President Ruth Simmons is not a serious candidate for the presidency of Harvard University, according to a Jan. 10 report in the Harvard Crimson, but her name continues to appear in media reports covering the school's search for a new leader. Perhaps in response to those reports, Simmons bluntly indicated Tuesday that she will not be leaving for Harvard.
"I feel extremely fortunate to do what I do at Brown. I can think of no better job. I am not a candidate for the Harvard presidency," Simmons said in a statement to The Herald.
In December 2006, Simmons was one of 30 potential candidates on a list that Harvard's nine-member search committee gave to the school's Board of Overseers, as reported by the Crimson and the New York Times. But since then, that list has been pared down and no longer includes any Ivy League presidents, according to reports leaked to the press over the past several weeks.
Convincing someone to take what many consider the most prestigious job in higher education is not as easy as it sounds. Simmons gave her first explicit denial yesterday, and officials from Columbia, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Cambridge and the University of Pennsylvania, among others, have all said they would not accept Harvard's presidency.
Simmons, who earned her Ph.D. at Harvard, originally suggested to a group of parents at an Orientation event in September that she would not accept a position at the Cambridge, Mass., university.
"I was just saying that I was very happy and satisfied to be at Brown and that I could think of no better job," Simmons said in a September interview with The Herald. "I think I even conceded as a Harvard alum that that was a perfectly respectable place, and I wish them the best as they search for a president. I look forward to welcoming that person as a fellow president."
But as coyness is a trademark of potential presidents being courted by search committees, not everyone was put at ease by Simmons' earlier statement and her office's unwillingness to comment on the process over the past several months. Her counterparts at Princeton, Penn, Columbia and Cambridge gave more forceful and repeated denials of interest than she did.
But Simmons did tell the Providence Journal in 2005, before ex-Harvard President Lawrence Summers resigned, that the Brown presidency would be her last job.
Signs indicate Harvard may look internally to fill the top post, with law school dean Elena Kagan and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Dean Drew Gilpin Faust mentioned as likely candidates. Nobel laureate and biochemist Thomas Cech, the head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is also said to be under consideration.
Last year, Harvard professor Judith Ryan and Cornel West, former Harvard and current Princeton professor, publicly suggested Simmons for the post.
She is also frequently mentioned in media reports on the issue. The Chronicle of Higher Education described Simmons as "among the names that came up most frequently," and the New York Times published her photo with an article on the Harvard search earlier this month.
Simmons, Penn President Amy Gutmann and Princeton President Shirley Tilghman are probably named in media reports so frequently because they fulfill many of the criteria Harvard may be seeking and not because they are actual candidates, said Stephen Nelson, an associate professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State College and author of "Leaders in the Crucible: The Moral Voice of College Presidents."
"My guess is none of those women have ever been serious because of timing issues, not because of their capacities," Nelson said. Each of the three women is in the beginning or middle of her presidency, and all are generally well-liked and successful fundraisers, so Harvard might be seen as acting in bad faith by hiring the leader of an institution with which it directly competes, Nelson said.
"If you're going to steal a senior administrator from somewhere else - like the University of Michigan - that's one thing," he said. "It's another thing when you get more geographically proximate like in the Ivy League ... but also in a fairly close collegial working relationship."
