Ruth Simmons leaving

Colleges and Universities A-Z Brown University
1

<p>I was sad to hear that she announced her intention to step down as president at the end of this year. I was glad to hear that she intends to stay at Brown as a professor. </p>

<p>I may not have agreed with everything she did, but I think Ruth was an amazing president and inspiring person who brought new life to the campus. If nothing else, I applaud her for bringing need-blind financial aid to Brown. Filling her shoes will be very difficult. I had hoped she would have stayed much much longer.</p>

<p>Current Brown students – how’s the campus reacting to the news?</p>

2

<p>A lot of people share your reaction: there is an overwhelming feeling of loss. However, people are taking comfort in the fact that she will still be on campus as a professor.</p>

<p>It’s a shame, given that she did a lot for Brown and was well-loved. Nonetheless, people rarely stay in these sorts of higher education leadership positions for more than a decade. I believe it’s due partly to political reasons, partly to a need for varied leadership, and partly to the fact that it’s a very difficult, time-consuming job.</p>

3

<p>Agreed, a lot of people here are feeling down about the news. She’s an inspiring and important part of Brown and I don’t think we’ll forget that!</p>

<p>That said, I think a lot of us are now scrambling to get our free hug :)</p>

4

<p>This is who we’re losing.</p>

<p>“Ruth Simmons: America’s Best Leaders 2007.” [Ruth</a> Simmons - America’s Best Leaders 2007 - YouTube](<a href=“Ruth Simmons - America's Best Leaders 2007 - YouTube”>Ruth Simmons - America's Best Leaders 2007 - YouTube)</p>

5

<p>When they gave her the Rosenberger medal at graduation I saw it coming.</p>

6

<p>Let me offer a contrarian viewpoint. I think Simmons did a good job, especially after the Gee fiasco. But, ironically, I was just thinking this week it was time for her to go. Perhaps it was the latest ranking for Brown in U.S. News and World Report. At the end of the day, or her presidency if you prefer, Brown still has the lowest endowment in the Ivy League, is ranked dead last among the Ivies in quality(Tied with what is essentially a land-grant school in Cornell, a school Brown should be light years ahead of), has no physical space of its own for any Brown clubs(Again, Brown is lumped with Cornell, on Cornell’s terms for s subpar facility in New York), and is still not remotely mentioned in the same breath as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. It’s time for her to go. A dynamic leader like the one Penn had is needed to transform the school from the worst Ivy to one that is at least consistently mentioned as the fourth best Ivy is now needed. Simmons should be lauded for what she has done for Brown. But she is no Charles Eliot, Kingman Brewster, Nathan Pusey, or transformative type of leader to take Brown to the very top tier.</p>

7

<p>^I fear for Brown if it chooses to replace Ruth – who herself was charged with and successful at increasing Brown’s focus on the graduate-type resources that play into the idiotic US News rankings – with someone even more focused on taking Brown “to the very top tier.” Brown was exactly what we needed in this last decade; now, it’s time to return to our University College roots.</p>

<p>It is also delusional to obsess on Brown’s endowment in such a hands-over-eyes, doom-and-gloom way. Brown’s endowment per student is smack dab in the middle of the Ivy League.</p>

8

<p>Mg, with all due respect, this is why Brown is viewed as a nice, good, New England college, but not one of the great universities in the country. Brown “should” compete for higher rankings. They will get better students, better opportunities for those students, and more global respect, increasing opportunities for its graduates even more. This status quo, Brown is good enough as it is, is perceived as losers talk. There was a study done recently that top firms preferred HYPSMW students because they were perceived as being the best, and not having to “settle” for Cornell(there’s that association again) or Brown. Your point of view, and, frankly, Simmons as well, is unacceptable. If you are an administrator, you want your institution to be perceived as the best because, oftentimes, perception segues into reality. If Brown doesn’t want to be perceived as the best Ivy, at least for undergraduate instruction, then go to The Patriot League with other good but not great schools. If you take parents money, and student’s dreams, and don’t strive to have a top 5 endowment, star faculty that’s quoted often in the news for groundbreaking research, acquiring students capable of winning several Rhodes every year, in other words, if you don’t want to compete, then let MIT take Brown’s place and Brown should hook up with Colgate, Tufts, Bucknell, Lafayette, Georgetown et al., and students and parents would have a more realistic expectation of what a Brown degree can do for them.</p>

9

<p>IMHO, the obsession with money and prestige – this misguided belief that monetary value is the most important (only?) value – in any and every arena of life is what has gotten our country into the mess it is in. I say that as an HYPS alum who couldn’t be happier that both of her children are at Brown (and chose not to apply to HYPSetc. – it’s a values thing, a values-about-education-and-life thing).</p>

<p>Galanter, it sounds like you and Brown simply are not a good fit. Indeed, anyone who puts such strong stock in the USNWR rankings wouldn’t be.</p>

<p>But I imagine this irresolvable conversation has been had on CC many times over over the years.</p>

10

<p>Bedford, I am a Brown graduate who has been out in the “real” world for a long time, so my criticisms of Brown are made with a touch of love. I enjoyed the place. You may be right about the excessive value placed on money and material things. I certainly no longer believe they are germane to the quality of one’s life beyond a certain point of material comfort. However, Brown has chosen to remain in an association that connotes access to power and influence.(The Ivy League) What I am saying is that if Brown is not in the association to win, it should downsize its aspirations and associations and not mislead thousands of impressionable kids about the comparative opportunities a Brown degree confers(Via Harvard,Yale,Princeton,MIT,Stanford,Dartmouth,Wharton). Especially with the enormous costs now associated with attending The University.</p>

11

<p>:(. <– only reaction i can have.</p>

12

<p>

</p>

<p>Let’s say we believe the US News rankings. There are 3000+ institutions of higher learning in the country. I think you are delusional to think that Brown’s ranking – 15, 16, whatever – does not place it as one of the great universities in the country. Top 0.5 percent – sounds like the tippy top to me.</p>

<p>Galanter, Brown’s graduates go on to make movies and TV shows that earn millions of dollars for Hollywood studios, to control Fortune 500 companies, to write Pulitzer Prize winning articles. They are Nobel laureates and college presidents. Brown faculty members are frequently quoted in the national press and doing studies that get national and international attention.</p>

<p>Maybe there has yet to be a US President who went to Brown, but I think you can make a very strong argument that many Brown graduates have plenty of power and influence. I don’t think anyone is misleading high school students.</p>

<p>I just spent the weekend with a friend whose daughter graduated Yale last spring. Most of her friends are either unemployed or working for no pay for nonprofits. So much for that vaunted Yale diploma. </p>

<p>Of course, you may only associate in the rarified climate of Wall Street, where if you didn’t go to one of a handful of prep schools, colleges and then Harvard law, you are a failure in life. Thankfully, most of the people in this country don’t wear such blinders.</p>

<p>My initial comment was that I wasn’t thrilled with everything Ruth did. But transformative is definitely an adjective I would use to describe her tenure. And I’ve seen quite a number of Brown presidents.</p>

<p>wolfman: I thought the exact same thing at graduation last year. I’ll bet the faculty knew she was planning on leaving when they decided to give her that. BTW, that was one of the most touching moments at commencement.</p>

13

<p>Any ideas on how her departure might influence Admissions? Is the impact going to be influenced greater by who assumes the helm coming in?</p>

14

<p>I don’t think her departure, or who replaces her will have any effect on admissions.</p>

<p>Fire, you made an eloquent post. However, you completely missed the thrust of my position. It doesn’t matter that there are 3000 colleges in the U.S., many of them by the way are two-year or voc-tech schools, so they really shouldn’t count. The point is Brown “purports” to be a peer of a handful of colleges, ruinously expensive, and to provide analogous opportunities. Your listing of the various fields that Brown grads notwithstanding, every college can more or less say the same. I hope you are not saying that Brown produces people who are as influential as HYPSMW because then I would have to say you are being intellectually dishonest. Brown has produced 1 nobel laureate. Brown is what, a 200+ year university. Chicago, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, et al. were all formed after Brown had a head start, and Brown can’t touch either producing Nobel laureates, or having them on their faculty. Let’s look at endowment. Endownent is, in my opinion, a key metric in expressing both how a school prepares it graduates for success post college, and the satisfaction that alumni have with their experience at the school. Again, Brown is a “200+ year” year college, with a head start on Stanford, Chicago, Dartmouth, MIT, Cornell, and for christ sakes, Vanderbilt, and, guess what, it’s poorer than every single one of those schools, and Simmons hasn’t closed that gap one iota during her tenure. That’s a key stat. This nonsense about her improving fundraising at The University is problematic. Even schools such as USC are gaining ground on Brown in resources. Look, having the 25th or so largest endowment in the nation is nothing to hang your head about. But the fact of the matter is Brown as an institution is closer in quality to schools whose endowments it most closely approximates like Boston College, Georgetown, Tufts, Colgate, Bucknell, et al than any of the Ivies, and, to me, that is misleading to impressionable kids from unsophisticated families who believe they are getting HYP opportunities because Brown is an Ivy League school by association. My contention still stands. Unless Brown wants to get serious about competing in the stratosphere of American colleges, not filler colleges that constitute the other 2000 or so schools in the country, it is doing a disservice to its potential and the students it serves not to do what is necessary to find, keep, and assist the kind of transformative leader that can take Brown to the very top of the collegiate pyramid.</p>

15

<p>Galanter, I don’t quite know whether to treat you like the alum you purport to be, or the ■■■■■ that you seem to be. I’m going to do the former, but I have to say that I’m inclined to let it go because your impressions are so out of touch as to be of questionable honesty. You and I have actually fought before. Anyway, I suspected that others would (rightly) attack your ridiculous views on what matters in life, and that you would accuse them of attacking the hypothetical. That’s happened, so I’m going to try something different: telling you that you’re wrong. Because you are.</p>

<p>Here’s my read on you: You went to Brown when it was still a regional school, and you’re stuck in that world. You see the (useless and contradicted by other rankings) US News rankings as validating your perspective, so you fixate on them as a useful measure. We are not “ranked dead last.” Rather, a single magazine has ranked us last. </p>

<p>Thankfully, no one in the real world cares. Certainly, college applicants don’t; instead, they regularly choose Brown over schools that you and US News regard as reputationally inferior. [A</a> Revealed Preference Ranking of U.S. Colleges and Universities by Christopher Avery, Mark Glickman, Caroline Hoxby, Andrew Metrick :: SSRN](<a href=“http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=601105]A”>http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=601105) . Recent admissions statistics suggest that that is more true now than ever before. </p>

<hr>

<p>Here’s some specific quibbles:</p>

<p>You obsess about endowment, but (suspiciously) refuse to look at per-student figures. Doing so allows you to compare Brown disfavorably with large land-grant schools, which is incredibly intellectually dishonest – while at the same time accusing others of intellectual dishonesty. You must know that graduate students are much more expensive to support, and the absence of large numbers of graduate students at Brown means that its dollars go much farther.</p>

<p>Your reference to a head start over other schools demonstrates a particular ignorance of the history of educational fundraising, and suggests again that your are living in the past, when Brown was a regional college. </p>

<p>You talk about college expenses with the same ignorance of my friends’ parents, who barred them from applying to great private colleges because “they must be so expensive.” The myth of the better private schools being more expensive is ridiculous. The elite colleges – Brown included – are, on average, the least expensive private schools in the country to attend, because of their financial aid policies.</p>

<p>Your claims about President Simmons not improving fundraising are contrary to fact and I’ll let you try to support them yourself (hint: you can’t) rather than going out of my way to attack them.</p>

<p>Re: “acquiring students capable of winning several Rhodes every year” – Brown is in the middle of the Ivy League and tied with Chicago for Rhodes scholars produced. <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/772208-ranking-college-rhodes-scholarship.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/772208-ranking-college-rhodes-scholarship.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Re: “There was a study done recently that top firms preferred HYPSMW students because they were perceived as being the best.” – I suggest you take a closer look at that ‘study’, which was hopelessly flawed. For example, law firms (which couldn’t care in the slightest where you went to college – and if you fight me on that particular fact, I will destroy you with evidence) were included. The study – like many of the pieces of evidence that you cite – also favored colleges where the students happen to be interested in certain specific professions.</p>

<p>Re: lack of alumni clubs. Brown was late to this game, just as it was late to the world of elite academia relative to some of it’s peer schools. It has made a rational decision not to build clubs. Clubs will all be gone – or made completely different – within 20 years. They’re facing drastically decreasing use because no one under 40 whose not a tremendous d-nozzle has any interest in sitting in a stuffy club with a silly dress code full of old white people eating bad food for ridiculous prices.</p>

<hr>

<p>Moving on, I think you’re just in some kind of la-la land that is divorced from reality. Here’s the world that I (and, I think, the rest of society) live in: Brown is a world-class undergraduate college with a reputation that puts it comfortably in the middle of the Ivy League. College applicants regularly choose Brown over all but a handful of other colleges. Graduate schools regularly choose Brown students over applicants from all but a handful of other colleges. Employers regularly choose Brown students over applicants from all but a handful of other colleges. I go to small towns in the middle of nowhere wearing Brown apparel, and the waiter at the local cafe will say something like “Wow, Brown? That’s a really tough school to get into!” The vast majority of students at Brown come from elsewhere in the country, and go elsewhere upon graduation; it’s clearly not a regional college anymore.</p>

<p>In my world, the real world, Brown is one of the most selective schools in the country. Take a closer look at the US News rankings – look at the columns other than rank. Brown has the fifth-lowest acceptance rate among the national universities – after HYPS and in front of Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn, and Cornell, not to mention the other schools that you’re worried about “beating”. Where’s the evidence that Brown is failing to attract the best and the brightest, huh? With a 100% increase in applications over the past ten years – drastically higher than our peer schools – I’m not sure how you think things haven’t improved during Ruth’s tenure.</p>

<p>In my world, Penn hasn’t rocketed to some kind of magical prestigious position. Just as it was when my father went there, Wharton is pretty prestigious, and the university itself is not so hot.</p>

<hr>

<p>Yes, you have delusional views about what a school should strive for. For example, you say: “If you take parents money, and student’s dreams, and don’t strive to have a top 5 endowment, star faculty that’s quoted often in the news for groundbreaking research . . . .” That’s a complete non-sequitur – I’ll leave it to you to figure out why, and if you can’t, then perhaps the cause is hopeless. The point of this post was just to suggest that even if you do take your (miserable) worldview, you’re still wrong. I await the stream of falsehoods and misconceptions that you’ll spout in response.</p>

16

<p>Anyway, going on-topic:</p>

<p>Ruth is special. I very fondly remember spending an hour in her office discussing the curriculum and my concerns about changes that might have affected it. A university president’s job is not to listen to undergraduates’ specific curricular concerns. But she listened patiently to me, demonstrated that she genuinely cared about the issue, and made sure that I got access to the people-time and resources that I needed. Her departure is Brown’s loss.</p>

17

<p>I have mixed feelings about “Ruth”, as everyone calls her. (How many male college presidents get called just by their first names? I think that is a testimony to the endearment she has earned from the students who have been there during her tenure, and to her openness.)
As opposed to Galanter, many of the things that worried me a bit about her time at Brown, were just the things he would like changed, and she was slowly effecting that change. “Prestige” by USWR or others often has to do with size and grad/research etc. of a school. I have always been vastly proud and grateful that Brown was a small enough school, and particularly that it IS an UNDERGRADUATE school, and hope that will not change. That is precisely the quality that gives it what makes it so great a place to be. Ruth (or maybe it is really the corporation) has been slowly changing that. The class sizes are going up (and overcrowding dorms, course class sizes are creeping up, there are more TAs etc.). </p>

<p>But by increasing Grad programs, and the total number of students the “figures” go up for all those number games items (but do they really enhance quality of undergrad education?) This is a question that many colleges are dealing with. The universities that Galanter wants Brown to be more like tend to have size as one of those factors. I doubt he has done work on interviewing prospective students (thank goodness! I don’t think he would be a great representative for the school!) or he would know that many of the “second tier schools” he is speaking of actually have higher tuition, and Brown applicants and their parents think Brown is just fine as a value of education. (I am paying FULL tuition etc for a student that could be at a “prestigious” instate big school for 1/3 the price). </p>

<p>During the last 10 years Brown has been making a bigger push at finances than in any of the previous 2 decades that I have been around Brown. Or maybe I’m just older so they think I am more able to give?? But the outreach that I see to alumni (to bond them to the school, etc) and to parents etc I think has about tripled in the past 4-5 years! It is always harder for a school with primarily undergrad education to deepen their pockets in the same way bigger institutions do. Ask any LAC (except maybe Smith’s) Boards. Has Galanter done anything to help Brown’s financial security??? And I agree with FireandRain that one of Ruth’s best legacy’s is getting Needs Blind Admissions done, despite any financial qualms.</p>

18

<p>“How many male college presidents get called just by their first names”</p>

<p>At Tulane, President Cowan is affectionately known as Scott (pre and post Katrina)</p>

19

<p>Interestingly, the only other Brown Alum from the '60s I know who rants the same complaints about Brown as Galanter, is one who never attends any Brown related events, yet really wanted their kid to get in to Brown (despite those rants). (Kid did not get in and rants are now worse.)</p>

20

<p>As for the effect on admissions: In the short term, there will be no, or maybe minimal, impact. There might be a handful of people who decide not to apply. But I doubt that most high school students make application decisions based on who the school’s president is.</p>

<p>Long-term, it could have an impact. The president sets institutional priorities, which in turn impact admissions. For example, one of Simmons’ objectives was to increase the number of first-generation students. So at Brown, it is a major hook to be first generation. The next president could change policy on things like legacy representation in the class, geographic and ethnic diversity, etc., that would have an impact on admissions.</p>

<p>I agree with BrownAlumParent – in fact, the emphasis on the grad school and the slow increase in class size were things I didn’t like about Simmons. (I sometimes wonder if I know you, BAP – this has been a topic of conversation among my friends.)</p>

<p>And nice post, mgcsinc.</p>