Ruth Simmons on Cultivating the Next Generation of College Students; New York Times, February 28, 2018

Marguerite Joutz, New York Times; Ruth Simmons on Cultivating the Next Generation of College Students

"In 2012, after a distinguished career in higher education, which included serving as the president of Smith College and Brown University — where she was the first black woman to lead an Ivy League institution — Ruth J. Simmons retired and moved back to her home state, Texas.

She didn’t think she’d ever work at a university again. But after several years, Prairie View A&M University, a historically black school with about 9,000 students, came calling...

M.J.: You’ve led several institutions that are all very different from each other, and the topic of leadership is something you’ve talked a lot about. In another interview with The Times you said that it’s much easier to lead people “if you convey the underlying principles.” Can you elaborate?

R.S.: One thing that I’ve learned is that the perceptions of what it takes to be a leader are often based on prototypical models that don’t have much truth in reality. People look at the institutions that I have led and they see dissimilarities. I see similarities. When people think in terms of leadership, they’re often thinking about the kind of specific skills needed for different types of enterprises. I think of leadership as more of a disposition — the ability to step into a situation to learn about the history of the enterprise, the opportunities that it faces, the culture that exists and the people who are served by it. To look at all of that, to listen to stakeholders and then to think about how that enterprise or institution should best be served. There is no one model of leadership if you approach it that way. What I have tried to do wherever I go is to start where the institution is rather than try to import particularly rigid constructs from other places. In that sense, I think a leader is more than anything else a facilitator. A person who is able to come in to show a community a picture of what it is, to provide some insight into what it could be — how it could be different or improved perhaps — and then enlist the help of people who are there and others who support that institution in order to move forward together.

I don’t subscribe to the model of hero leadership, which is identifying somebody who can come in and have magical powers and then wield the wand and fix things that have not been fixable before. I don’t see that. I think leadership is a community affair."