her life. She worked with majority low-income students who reminded her of herself as a young adult, and she advocated to create equity between HBCUs and the state’s better-funded Predominately White Institutions. By the time she left, she significantly boosted research spending and financial contributions at the university in Waller County. She struggled to see the A&M system share her passion. “I don't believe that the Board of Regents of the system is at all capable of managing the affairs of Prairie View,” she said. “The simple reason for that is because they don't know Prairie View, and they have no interest in learning. “That's why I didn't think that the system was competent to make the call about whether or not I shouldn't make appointments," Simmons continued. "They simply don't know the reality well enough. They don't care to know the reality." A&M system denies claims When Simmons announced that she would leave in February, instead of May, Chancellor Sharp clarified that no outgoing president in the system is allowed to make high-level appointments, and he cited several examples where he required the same of other system presidents. Texas A&M System officials said in a statement on Tuesday that Sharp has remained a champion for the university, long before Simmons came to Prairie View. "When he applied to be chancellor almost 12 years ago, he had two immediate goals: Acquire a law school and enhance Prairie View A&M," Vice President for Marketing and Communications Laylan Copelin said of Sharp. "He has delivered on both promises." The system also provided examples, including $341 million in construction projects at Prairie View over the past 11 years and $36 million in research funding allocated from the chancellor's research fund. Prairie View's allocation from A&M's permanent endowment has also increased by nearly 150 percent, from $12.1 million in 2011 to $29.9 million this year, Sharp said. And funding per student more than doubled to $3,306 per student, up from $1,384. "Truth is, the first time President Simmons was told 'no' over almost six years, she quit and abandoned Prairie View A&M’s students, faculty and staff," Copelin added. "Despite her public criticism of The Texas A&M University System, Chancellor Sharp allowed her to speak at commencement after her resignation and authorized her signature to be attached to December’s diplomas. We wish her well in her new endeavors." Simmons has remained guarded about what positions she was trying to fill, but she said she had been using her discretion on what was appropriate to handle immediately and what could wait for the incoming president, Tomikia LeGrande. (Most recently vice president for strategic enrollment and student success at Virginia Commonwealth University, LeGrande takes the helm June 1.) The system's response to her departure was "rubbish," Simmons said, given her experience and proven record of keeping the university’s best interest in mind. She wouldn't have become president if that wasn't the case: Guilt and a sense of duty drew her to Prairie View in the first place. Sharp recruited Simmons to come to Prairie View years into her retirement from Brown University. Still active in higher education, she expected he was seeking a consultation, but Sharp got off a private plane from College Station to Houston and shocked her with an immediate ask to serve as Prairie View’s interim president. In her early 70s and having already served as a president twice, she planned to feign interest but politely decline, she said. A visit to Prairie View changed that. “I just folded,” she said. “Seeing these young people walking across the campus and knowing that this was what I was like at their age … I thought, after everything that has happened to me in Texas, all the people who went out of their way to help me, how could I do less than to help these young people?” Few in American higher education have such informative experience as Simmons. Born in 1945 in East Texas as the youngest of 12 siblings, her family moved to Houston as agriculture technology began replacing sharecroppers’ work, she wrote in a 1998 essay published in the Texas Journal of Ideas, History and Culture. At Wheatley High School, her teachers instilled in her the importance of Black educators and gave her the lifelong mission of bettering opportunities for Black students, she said. Simmons has always considered herself a bit of a disruptor. She earned a Ph.D. in romance languages and literature at Harvard University, in part because white educators had long withheld the humanities as a field of study for Black people. She said she became a problem everywhere she went – a pain for her bosses in the early years and too unconventional for donors in later years – holding appointments in New Orleans and California before moving into administrative roles at Princeton University and the historically Black Spelman College. Breaking the color barrier Her time as president of Smith College and Brown were history-making. She broke the “color barrier” at both institutions; created Smith’s engineering program, the first at a women’s college; and ignited a racial reckoning in higher education when she re-examined Brown’s history with the slave trade. "I would say she’s probably the most respected university president of this generation, for sure," Rice University President Reginald DesRoches said. Back in 2017, Simmons' brother, a Prairie View alumnus, appealed to her conscience. She had never been president of any HBCUs, which have been historically undermined through with less state funding and the tendency of some white people to view them still as lesser places of education, even decades after reintegration. She took the job, planning to be interim president for a few months. Simmons eventually asked to stay, serving in the role for six years but leaving with the knowledge that HBCUs are still “pretty far off” from being considered equal. “They were created to be less than. Now they are in an era when Blacks have been given access, full access to education, and yet people don’t let go of that idea," she said. "Overcoming that is a monumental task, and you can’t do it by pretending it never happened.” Simmons endeared herself to Prairie View students in quick time. A celebrity in the higher education world, she was also revered on campus, earning a name emblazoned on T-shirts: “Ruth the Truth.” The former president said she feels her kinship with the community must have come from their knowledge that she didn’t have to be at Prairie View, but she wanted to. “She just left a mark on all the students, just by her presence, just by being well-known nationwide,” freshman Briana Baker said. “Transferring all her success and her experience to Prairie View, she’s done a lot.” Many faculty share that admiration. Under Simmons, Prairie View’s aggregate research spending went way up, coinciding with the university’s elevation to a “Research 2” Carnegie Classification. Fundraising also hit new highs, with Simmons bringing in money left and right by her name alone. Corporate partnerships abounded, and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott in 2020 gave $50 million to be used at Simmons’ discretion. While some people questioned Simmons' decision to lead a HBCU, they were disproven when she brought Prairie View to the national stage, said Melanye Price, special assistant to the president and director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice. “I think lots of people saw that as a step down, but she never treated it that way,” Price said. “There was a way in which having her as our president, everybody walked a little bit taller.” Simmons said she never kept secret how she felt the A&M System’s relationship with Prairie View needed to improve, especially in her desire for more collaboration between the system institutions. At a Houston-area HBCU panel in August, she shocked the audience to laughter, joking to the president of the independently-run Texas Southern University that they could have Prairie View’s place in the system if they wanted it. Still, Simmons said she maintained a good relationship with A&M’s chancellor until she heard from his office earlier this year. The departure Simmons’ chief financial officer gave her the news – via communication from one of Sharp’s subordinates – that the system didn’t want her to fill any more positions, she said. Months away from leaving, she sent a letter to the chancellor letting him know that if she couldn’t be president in full, she couldn’t stay. “The pretense of being a president in name … in reality, that was a step too far for me,” she said. “I've never endured anything like that, and I never will. So I didn't want to tell a lie to my students. I didn't want to tell a lie to alumni. And I was not prepared to lie, to make it a pleasant story for the system.” Instead of hearing back from the president, Simmons said she got a “cryptic” text from one of Sharp’s “underlings” telling her to consult with public relations before sending out a resignation. Texas A&M System officials say that Sharp did respond to Simmons, even though she said she never received it. A copy of an email dated Jan. 30 reads that the directive to not make appointments has been in place for “ALL” of the universities in the system for over ten years. The letter, which the system provided the Houston Chronicle, adds that if the incoming president was fine with a certain appointment, Simmons could proceed. “I regret that my staff didn’t discuss this with you the day you announced your resignation but I can only assume that they were sure you know about it,” Sharp said. In mid-February, Simmons released a personal letter to the Prairie View community including her reasons for leaving. Within hours, it was national news – she was taking a personal stand, but the attention it garnered meant she was taking a public stand, too. “She demonstrated I think for lots of people, when something becomes untenable, you remove yourself from it,” Price said. “When you’re in a relationship like this that has a power differential, the people in power believe that you should be gracious enough to take what they give you. And she said, no I don’t.” Simmons said she believes A&M has continued to miss the mark, as it would be credited in the public eye for improving Prairie View. And the school’s history is inextricable from A&M’s flagship in College Station, both founded in 1876 and owned by the state as a result of post-Civil War land grants for higher education. “It has to be because they cannot understand the relationship between this history of race in the state of Texas, and where the university is today and where it should be today, based on all of the discrimination that has taken place over decades,” she said. “It's a failure at some level to understand the duty of people today to deal with that history.” The former president’s biggest regret, she said, is that her plan for a smooth transition failed. But she’s encouraged by what she’s hearing from people in the Prairie View community – that they were glad she vocalized what they have always felt. “I really do hope that it helps the system understand that Prairie View is not a little kind of insignificant bump,” Simmons said. “It's not that at all. It is an incredible institution that is waiting for the proper leadership in in the system to value it, and to help it become the place that it can become.” SOURCE Houston Chronicle If you enjoyed this article, Join HBCU CONNECT today for similar content and opportunities via email! |
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