Around the Prairie ViewA&M campus, she’s known as “Ruth the Truth.”

In the rarified air of American college and university administrators, Ruth Simmons is recognized as a pioneer and a trendsetter in higher education.

In the opinion of Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp, she is a “rock star and a really great human being.”

From 2001 to 2012, Simmons served as president of Brown University, the first Black woman to head up an Ivy League school. Upon stepping down from that post, she returned to her hometown of Houston, intent on making a difference within the communities that made a difference in her own life as a school-aged girl.

She planned to enjoy retirement back home and close to family.

In June of 2017, long-time Prairie View A&M President George Wright announced his plans to step down as head of the school and return to teaching and research duties as a member of the faculty. His intent was to remain as school president only until an interim successor could be named.

One month later, John Sharp shocked the academic world announcing that Simmons would fill that role at Prairie View.

“Soon after George Wright announced his retirement, Ruth’s name kept popping up,” Sharp says today. “I didn’t know anything about her, but when I did a Google search, I said, ‘Wow! We need to talk to this woman.’”

Sharp reached out to Simmons and asked if she would be interested in meeting with him to discuss possible candidates for the Prairie View A&M position. She agreed. The two met in Houston where, as you might guess, Sharp played his hand.

“I lured you here on false pretense,” Sharp says he told Simmons. “I want you to be the president.”

“When he told me that, I thought the idea was completely ridiculous,” Simmons says today. “I knew I was going to say no to him, but I didn’t want to be rude.”

So, Simmons told Sharp, “I won’t say no immediately.”

Michael Young had exercised a similar tactic with Sharp, failing to understand that if you don’t close and lock the door on the Chancellor, chances are he’s going to barge right through and make you an offer you can’t refuse.

“I was actually shocked at his offer,” Simmons says of the initial agreement Sharp proposed. “All those years I’d worked as an administrator in higher education–vice provost at Princeton, president at Smith, president of Brown–not one time did I ever get an offer to come back to Texas. So, maybe that’s why I didn’t immediately say no to John.”

After the meeting, Simmons called her brother, Clarence Stubblefield.

“Can you believe all this?” Simmons told her sibling. “I’ve been a university president, twice. I’m retired! I don’t want to do anything like that again.”

To which Stubblefield replied, “You have to do it.”

Stubblefield had attended Prairie View and is a member of the school’s athletic hall of fame. In 1962, he and future NBA great Zelmo Beaty led the Panther basketball team to the NAIA national championship.

“My brother is a died-in-the-wool Prairie View supporter,” Simmons says. “The school means everything to him. When he told me I had to take the job I realized I was in a dilemma with my family. The biggest mistake you can make in my family is to think that you’re too good to do something important.”

Like her brother, Simmons was also a first-generation college student and a graduate of a Historically Black Colleges and Universities–“HBCU”–Dillard College, in New Orleans. She went on to earn her masters and doctoral degrees in the study of Romance literature from Harvard University.

After further discussions with Clarence and other members of her family, Simmons agreed to take a tour of the Prairie View campus. Sharp insisted he be her tour guide.

The two met at the super-convenience store, Buc-ees, on U.S. Highway 290, just south of Prairie View. Sharp promised their tour would be kept secret.

“As we were driving around on campus, I made a wrong turn and went down a street I wasn’t supposed to” Sharp remembers, “and a campus policeman came up to me and started screaming, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ Of course he had no clue, nor did he care, who I was or who I had with me in the car.

“In the midst of all this, Ruth smiled and said, ‘You’ve got a lot of influence around here.’

“‘Yes, I don’t,’ was my reply, as I scrambled to do a u-turn and make the campus officer happy.”

Seeing the campus and its students made a big impact on Simmons. She was reminded of her own time on “The Hill,” attending her older brother’s basketball games.

How am I going to be able to go back and tell my family that I won’t do this because I think I’m too good for it?” she contemplated.

And then she gave thought to just how far she had come from her own youth.

The publishing house Simon & Schuster wanted Simmons to tell her life story during her time as president at Brown. She was well-known and well-regarded. She received a sizable advance and, in a short amount of time, completed her manuscript. Shortly after, she became embroiled in a controversy as a board member of the global banking firm Goldman Sachs. During the Great Recession of 2008-2009, the Goldman board received harsh criticism for the sizable bonuses they had authorized for top executives while the firm was receiving bailout money to stay afloat.

In a 2010 New York Times story, a 19-year-old Brown student said Simmons’ actions had “brought shame on the university.” Simmons told The Times she was used to “lively debate on campus,” but offered little more in the way of explanation or comment. By that time the Times story was published, Simmons had stepped down from the Goldman Sachs board, and eventually she returned the advance she had been given for her book.

Her story still needs to be told.

After Simmons accepted the Prairie View job on an interim basis, she met with the school’s faculty, staff, and students. At one gathering, students broke out t-shirts in the school’s purple and gold colors, proclaiming “Ruth The Truth.”

Beverly Copeland, a Prairie View graduate and now associate professor and assistant to the president at the school, remembers her first meeting with Simmons.

“We had a get together in the President’s dining room, and it was a lovely occasion,” Copeland says. “Her shared presence emanated something magnificent, and one got a feeling that we had landed someone exceptional. I introduced myself and made small chat with her about the refreshments that were being served. I walked away knowing that something good had just happened to Prairie View.

“I had been on the faculty at that point for close to five years, and for the first time, I felt I had a leader whom I wanted to follow.  I don't know why; maybe it was the way she humbly conversed with me about seemingly insignificant matters. Whatever it was, I felt at ease.

“But if you know Ruth Simmons, she has a natural gift of making people comfortable in her presence.”

Ruth Stubblefield was the youngest of 12 children raised by parents Isaac and Fanny Stubblefield.  Ruth was born July 3, 1945, in the small East-Texas town of Grapeland.

“We worked on a very large plantation on the banks of the Trinity River,” Simmons says. “I’m told there were as many as a hundred families living on the plantation, toiling as ‘sharecroppers.’

They weren’t slaves, Simmons says, “but just barely.”

“We had a very basic existence, going into the fields and picking cotton all day,” Simmons recalls. “That included children, whose labors were vital to the industry, but it meant that kids didn’t spend a lot of time at school when crops needed to be brought in.”

As the Stubblefield children came of age, most moved away to larger towns and cities where economic opportunity was greater and more diverse. Ruth’s oldest siblings moved to Houston. Three of her older brothers enlisted in the Army during and after the Korean War.

“My brothers made it clear their goal was to get my parents off the plantation,” Simmons says. “My brothers often sent their paychecks home, and eventually, my parents and the rest of our family were able to move to Houston, too.”

Grapeland had been “deeply segregated,” says Simmons, who left the area when she was seven. “There was a long list of things we couldn’t do. We were taught to step off the sidewalk when a white person approached.”

Things wren’t much better when she moved to Houston.

Ruth and her parents settled into a home her older siblings had found in Houston’s Fifth Ward. Once known as one of the “proudest Black neighborhoods in the U.S.,” by the 1950s, the segregated community two miles north of downtown Houston had become deeply impoverished due to the large number of residents, like the Stubblefield family, who were able to find only low-paying jobs.

But the schools within the Fifth Ward, although also segregated, opened up a whole new world for young Ruth.

“The most marvelous thing happened when we moved to Houston,” Simmons says. “The community center down the street from where we lived had a library, and the schools I attended had libraries, and so I made it my goal to read every book ever written. I’ve concluded that my motivation then was to try to escape the ‘self-imprisonment’ of a segregated world that didn’t make much sense to me as a child.

“I found that escape in books.”

Simmons says the idea that a child wanted to stay in books all the time was alarming to her family and friends. “They thought I was ‘touched’ in the head, but what I found in books gave me strength.

“One thing that happens when you read a lot is you begin to be very good at language. I started speaking in ways that became infuriating to others because they said I was using ‘fancy words.’

“My father protected me from feeling ostracized until my teachers started taking care of me.”

Simmons describes her younger self as “kind of a geeky kid who just loved learning.”

Perhaps her greatest influence growing up was her young debate instructor at Wheately High School.

“All of the schools I attended in Houston were segregated, and it may not have been until I joined the debate team under Lillie Vernell that I really spent any time around white people,” Simmons says. “She took us to debate tournaments throughout Texas where we competed against white students. She also took us to plays at the theaters in downtown Houston.

“I graduated from high school in 1963, and it was about then the integration movement was starting to become a big deal.”

Lillie Vernell strongly encouraged Ruth to attend college and recommended the school from which she had received her teaching degree, Dillard College in New Orleans. Vernell helped Ruth get a scholarship from Dillard, while Houston’s Worthing Foundation also provided much-needed financial aid.

“While the racial landscape was beginning to change in the mid-1960s, Historically Black Colleges were still about the only option that high-ability African American students had at the time,” Simmons says. “People sort of scoffed when I decided to major in French. They told me I needed to major in something practical because society was on the cusp of important change.”

Such was Ruth’s love of language that after her first year at Dillard, she got on a bus, traveled to Mexico, and spent her summer living with a Mexican family to learn Spanish.

Ruth also became an activist during her college years. “A real nuisance,” she describes her younger self. So, it was not surprising that one day she was called to the Dillard president’s house. “I figured I was in trouble.”

Ruth didn’t realize that college presidents don’t usually mete out discipline from the living room of their residences. Instead, the school’s then-president, Albert Dent, had other news for her.

“We have an exchange program with Wellesley College,” Dent told Ruth, “and every year we get to send a student there. We’d like you to go.”

“At first I wasn’t sure if he was trying to get rid of me or what,” Simmons laughs today.

Wellesley was and remains one of the most highly regarded all-women’s colleges in the country. Located in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the school offered Ruth a new outlook on her world.

“I spent my junior year at Wellesley,” Simmons says, “and that was a very eye-opening experience for me. I lived on a hallway with all these young white women. For the first time in my life, I studied alongside what society considered ‘normal’ people.”

Simmons smiles and shakes her head at her words.

“I had one friend from Switzerland, and I got to meet her family on a trip we made to Europe. Another friend was a Jewish girl from Philadelphia. And I had a friend whose family lived on a farm in Connecticut. I got to go to all these different places and meet all these different people.

The most important lesson Wellesley instilled in Ruth was to help her understand her own potential.

“I grew up in a very patriarchal family. My father made all the decisions. I never really considered that I deserved to be at the forefront of anything because that was for my brothers. Yet at Wellesley something very strange happened. I saw a woman, Margaret Clapp, who was actually the president of the school.

“That disrupted all kinds of notions I had about my ‘proper place.’”

Returning to Dillard, Ruth became an even more passionate activist, and when it came time to graduate, she was told she would not receive her degree for boycotting chapel services. At the same time, she had received a Fulbright Scholarship and was admitted into graduate school at Harvard.

“That created a conundrum for Dillard,” Simmons says today. “Since I’d already been admitted into Harvard and that was a positive reflection on Dillard, administrators at the school decided to look the other way and I was able to graduate.”

By the time Simmons was in her early thirties, she was associate dean of graduate studies at the University of Southern California. It was obvious she was on a rapid assent into a senior position in university administration. Then came three critical decisions which friends and colleagues told her were career killers.

“The position I held at USC was a wonderful job, a wonderful environment,” Simmons says, “but I really wanted to be in undergraduate education because that is the formative experience for young people.  So, for about one-third the pay I was making, I took a job as director of undergraduate studies at Princeton.

“Everyone told me that was a step in the wrong direction.

“While I was at Princeton, I got an offer to become director of African-American Studies at the school. At first I told them I wasn’t qualified, but they insisted I consider the position.  When I decided I would take the job, my friends told me I was making yet another bad decision.

“‘You’ll be typecast,’ they said, ‘You’re a French professor, you don’t need to do that. If you do, you’ll never be able to pursue an administrative job.’

“I took the position, which led to my biggest promotion at Princeton. They said, ‘What you’ve done in African-American studies, we now want you to do across the entire university.’ That’s how I became associate dean of faculty at Princeton.”

By that time, Simmons realized people, despite their good intentions, often give bad advice because they can’t look inside a person’s heart.

“I was doing all the ‘wrong’ things–at least in other peoples’ minds–because I was making choices based on things I valued, like helping the African-American community. That’s why I made my third career-killing decision.”

She left Princeton to become provost at Spellman College, a Historically-Black liberal arts school for women in Atlanta.

“Don’t do it!” people implored Simmons. “You could be president of a major university someday, you don’t need to be working at a women’s college.”

Two years later, Simmons was back at Princeton, and in 1995, she was named president of Smith College, the first African-American woman to preside over a major American university.

In 2001, she became president of Brown.

After her visit to The Hill, when Simmons considered her career trajectory, she realized accepting the Prairie View A&M job was a perfect fit with the decisions that had benefitted her in the past.

“I realized that pursuing opportunities that meant a lot to me personally had shaped my life in really valuable ways. If I had listened to any of the advice I got through the years, I’m certain I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

Soon after assuming the presidency at Prairie View, she realized much work needed to be done there, and that an “interim” president probably wasn’t going to accomplish much.

“I reached the conclusion those changes were important enough, both to the institution as well as its students, that it might be best if I was able to hang around for a while.”

Simmons texted Chancellor Sharp with a pointed question: “How complicated would it be to remove (my) interim designation?”

Twenty-seven minutes later, Sharp replied: “Simple.”

In early 2018, Ruth Simmons was again featured in a New York Times piece entitled, “Cultivating the Next Generation of College Students”

Madufuro Eze was a member of Prairie View’s first graduating class after Ruth Simmons became the full-time president of the school. Prior to his senior year, he interned in the Office of the President, and watched as the transition from President Wright to President Simmons unfolded.

“On her first day, in meeting with everyone who worked in the president’s office, the first thing she said was, “Why isn’t there any art on the walls of this building?” We all sort of laughed nervously, but her persona, from the very beginning was welcoming and open, At the same time, you realized she was ‘all about business,’ too.

“I was heavily involved in the Student Government Association during my time at Prairie View A&M, and when student leaders came to Ruth–she wanted everyone to call her by her first name–she was always very open to what we had to say, as long as we had thought through things thoroughly. If an idea seemed ‘half baked’ to her, she would ask thought-provoking questions to help us come up with better ideas.

“She was always very student-centered, and always wanted a student in the room when decisions were being made.”

Simmons impact on The Hill has been dramatic and far-reaching. A drive past Buc-ees today reveals a building boom within the town of Prairie View, as multiple student-housing facilities are being added to accommodate the school’s “Ruth-the-Truth” enrollment boom.

One of Simmons’ most important initiatives at Prairie View A&M is to attract and retain top-notch faculty. For her, the modern day “Historically-Black College” experience means her students should be on an equal footing with other universities across the country.

It’s difficult not to describe the Ruth Simmons of today as an “academic cult figure,” as she was at Spellman, Smith, and Brown, but in speaking with The New York Times after landing her job at Prairie View, Simmons did not subscribe to a model of “hero-worship” leadership.