PECULIAR INSTITUTIONS.(John Brown's Brown University)

On May 14, 1770, John Brown laid the foundation stone for Rhode Island College, on a hill overlooking Providence and Narragansett Bay. According to the Providence Gazette, "a Number of Gentlemen, Friends to the Institution," attended the ceremony, and, as tradition has it, Brown treated them to punch. He and his brothers--Nicholas, Joseph, and Moses--had reason to celebrate that day. All four had worked hard to establish the college, later known as Brown University.

The Browns themselves had no formal education. They were Baptists--their great-great-grandfather Chad Brown had been baptized by Roger Williams soon after Brown's arrival in Providence, in 1638--and, until their generation, Baptists had regarded Biblical and classical learning as no more than obstacles to the direct experience of God. The brothers, like their forebears, and like most people in their largely Baptist town, had gone to work at around the age of fourteen. Their father, Captain James Brown, died in 1739, when Moses, the youngest, was less than a year old, and they learned their trade from their merchant uncle, Obadiah. Brought up on the wharves and amid the stench of Obadiah's spermaceti-candle works, they succeeded where many failed in the risky world of maritime trade, whaling, privateering, and small manufacturing. Ambitious, farsighted, and hardworking, the brothers were not only building a mercantile empire but also turning Providence into a major seaport, and, in the process, challenging Newport's commercial and political supremacy in the colony. Along with a number of other merchants and Stephen Hopkins, a governor of the colony and Providence's political champion, they believed that education was the key to the future.

The Brown brothers raised the money for the college, and the family firm, Nicholas Brown & Company, took charge of constructing the College Edifice, which is today University Hall, the main administrative building. The Edifice was fashioned after Nassau Hall, at Princeton University, where the Reverend James Manning, a Baptist minister who was the founder and the first president of Rhode Island College, had studied. Both its design and its scale--four stories and fifty-six rooms--suggest the ambitions that Manning and the Browns had for the college. According to the records, the building committee hired a variety of laborers for different periods of time. A few were listed as "Negro." At least three of them, and perhaps four, were slaves.

On November 9, 2000, Ruth J. Simmons was elected the eighteenth president of Brown University by its trustees. Announcing the decision at a press conference, Brown's chancellor, Stephen Robert, pointed out that the election made her the first African-American to become president of an Ivy League institution. "This is a historic occasion," he said. Robert praised Simmons's accomplishments as the president of Smith College, where she had established an engineering program, increased the number of minority students, launched several new building projects, and doubled the college's endowment. "She is truly beloved by faculty, students, and staff at Smith," he said, "and we have every reason to believe she will be a star at Brown." Simmons thanked the Chancellor and said, "It's very hard for me to explain what's going through my mind and through my heart right now. It would be impossible for you to understand, because you don't know my personal circumstances yet. But, when I was told I had been elected this afternoon as president of Brown, I said my ancestors were smiling."

Simmons often talks about her past. She was born in 1945, the twelfth child of sharecroppers on a farm near the town of Grapeland, in East Texas. During the press conference, she recalled that her first day of kindergarten was "magical," because "here was a place that was bright and orderly, and something terrific happened there. I could have a pencil and paper; I could have books to read." When she was a little older, the family moved to Houston, where her father found work in a factory and her mother cleaned houses for white families. They lived in the Fifth Ward, which she remembered as "a very impoverished area of Houston just in the shadow of the downtown skyscrapers" and "brutally segregated." As a child, she knew no one who had been to college, but, with support from her family and her teachers, she went to Dillard, a historically black university in New Orleans.

Simmons usually speaks about her background in the context of how education can transform the lives of poor and minority children. After graduating summa cum laude from Dillard, she went to Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in Romance languages and literature. She studied in France on a Fulbright scholarship, then taught French at the University of New Orleans, where she became an assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts. There and at the University of Southern California, in the early eighties, she found her vocation as an academic administrator. In 1983, she was hired as director of studies for one of Princeton's residential colleges. "Frankly, it was affirmative-action-driven," a former university officer said. "There were hundreds of applicants and she got a second look. Then she clicked immediately." Two years later, she was brought into central administration, in Nassau Hall. The move turned out to be an important one for Princeton, and a turning point in Simmons's career. Charged with strengthening the African-American Studies program, she recruited Toni Morrison, Cornel West, and a number of other stars, making Princeton's program the most dazzling in the Ivy League. She became associate dean of the faculty in 1987, spent two years as the provost of Spelman College, in Atlanta, then returned to Princeton as vice-provost in charge of the budget. By 1995, she had a thorough education in university governance and was regarded as a comer in her field.

Though not tall or svelte, Simmons holds herself regally. Her accent is mid-Atlantic, and she speaks with precision, in full paragraphs. She has two grown children from a marriage that ended sixteen years ago, and in photographs, smiling broadly with a hint of humor in her eyes, she looks ready to embrace the world and to mother everyone in it. Still, in her presence people tend to feel that they will have to pass a test or two to earn an embrace. She is so direct, so articulate, and so obviously in command that she inspires respect, even fear. Johnnetta Cole, a former president of Spelman, says that as a friend Simmons is warm and open and loves to laugh, but she concedes that this is not the way most people see her when she's on the job. Those who have worked with Simmons describe the qualities that distinguish her with remarkable consistency. "Drive, ambition, and focussed energy," a Princeton administrator said. Two Brown trustees--both men--used exactly the same words. "She's always working," one added. "I've learned a great deal about determination from her." ...