Breakfast With The Formidable Dr. Ruth Simmons

Ruth Simmons: Femme Formidable

In French, the adjective formidable is used to describe something or someone electrifying, outstanding, or wonder inspiring, whereas in English, it is typically used to evoke something or someone to be reckoned with, intensely powerful, and awe inspiring.

How fitting that Dr. Ruth Simmons, known best for her role as the first Black President of an American Ivy League school and the first woman President of Brown University, is formidable both in French and English and...that she might appreciate that very very much as the Doctor in French Literature she is.

In fact, she might appreciate this more than you gentle reader and... that is just fine since this post is about her and I hope she reads it!

Dr. Simmons was recently in St. Louis to deliver a lecture  at Washington University.

Thanks to the mindfulness and generosity of our incomparable Vice Provost for Diversity Adrienne Davis, a group of women from the Danforth and medical campuses were invited to share a memorable breakfast with Dr. Simmons.

It is hard to render the impact of this encounter. I know that this is starting to sound like a teenager describing how she feels about One Direction but I am not being hyperbolic: meeting Dr. Simmons was enthralling and unforgettable for myself and my colleagues.

I will not detail the obvious, especially since you can easily look it up: her keen intelligence, her wit, her sharecropper family background seemingly light years away from the halls of Academia, and her too numerous to count accomplishments.

Instead, I will try and [fail to adequately] share a few of the reflections she made that morning, with a rare ability to use her words to bring the most vexing feelings to life.

For instance, she put into very clear relief that there no solution, no harmonious synthesis, no pretty pink bow tying together all the ingredients that make her who she is.  Those ingredients, including for instance, where she is from, where she has gone and the distance between those, can be perplexingly contradictory. One pillar of her strength comes from being aware of these contradictions. So, when a faculty member asked her if she (Ruth) meant that she had to become clear about who she was so that others would not peg her? Dr. Simmons replied that no, she could not quite be "completely clear about who she was", but that it had been/is vitally important to enagage in that reflection about all those threads that constituted her.

She spoke much about authenticity, the importance of conscience, of values, and that her clarity about what these are and comitment to them were other chronic fuels to her strength. Even when it seems that success in academia (or in any complex human system) depends on the artificial and thus inauthentic adoption of byzantine rules, there is the clear possibility of renewable power and success in being authentic, speaking the truth, interrogating one's and others' consciences.

As we were listening to her, it was clear that her achievements and arrival at the presidency of an Ivy League institution had not just occured because of honesty and integrity but...she made it clear that those had absolutely been major factors even as she spent decades thinking that they could be her undoing career wise.

She spoke very openly about some of her experiences of being a minority (and perenially perceived as "weird and other" by many), of inequity (including from those who were her greatest source of support in other ways) or, still, of temporary invisibility (e.g., being ignored in a board room.)  If you guess by now that she brings her words, intelligence and honesty to all these situations: indeed she does.

We were all a little dizzy afterwards.

Courageous, brilliant, outspoken, self-aware and generous: Formidable.

Till Later,

Anne