Ruth Simmons

Ruth Simmons (born Ruth Jean Stubblefield; July 3, 1945) is the current President of Prairie View A&M University. She previously served as the 18th president of Brown University, where she was the first African American president of an Ivy League institution. Simmons was elected Brown's first female president in November 2000, assuming that office in the fall of 2001. She also held appointments as a professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Africana Studies. In 2002, Newsweek selected her as a Ms. Woman of the Year, while in 2001, Time named her as America's best college president. According to a March 2009 poll by The Brown Daily Herald, Simmons had more than an 80% approval rating among Brown undergraduates. Prior to Brown, she headed Smith College, a Seven Sisters and the largest women's college in the United States, beginning in 1995. On September 15, 2011, Simmons announced that she would step down from the Brown presidency at the end of the academic year, June 30, 2012. She retired to Texas where she had been born and raised. On June 19, 2017, she agreed to step in as the interim president of Prairie View A&M University, a member of the Texas A&M University System and a historically black institution, assuming the office on July 1, 2017. On December 4, 2017, she was officially named the eighth president of Prairie View A&M University. She is the first woman elected to serve as president of Prairie View A&M, where her older brother was a basketball student-athlete.