As she prepared for the Campaign for Academic Enrichment's public launch, President Ruth Simmons spoke to The Herald about what this campaign means for current students, the University's future and her own legacy as Brown's 18th president.
How does the Campaign for Academic Enrichment compare to your other fund-raising efforts, in terms of its size and its mission?
First of all, we spent a considerable amount of time at the beginning of my time at Brown setting institutional priorities and trying to define a direction that would be exciting for prospective donors and that would speak to core needs and values at the University.
I had not been involved with a campaign that had done it quite that way. Most campaigns you come out to identify needs as a part of the campaign planning, and it's fairly rushed, and you go into a campaign with new things that you need without much time to establish for your constituents what it's all about.
Secondly, the size of the Campaign is quite ambitious. I've not been involved with a campaign where we have tried to raise as much money and where we've tried to raise gifts of the size of these gifts.
What differentiates this campaign from previous campaigns, particularly in regard to the University's standing and future goals?
Well, I think as we tried to articulate in the Plan for Academic Enrichment, there are quite honestly some things that Brown needs to do at this particular juncture to continue to be in the first ranks of great universities.
It needs to continue to offer a faculty-student ratio that is favorable to the students. There's no question about that, and it's vital to do that now, in particular. It needs to continue to offer the support to faculty so that we're recruiting the best minds possible to teach our students, because our students are first in class, and therefore everything we do should be first in class.
I think it's an important time also because higher education is changing, in some ways, pretty dramatically. There are very, very wealthy institutions that are pulling away from other universities. It's an era in which some endowments are making very significant gains, and in order to keep up with just the resources that both colleges and universities that are well endowed are able to apply to their campuses, we have to raise money and be prepared to do what they're doing, to offer what they're offering.
So the competition is keen enough, as keen as it's ever been in higher education. ... We've got to be raising money very aggressively in order to provide the kinds of programs that we need to for our students.
How does the table of needs reflect some of those specific needs, such as the importance of a stronger endowment?
When people ask me what the Campaign is about, I always say it's about two things. It's first of all about the students. And it's no accident that on the Campaign list the highest figure on here is really support for students. And I fought for that because I want the message of this campaign to be: Our students should have the support they need in order to be able to come to Brown and focus on their studies and do what they need to do. So the largest category, the largest figure is for financial aid.
But right after that is support for faculty, because support for students comes first, but then you've got to have the resources to support first-rate faculty. So, one of the important things I would say about our summary table of needs, that I always said when we were developing it - when you look at it, it should say to you immediately, "That's what Brown is all about."
How do you expect the table of needs will hold up as fund raising continues?
It's hard to know because you never know what the donors are going to say. Will we be able to find donors and persuade donors that they should give to the things that we would like them to give to? We hope so. Will we be 100 percent successful? No, we won't. But my hope is that we spend enough time educating people about what we're trying to do that they will feel that we have spent so much time debating this, prioritizing it, that, in fact, we've been through that process rigorously, and that they can, in fact, trust us to allocate the funds to the right places.
So my hope is that a good number of donors will say that these are the right categories, and that's what I'll give to. But we can never be positive that that's going to happen.
And what if somebody comes along and says, "Ruth, that's all nice, but I really want to support something else"? What would we do? We're always going to try to support donors, in the end. If they want to support Brown, and there's something different they want to do, then we have a very long menu of things beyond this that are important at Brown.
As the quiet phase has progressed, how has your role guiding it taken shape, and how do you think that will change starting Saturday, when the Cam-paign officially kicks off?
As president, you're always picturing a campaign as being this incredible mountain that you have to climb, and I no longer see it that way, frankly, because of our experience in the quiet phase. And by that I mean that we have 60 very able vice-chairs of the Campaign. We've got a Corporation that is very attuned to being involved in the Campaign. We have a lot of staff who are excellent at providing information to donors about what is available to support.
So I think I will be much more of a cheerleader, in a sense, for all of the volunteers, and I will have targeted people that I will be seeing, of course. There will be a fair amount of travel this year because we will be launching in a number of different places. So we not only launch on campus, but we go out to cities, and we announce the campaign there as well. We'll be going to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, New York, two cities in Florida and one more I can't remember.
Have there been any unexpected or particularly memorable moments in the Campaign so far?
I will always remember the phone call I got from Sidney Frank ('42). I was at home having lunch, and the phone rang, and he said he wanted to give Brown $100 million dollars. That was a big shock - a very pleasant one.
I would say the moment that the Corporation agreed that we would launch a campaign and that it would be a very ambitious campaign - that was memorable to me. Because before we undertook this, it was hard to say what our goal would be. It could have been $700 million, it could have been $800 million. But when the Corporation agreed that this would be over a billion-dollar campaign, to me that said so much about the level of confidence that the University has in itself.
I'm always learning when I'm working on a large gift. I'm learning about what Brown has done for people. I'm learning why they are bound to the place in the way that they are. I'm learning what we have done well, and how we should preserve that because it is working well for people 30 years later or 40 years later. Actually, when you are on the campaign road, you are learning so much about what is useful and successful about a university. So it's quite beneficial, actually, in a lot of different ways. Those moments when you're doing that and learning what people have to say about their time at Brown, those are always exciting moments, frankly.
A common criticism of large-scale initiatives of this kind is that they don't benefit current students during their university career.
I know, I know, it's agony.
So how do you respond to that, and how will this campaign create a different experience for those who are here now?
One of the things that we did very consciously several years ago is we said that if we wait for the Campaign, our current students won't benefit. So we started thinking immediately about things we could do that would affect the students who are here now. And we came up with an entirely separate program of near-term improvements for the students who are here now. So in fact, the students who've come recently probably don't even know it because they assume it was always like that.
The truth is, what we have done with the Campaign is, for the important initiatives, we've asked donors specifically to help us start those things right away rather than waiting. The Frank gift (for financial aid) is already implemented, for example. And it's implemented because the way it was structured was for money to come immediately as a separate gift to allow the program to begin immediately.
What initiatives in this campaign have personal significance for you, and are there any that you see as particularly emblematic of your mission here at Brown?
There are so many like that, actually. We try to have a shared approach to decision-making here, but on occasion my heavy hand surfaces. I think it is the job of a president to set parameters that are important and to ask people whether they agree that those parameters are important.
But I certainly felt from the outset, always, that financial aid should be the driving force of this campaign, number one. And so I pushed that. Every time people would say, "If we took a little from financial aid, we could do this over there." I tried to fight that.
Why is financial aid so personally important to you?
The single most important thing for the future, in my view - to assure that Brown remains the kind of place where we get the very best students - is financial aid.
So there are two things that I care about. First, I care about the strength of the University, academically. I want people to say when I've left Brown ... that I helped ... Brown be stronger as a university. That means more to me than anything. And I think financial aid is a huge piece of that for graduate students, for medical students and for undergraduates. I resonate with that, and I feel very passionate about that.
What are some items you wish were included in the table of needs?
Campus center. I was really pushing for that, but in the capital budget we have so many other things to do that I was persuaded that the other things on the list should come first. I would like to see more student housing on-campus, high-quality student housing, and that's something I think we need to look at as well.
This weekend's kickoff has been carefully planned, as have other events across the country. What message do you hope those events will send outside the immediate community, and how significant is that message for the Campaign?
It's immensely important that we set the tone (this) weekend, the proper tone for what our campaign is about. This campaign is not about business as usual in any sense. It is about some very significant projects that support the heart of what Brown is.
What is our campaign about? It is about supporting students who are some of the most exceptional minds of their generation, and supporting them at the highest level. ... It's about bringing the best faculty to Brown in order to create the environment, an environment of high achievement, of knowledge production, of excellence in every sense. That's what this is about. I think our hope is, coming out of this weekend, those messages will be clear, and we will take that on the road and be able to celebrate that.
