校园改革者
跟早期的大学校长一样，鲁思·西蒙斯是她所管理的那所大学的道德指南针
曾有一段时间，一流大学的校长着实起着举足轻重的作用。《纽约时代》杂志一直关注着他们的一举一动。就连总统也向他们征求意见。伍德罗·威尔逊和艾森豪威尔曾是普林斯顿和哥伦比亚大学的校长，他们的大学校长身份是他们入主白宫的敲门砖。然而，今天大学校长的差事与雅芳小姐的工作差别越来越小了(除登门拜访有钱的校友外)。
鲁思·西蒙斯是布朗大学的新任校长，也是第一位领导一个名牌大学的黑人校长，她就是过去校园改革派领导人的翻版。她不单单只筹集资金，她还把这些资金投到当今伟大的教育事业之中。西蒙斯用她在1995-2001担任史密斯学院院长期间筹集到的3亿美元的资金开设了工程学专业(在所有女子学校里这个专业是第一次开设)，并增设演讲研讨会，以把那些无所不在的“如像”和“嗯”等废话从校园用语中清除出去。在一次讨论史密斯大学数学系发展前景的会议上，一个教授战战兢兢地提出能否给他的课再增加两次讨论。她是这样回答的：“再大胆些。”
她自己的梦想是在德克萨斯州东部的一个佃农小屋里诞生的。家里没钱买书或玩具——过圣诞节时，她和十一个兄弟姐妹每人只得到一只苹果、一个橘子和十只坚果。尽管在去上学的路上有人叫她黑鬼，但她进教室时她却说：“这倒唤醒了我。”当她获得在迪拉德大学奖学金时，她的高中老师慷慨解囊，凑钱让她买一件外套。文档后她接着上哈佛大学，攻读拉丁系语言博士学位。
西蒙斯把多样性作为校园改革的头等大事。她几乎使史密斯大学的黑人新生入学人数翻了一番。能做到这一步主要是靠她亲自到美国最贫困地区的高中去招生的结果。少数民族学生来校后，她一直关心学生的情况，一直为缓解令很多校园十分苦恼的种族冷漠情绪而奋斗。在史密斯大学，她拒绝了学生提出的按种族分住公寓的要求。她在1993年任普林斯顿大学副教务长期间，写了一篇至今仍很著名的报告。在报告中，她建议大学成立一个专门解决种族冲突的办公室，以在种族误解激化之前化解之。
去年春天，学生报上刊登了一篇由保守派辩论家戴维•霍罗威茨撰写的煽动性文章。他在文章中诡称，从经济角度讲，黑人受益于奴隶制。文章一发表，就导致了种族关系的破裂。她在布朗大学的首要任务就是要修复这一裂痕。“在种族关系中，任何人都没有什么安全的地方。但是校园不同于我们社会上的其它机构，它给我们提供了跨越种族界限的机会，”西蒙斯说，“即便你受到了伤害，你也不能一走了之，你得跨越这条线。”
CAMPUS CRUSADER
Like university presidents of an earlier era, Ruth Simmons is the moral compass of the school she governs
There was a time when big-league university presidents really mattered. The New York Times covered their every move. Presidents, the real ones, sought their counsel. For Woodrow Wilson and Dwight Eisenhower, being head of Princeton and Columbia, respectively, was a stepping-stone to the White House. Today, though, the job of college president is less and less removed from that of the Avon lady (except the house calls are made to the doorsteps of wealthy alums).
Ruth Simmons, the newly installed president of Brown University and the first African American to lead an Ivy League school, is a throwback to the crusading campus leaders of old. She doesn't merely marshal funds; she invests them in the great educational causes of our day. With the more than $300 million she raised as president of Smith College from 1995 to 2001, Simmons established an engineering program (the first at any women's school) and added seminars focused on public speaking to purge the ubiquitous "likes" and "ums" from the campus idiom. At a meeting to discuss the future of Smith's math department, one professor timidly requested two more discussion sections for his course. Her response: "Dream bigger."
Her own dream was born in a sharecropper's shack in East Texas where there was no money for books or toys--she and her 11 siblings each got an apple, an orange and 10 nuts for Christmas. Though she was called n_____ on her walk to school, entering the classroom, she says, "was like waking up." When Simmons won a scholarship to Dillard University, her high school teachers took up a collection so she'd have a coat. She went on to Harvard to earn a Ph.D. in Romance languages.
Simmons has made diversity her No. 1 campus crusade. She nearly doubled the enrollment of black freshmen at Smith, largely by traveling to high schools in the nation's poorest ZIP codes to recruit. Concerned with the lives of minority students once they arrive at school, she has fought to ease the racial standoffs that plague so many campuses. At Smith she turned down a request by students to have race-specific dorms. In 1993, while vice provost at Princeton, she wrote a now famous report recommending that the university establish an office of conflict resolution to defuse racial misunderstandings before they boiled over.
Her first task at Brown will be to heal one such rupture last spring after the student paper published an incendiary ad by conservative polemicist David Horowitz arguing that blacks economically benefited from slavery. "There's no safe ground for anybody in race relations, but campuses, unlike any other institution in our society, provide the opportunity to cross racial lines," says Simmons. "And even if you're hurt, you can't walk away. You have to walk over that line."