The Making of an Ivy League President: Two Women’s Stories
Martha Southgate
In “Necessary Trouble,” by Drew Gilpin Faust, and “Up Home,” by Ruth J. Simmons, the former presidents of Harvard and Brown recount their unlikely paths to leadership at two of America’s most elite universities.
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NECESSARY TROUBLE: Growing Up at Midcentury, by Drew Gilpin Faust

UP HOME: One Girl’s Journey, by Ruth J. Simmons

Two baby boomers, both women — one born in 1945, one in 1947. One Black, one white. In 1995, Ruth J. Simmons, the elder of the two, became the first Black president of Smith, one of the largest of the Seven Sisters colleges. But that wasn’t her last first; in 2001, she left Smith to take the helm at Brown University, making history again by virtue of both her race and her gender — the first Black woman to lead an Ivy League institution, which she did until 2012. In 2017, she was persuaded out of retirement to take on the presidency of the historically Black Prairie View A&M University, located in her native Texas, a couple of hours’ drive from where she was born. She left that job earlier this year.

In 2007, Drew Gilpin Faust was named the first woman president of Harvard University, a post she held until 2018. She’s also a historian and the author of six well-regarded books, one of which, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. In a remarkable coincidence, these two leaders have published memoirs of their young womanhood at the same time. Read in tandem, they cast a stark light on how the legacy of slavery played out on both sides of the color line in post-World War II America.

“I was born to be someone else,” Simmons writes in the first paragraph of “Up Home.” “Someone, that is, whose life is defined principally by race, segregation and poverty. As a young child marked by the sharecropping fate of my parents and the culture that predominated in East Texas in the 1940s and ’50s, I initially saw these factors as limiting what I could do and who I could become.”

Simmons maintains this restrained tone as she describes a childhood that could have taken place in the 1850s. She was born in a dilapidated farmhouse, delivered by a local midwife. As the youngest of 12 children, she had a comparatively easier time because she was the baby of the family. But “comparatively” is about as far from ease as you can get. “When my family performed grueling work such as picking cotton, I escaped the worst of being in the fields,” she writes:

My older siblings placed the cotton bolls picked from the plants into sacks they dragged between the rows of cotton. These eight-foot-long canvas bags, sewn by my mother, were sturdy enough to carry me along with the fluffy bolls stuffed inside. Dragging me along on the end of the bag was difficult, but with every hand including my mother in the field, my youngest sisters and I had to be there too. … For most of us, the apprenticeship for cotton picking began around the age of 6.

There was never enough food. The family’s handmade clothing was cobbled together from burlap and rough cotton. Her parents loved her and her siblings but, given the enormous stresses of their lives, also struggled — her father in particular was angry and sometimes abusive (though Simmons focuses on the love and never uses the word “abusive”). There were white people in the vicinity, who, though rarely interacted with directly, were always a menacing presence: “One lived on edge because any of them, no matter their station, could summarily condemn a Black person to injury or punishment.”