President Ruth Simmons has spent much of this semester away from Brown, raising funds in the "quiet phase" of the University's capital campaign. Before leaving to look at a mock-up of the Life Sciences Building, Simmons took time on Wednesday to speak with The Herald about her overarching vision for the Plan for Academic Enrichment, plans for the capital campaign's official launch, the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice and what it's like to ask for a $100 million donation.
Simmons' next trip will take her to California in January, followed by Oregon; Denver, Colo.; Phoenix, Ariz.; Florida, Detroit, Mich.; Houston, Texas; and Atlanta. She will travel to Paris over the summer and to Asia next year.
Herald: Everyone is most curious about the plan, and how you think it's going.
Simmons: The plan is - well, it's amazing. We started the first year doing a very abbreviated plan just to get started, and in that first year we announced the major things. They included need-blind admissions, an expansion of the faculty and changes in graduate school support.
The second year, we started a much more extensive process, involving students, faculty, campus committees and so forth, in a debate about where our resources should be allocated and precisely how much we should try to do over the 10-year period of time. We undertook, for example, a master planning process just for the physical campus and invited in an architect who looked at everything on the campus and told us what we needed to do in order to improve the campus.
That person looked at where we might find expansion room, because the question is if we need a new building, where on the Earth would we put it? Because we couldn't figure that out - we looked around and we didn't see that. We knew we needed an expert to come in to do that. As you might imagine, in every possible aspect of the campus, we've been studying what we should do. That took the next two years because it's very involved. We really have been looking at everything.
A subset of that was looking at what kind of spaces should our students have, and so we brought in a separate group to look at social spaces on campus, whether we needed a fitness center, whether we needed a campus center, what we should do with the Ratty, what we should do with our dorms, and on and on. ... I would say where we are now is with all of these studies and refinements and debates and so forth, we are at a point in the plan where we have a very good idea of what we anticipate doing over a ten year period of time, that those things have been well-vetted by alumni, administrators, students.
I'm very happy where we are now. I was concerned at the outset given how complex this all was - we actually might not be able to involve people to the extent that we needed to, but I do think that the students have had a strong voice in the process. We're doing some things that I wouldn't have guessed we'd be doing, frankly, but that's because we listen to student input in terms of those things.
Herald: You have said in the past that you have been pleased with donors' willingness to put their money to whatever uses the University thinks are most important for the plan. Where do fitness centers fit in?
Simmons: It was really the campus that urged that we build the fitness center. If I had made the decision myself, I'm not sure how - I might've picked the Ratty first (laughs). But I've really been convinced by the students that that isn't the most important thing to them. Yes, we do need to renovate the Ratty, but it's not the most urgent thing, from the students' standpoint.
(The Undergraduate Council of Students) recommended some near-term changes that they thought were needed - extending the hours of certain things on campus to reflect the hours that students keep, rather than the official University hours. And while that's been controversial, implementing it, it really came from the student recommendations that they needed some of these things open.
The students requested extended library hours. They requested more gathering spaces on the campus, so we've redone a number of spaces on campus because of student suggestions there. They've suggested more satellite fitness, so we have two new satellite fitness facilities. So we've tried to implement as much of that as we could.
At the same time, I think when we started this process I would've guessed a different outcome. I would've guessed that there would be much more substantial interest in, for example, doing the Ratty first. But that hasn't been the case. There's been much more interest in, for example, fitness centers, than going in and redoing the Ratty.
Herald: So it's really a question of involving as many groups as you can in this huge undertaking?
Simmons: Right. Do you think it's too huge? I wake up every day worrying about whether or not we're trying to do too much. That's my biggest worry. That's the thing I think about most - is it too much, and will we collapse under our own ambition? On the other hand, I would worry if we didn't have that ambition.
Herald: What about the campaign? When might it start?
Simmons: The Corporation has endorsed a 10 to 15-year plan that involves capital improvements, an increase to the endowment, new programs, enhancements for student life, planning for a greatly expanded campus not necessarily on College Hill and so on. Because we have all that planning underway, we are now in a position to launch the campaign officially and to go to our donors and say, "Here is what we'd like you to support. I know you're interested in this, I know you're interested in that, but note: Here is three years of study and consultation with every group on the campus, that has resulted in our prediction that this is the right set of things to support. Will you support those things?" So far people are responding very well to that.
I think this is a campaign - in my own experience with campaigns - where the donors are responding to what we actually need, and to what we actually want, which is fantastic. Imagine having somebody give you $100 million and not fuss with you about what it should be for. And when you say, 'Our highest priority, Mr. Frank, is student financial aid,' and the donor says, 'Okay,' without any discussion, I mean - it's sort of like a dream.
It's going well, and our goal officially is to launch in the fall. We're getting to go public in the fall. (This semester) I've been asking for money. In the quiet phase of the campaign the goal is to raise what is called a "nucleus fund," a very substantial amount of money that you try to raise to get the campaign off to a good start. Our biggest donors are approached in this phase. We have a targeted list of people that we pay attention to throughout the year, and it's rather like a little dance. We try to get on their schedule, and they know why we're coming so they might not be available (laughs). We keep working with them to make sure that we can see them. Sometimes we're seeing people several times, not just one time.
There are several different things that we do. I go in to meet with people to talk about the campaign. Then, we do big events. We do dinners, we do luncheons, and these are wonderful because it's a very small setting, and people feel they're much more included, much more involved, because they're really having a conversation with us about Brown.
Then we have the bigger events, and the bigger events are just huge. They're as many people who desire to come as can. We just did a big event in Northern New Jersey. We have a lot of alums in the New York area, and sometimes they feel that we only pay attention to Manhattan.
We did a huge event in Boston a few weeks ago, which was actually the day after the election, and it was in the same place where Kerry had conceded, so it was quite interesting and very emotional kind of session with the Bostonians there, because the election was very much on people's minds. And yet we got terrific attendance at the reception.
Part of it is being out and about in the country and letting people connect to the University. It's a lot of fun for me when I go to events and people come up to me and say, "I've been out of Brown for 40 years. I've never been back to campus since then, and this is the first time I've ever done anything." Isn't that terrific? I mean, when you can find people who've been away for 40 years - Sidney was away for 60! Sixty years, OK, with virtually no contact with Brown. So there is so much potential for us among all of those people out there who really are connected to Brown and for whom Brown has done a lot. And we have to find them. Because we can't be successful at the level we want to be if we do not find them, and if we do not pay attention to them.
Herald: What's the general idea behind the campus center?
Simmons: There has been a lot of work done on that, and there is a proposed site if we do a campus center. It's not altogether clear that that's the highest priority for the campus. What the students have told us is that they feel that the opportunities to function more coherently as a community are missed at Brown because of the absence of a larger space where students can congregate in a variety of different settings. One thing I've noticed - I have receptions every year at the house for different classes, and I always have a reception for the seniors. The number of times at the senior reception every year that I see seniors seeing their friends from their first year and saying, 'Oh my God, I haven't seen you since first year.' That's pretty common at Brown, because of the way we are organized, and student longing for a campus center is really all about the need for community - the need to encounter people more frequently.
Herald: The Herald has been covering many of the events sponsored by the Committee for Slavery and Justice. What do you hope to see come out of it?
Simmons: I would like to put to rest the sort of nagging sense among alums that there's something very particular, very different in Brown's history that's tied to slavery. I'd like for the historical context to be clear, because there has been an independent body of scholars looking at it and commenting on it. I hope we'll have something that isn't a so-called "official University version" that people think is inevitably a whitewash, but an authentic, scholarly observation about the Brown context. I would like to make that available to all of our alums and all of our students, so that we could all answer questions as we go about the country and people say, "By the way, what about John Brown? And what about the way Brown was founded?" I want everybody to have that at the tip of their fingers, to be able to say, "Oh, no, we've investigated that thoroughly. Here's the story."
I think the committee said early on that because of the deep ambivalence that people have - the incapacity in this country to even talk about slavery and justice - (they wanted) to bring some light to that, some clarity, so people don't feel that they've got to break out in invective or scream and be very emotional about this. We're at a distance where we should understand what history is, and how we interact with history, and how we use history. I'm hoping that there will be something that will enable us to get that into the high school and school curriculum in the state, because much of what we're dealing with is really about state history. I think it would be wonderful if we had something in the curriculum at Brown.
We walk among so many different things every single day on our campus without the least idea of what we are looking at, what we are seeing. (The committee) is also for us to gain a better appreciation for what we are walking among, because we have so many historic sites on our campus and near our campus that it would be very useful to know how to use that as a part of our overall learning process.
Part of the planning process has been about using what we have in a better way - this is also about using what we have in a better way. Yale created an institute on slavery. What's the proper way for Brown to organize that? We have, in the John Carter Brown Library, some of the most amazing resources on slavery in the New World. How are we making use of that?
I think that there are so many directions they could go in, and I just hope that because of the expertise that they have, that we will get some really terrific ideas. I love that kind of stuff - people confronting history using their intellectual resources to do it well, and helping to demonstrate how you can take the emotions out of so many of the things that we're dealing with and look at world conflict today and ways in which societies are fundamentally broken because they are unable to use their intellectual resources and their simple human capacity to get beyond historic wrongs.
I'm fascinated by the fact that we can have, as a nation, a bitterly divided election, and be very angry about that, and then get up the next day and continue with the work that must go on. That's something that we have really not been able to replicate extensively around the world. Why not? What is it that we are not doing as universities that might help that process along better? How should we dare think that societies can do that, if we cannot do it at universities? So I love the fact that Brown is doing this, I love the fact that it's controversial and Brown is doing it still, and I think it's one of the best things that a university can do.
