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A President on the Move By Laurie Fenlason Appointments, outreach and interviews have kept President Ruth Simmons on the move and in the news in recent months. This fall, Simmons was named to the advisory committee for the Gates Millennium Scholars Program, a $1 billion scholarship program established by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda. As one of seven advisers, Simmons will help develop policies as the foundation attempts to spend $1 billion over 20 years to send 20,000 minority students to college. Additionally, the program aims to increase the representation of African American, Hispanic American, Native American and Asian American students in mathematics, science, engineering, education and library science. Simmons was also appointed a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a granting agency expected to award some $60 million in 1999. Corporation president Vartan Gregorian cited Simmons' reputation for "intellectual astuteness and independence of mind" and predicted she would help the corporation "immeasurably as we consider ways to improve pre-college teaching and liberal arts education." In addition, by recent invitation from Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, Simmons is serving as a member of the advisory committee to the director of the National Institutes of Health. The committee is the principal advisory group to Secretary Shalala and to the NIH on policy issues, especially in the areas of biomedical research, medical science and biomedical communications. Simmons is also serving on the board of directors of Texas Instruments (TI), based in Plano, Texas. In its late summer announcement of her appointment, TI noted that the company "is actively involved in promoting educational excellence in science, engineering and math, with a special focus on increasing opportunities for women and minorities who have been underrepresented in technical fields in the past." Smith recently established an undergraduate engineering program, the first at a women's college in the United States. Speaking Out In early August, Simmons addressed the National Urban League's 1999 Annual Conference, "Agenda 2000: Equality and Power for the New Millennium," in Houston. Also appearing at the conference were Texas governor and presidential candidate George W. Bush, NAACP president Kweisi Mfume, Time editor Jack White, and Major League baseball commissioner Bud Selig. In late September, Simmons gave the keynote address at the Women in Technology International's 1999 east coast technology summit in Boston. Media coverage of her talk noted Smith's efforts to change engineering "from a pale, nerdy, male occupation" to a career attractive to girls and women. "So many women tell me they always wanted to be an engineer, but someone along the way told them that it was not the right career for a woman," Simmons told the conference-goers. "We are holding up a light toward which young girls and women can aspire." In the News Simmons' October 9 visit with students at Hamilton High School in Los Angeles received extensive coverage in the New York Times. In an article headlined "Elite College's President Takes to the Road to Attract the Disadvantaged," the Times noted that "stepping out of the Ivory Tower to recruit at urban public schools" is rare for a college president but increasingly necessary for colleges and universities like Smith, Princeton, Dartmouth and Hampshire that have "largely hit a wall in their efforts to lure more minority members." "To me, this is a matter of national interest, a matter of national salvation," Simmons said of her commitment to diversifying the campus. Simmons' November 19 announcement that the college will offer as many as three full-tuition scholarships to public school graduates in neighboring Springfield, Mass., caught the attention of the Boston Globe, which highlighted the new program under the headline "Smith Leader Promotes Diversity." The scholarships, valued at approximately $22,000, are the latest in an effort to expand Smith's outreach to the largest city in western Massachusetts and to increase opportunities for minority students. Next Steps Looking to the future, Simmons will participate this January in a public discussion on affirmative action at the New York Public Library. Proceedings of the program, which is sponsored by the Fred Friendly Institute at Columbia University, are to be published by Oxford University Press. In February, she will address the Economic Club of Indianapolis, as part of a lecture series that has featured F.W. de Klerk, former South Africa president and Nobel Prize winner, and Andrea Mitchell, NBC chief foreign correspondent. Later that month, she will deliver the W.E.B. DuBois Lecture at the University of Massachusetts, followed by an endowed lecture on campus diversity and race relations at Columbia University.

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