President Ruth Simmons does not want to be revered simply for her race or gender.
"I don't talk a lot about role models," she said. "Because the principle of it, I just don't believe in."
She would prefer to be remembered as a president who worked hard for the University, built a "pathway for Brown to the future" and left something solid for the next president to build upon, she said.
But, she said, her race and gender will "forever" influence how people perceive her and her tenure.
"While I'm not insulted by that, I can in a clear-eyed way be aware that (my image) is different from what it would be for anybody serving in this position who does not bring those particular attributes," she said.
Simmons is the first black president in the Ivy League and among its first female presidents. But she said those titles color her role more outside the University than within it. The interest in having her "play a role in African-American society" has been an expectation throughout her presidency, she said.
While serving as president, Simmons formed the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, which researched the University's historical ties to the slave trade and made recommendations for how the University can acknowledge its past. Simmons also participated in an ancestry program at Harvard and discovered that her great-grandparents were slaves. The daughter of sharecroppers, Simmons said the discovery made the act of facing Brown's relationship with slavery "fundamentally more interesting."
But she said the project did not define her presidency — that idea has been imposed by others.
"If I were white, people probably wouldn't even mention that in connection with my presidency," she said. "I'm very open-eyed about this."
People often approach her differently because of her race or gender, she said. Sometimes she examines her male presidential counterparts, wondering what it feels like "to be in that space."
"The experiences I've had — surely colored by the fact that I'm a woman and African-American — have been fantastic," she said. "I'm pretty happy with my life, and I'm pretty happy with what I'm able to experience. But I do get that sense of ‘what would it be like' if none of that were in play. I'll never know."
Women outside of the University call Simmons' example inspiring. Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., and Jane Gates, provost and academic vice president of Western Connecticut State University, both identified Simmons as someone who opened new paths for women of color.
Bass said Simmons opened the door for all colored women to enter academia, while Gates called Simmons' presidency "one of the most amazing accomplishments in higher education."
Simmons is an important role model, Gates added. Her presidency "reinforces the possibility of what can happen not only in my life, but in the lives of other young women and young women of color or any other underrepresented group in this country."
But Simmons disagrees with that theory.
"The idea is because you are black, or because you are a woman, you offer a special inspiration to people because they are women and because they are black," she said. "And I guess I don't believe in that because all of my life, I have been inspired by people who are so dissimilar to me. I don't buy it." She cited Aaron Lemonick — a former dean of the faculty at Princeton who was a white Jewish male — as her most influential mentor. She called him "big and blustery and aggressive," someone she actually feared.
Despite these differences, she credits Lemonick's influence as the reason she became a university president.
"It's finding that shared perspective that will encourage you, inspire you, make you feel like a human being," she said. "So I hope that people don't treat me like a role model because they think there's something superficial like race or gender that binds us together."
