President Emerita of Brown University
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Book Dr. Ruth Simmons for a Speaking Engagement
Businesses, Non-profit organizations, event planners and companies across the country have worked closely with our booking agents to hire Dr. Ruth Simmons for a speaking engagements, guest appearances, product endorsements and corporate events. Many of those same clients have continued to turn to our speakers bureau as we can easily align Dr. Ruth Simmons’s availability with their upcoming seminar, gala, annual conference, corporate function, and grand opening. Our close relationship with Dr. Ruth Simmons’s booking agent and management team further enables us to provide inquiring clients with Dr. Ruth Simmons’s speaking fee and appearance cost.
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In 2001, Ruth Simmons made history when she became the first African-American president of an Ivy League university, as well as Brown University’s first female president. Prior to this appointment, she served as the first African-American female president of a major college or university when she took the reins at Smith College in 1995. Yet growing up, Simmons had much more modest ambitions. “I had one goal,” she recalls, “if only I could one day work in an office, because every woman that I knew was a maid… The farthest I could think was working in an office. That was it.”
Simmons began her prodigious journey on a sharecropping farm in Texas, the youngest of 12 children. She attended Dillard University on scholarship and spent her junior year at Wellesley College, where she encountered President Margaret Clapp who opened her eyes to the possibility of women in leadership. Graduating Dillard in 1967, she studied in France on a Fulbright fellowship, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in Romance languages from Harvard.
In 1983, after serving as associate dean of the graduate school at the University of Southern California, Simmons joined the Princeton University administration. She left in 1990 for two years to serve as provost at Spelman College, returning to Princeton in 1992 as vice provost. In 1995, she became president of Smith College, the largest women’s college in the U.S., where she launched a number of strategic initiatives to strengthen the college’s academic programs and inaugurated the first engineering program at a U.S. women’s college. Over the course of her career Simmons has been a visionary leader in academia, championing, and demonstrating, the power of education to transform lives. She stepped down as Brown president in 2012, but remains a professor of comparative literature and Africana studies at the university.
A French professor before entering university administration, President Simmons also holds an appointment as a professor of comparative literature and of Africana Studies at Brown.
She graduated from Dillard University in New Orleans and completed her Ph.D. in Romance languages and literatures at Harvard. She served in various administrative roles at the University of Southern California, Princeton University, and Spelman College before becoming president of Smith College, the largest women's college in the United States.
At Smith, she launched a number of initiatives including an engineering program, the first at an American women's college.
Simmons is the recipient of many honors, including a Fulbright Fellowship, the 2001 President's Award from the United Negro College Fund, the 2002 Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, and the 2004 Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal.
She has been a featured speaker in many public venues, including the White House, the World Economic Forum, the National Press Club, the American Council on Education, and the Phi Beta Kappa Lecture at Harvard University.
She is President of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, an Honorary Fellow at Selwyn College at Cambridge University, a member of the Howard University Board of Trustees, and serves on a number of boards, including Texas Instruments and The Goldman Sachs Group, and has been awarded numerous honorary degrees.
She was recently appointed by President Obama as a member of the President's Commission on White House Fellowships.
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NOPACTalent acts as a Celebrity Speakers Bureau and Athlete Booking agency for corporate functions, appearances, private events and speaking engagements. NOPACTalent does not claim or represent itself as Dr. Ruth Simmons’s speakers bureau, agent, manager or management company for Dr. Ruth Simmons or any celebrity on this website. NOPACTalent represents organizations seeking to hire motivational speakers, athletes, celebrities and entertainers for private corporate events, celebrity endorsements, personal appearances, and speaking engagements.
