Former President Ruth Simmons’ Inaugural Address

Delivered September 30, 1995

Madame Chair and other members of the Board of Trustees, my friends Harold Shapiro and Johnnetta Cole, Presidents Dunn and Conway, President Gregory Prince, honored delegates, Smith faculty, students, staff and alumnae, and, finally, my dear family and friends, I am overwhelmed by the weight of this occasion. You can see and hear that the Smith family has welcomed me with a warmth no one could have predicted and that some still don’t want to believe. However, I have been heartened both by their welcome and by the confidence that they place in me.

The Smith Alumni Quarterly looked at President Simmons' legacy in “The Simmons Years.”

As I begin this journey, I know that the way will be strewn with obstacles. For I come to lead Smith College at a time when our profession is beset by the harshest of criticism and by a growing variety of complaints and controversy. Education, once a strong and resonant call for so many, is today the object of gratuitous attack and constant derision. Many are calling for sweeping change in the academy. Change in our mission. Change in the way we do business. Change in the way we teach. Change in the way we judge excellence. They insist that we adopt new measures to ensure increased quality and cost controls and added productivity. Every month, it seems, there is a new proposal to reshape funding and tax structures. Many speak of intrusive new regulatory measures that would limit faculty choice in constructing curricula. Yes, some would have us set aside the defining characteristics of our profession in favor of production-line procedures originating in the manufacture of products on the basis of formulaic inputs.

I stand before you today as one who mercifully escaped such formulae. Like millions of others, my life was touched by the best of the academy–an academy shaped by resolute faculty deeply committed to their students, by inspired teaching, by responsible moral leadership and by excellent and demanding standards of inquiry. Through its high priests and priestesses–teachers–education reached out to me and led me to this place today. What in the current debate about input and output tells this story and that of countless students whose lives and whose communities have been deeply and movingly transformed by education?

Yes, there is a will to change about, and some would focus on change within the academy. That is as it should be, for no sector of our national life should be left untouched by the most rigorous debate about quality and accountability. But there is much in what we hear today that calls for change for the sake of change. Change that could prove damaging to the enduring benefits of a broad education. Change that could place the training of future generations of scholars at risk. Change that could diminish significantly the quality of the human capital available to the world. Change that doesn’t encourage examination of its own premises.

When Smith College was created, few in this country thought that women could or should study at the collegiate level. It took a radical change–the founding of a women’s college that would teach women at the same level as men–to show how wrong the skeptics were. and in just a few decades after the implementation of that radical idea, the fact that women could pursue successfully a collegiate curriculum had become an accepted fact. And so, just as a drastic change in awareness came about within just a few decades of the founding of women’s colleges, the next few decades will bring about similar change in our understanding of what women need and can achieve. More important, the extraordinarily rapid changes which ever-improving communications and technology are bound to bring will require ever greater flexibility and responsiveness in our students if they are to achieve in new ways.

Women today come to Smith with the same hopes that women had a century ago. They seek a place that can help them understand better how to use their intelligence and talents to the fullest extent and to the benefit of their families and communities. They go out into the world to found and manage companies, to help their mates and to rear children, to execute a variety of important tasks in varied sectors of institutional, industrial, corporate and social settings. As they leave Smith, future graduates will enter a world in which their accomplishments and their work form an important dimension of the economic survival of their families. The demands on their time will be great. The conflicts in their personal lives will be real. Women must be educated today as if their very lives depended on their education because, for most of them, their lives will. Their high aspirations will have to sustain them through a lifetime of change and challenge.

I have walked about this campus and marveled at the aspirations of today’s students, which are so much more dazzling than any I could have imagined as a student. I see women students doing front-line research and benefiting from and developing state-of-the-art technology that delivers and analyzes test results that would have taken many months and often years longer in my youth. I see women students striving to create new methodologies that make us more efficient in various fields. I see women struggling with complex social issues and developing strategies for definitive solutions. I see women students writing and producing ambitious creative works that are richly nuanced and aesthetically instructive even in a world over-stimulated by a variety of mixed media. Such efforts and aspirations are made possible by a cadre of faculty and a culture of learning that affirm possibilities. And, in affirming possibilities, this environment, through the broadest of learning, enables lives of accomplishment and fulfillment.

But this broadest of learning may be at risk in these times, for in times of uncertainty, the narrowest of planners will insist on a narrowing of scope, a limiting of reach, a suppression of intellectual and artistic endeavor. And so, the rhetoric of containment, constraint, limitation and elimination now rings across the plains. Salvos against intellectuals, artists and researchers have become a point of honor. Attacks against academic elites have formed a line of offense for which colleges and universities have only belatedly begun to mount an effective defense. Increasingly, the attacks threaten to lead us into a labyrinth of parochialism that could ultimately destroy liberal learning as we have come to know it.

For our critics would have us believe that the times require application, rather than creation; rote and routine, rather than deep and original analysis; uninspired tinkering, rather than true discovery; regulation, rather than revelation. These harbingers of containment would limit the opportunity to carve out new areas of human pursuit, new areas of research, new areas of human possibility, new areas that have the potential to save our civilization from untimely extinction. Since no one can predict with certainty where the future will take us, let us not through imperfect science and myopic greed relegate our future to one of uninspired and artless learning. We need a population that is well educated, able to retool quickly in response to economic and technological changes and able as well to be critically adaptive as the world constantly changes.

At Smith, we still believe that the best policy in education is to learn well and to learn broadly. For that is the only way to ensure that, as societal, industrial and technological shifts occur, this society is left not merely with doers whose only capacity is to follow instructions that will become obsolete, but also with thinkers who, when the system crashes, will be able to rebuild it.

Given these kinds of problems and challenges, places like Smith are more important than ever, for they offer a relationship of learning that creates thinkers as well as doers. Our faculty can be found challenging students to push on to the next layer of philosophical thought, the next level of critique, the next plateau of effort. They can be seen stimulating new research challenges. They can be heard exhorting students to leave aside hollow rhetoric in favor of deep analysis. Such exhortations are the stuff of intellectual growth. They are also the stuff of sustained economic growth and productivity. But if critics of higher education have their way, that relationship of learning will not be sustained.

Smith College makes possible an authentic learning process. However, one hundred twenty years after Sophia Smith insisted on women’s rights to an education on a par with men, we still have in effect educational streams that do not protect that most important process. There remains in many parts of this country and the world a kind of special education for women that manifestly undertrains women. This special undereducation takes place in primary and secondary level schools and in colleges. And in fact it takes place in some of the best institutions in the country. In this stream, women are still gently guided toward those areas that are defined as being suitable for their dispositions. They are still directed to areas of their chosen fields that are thought to be less demanding. Women who show promise for leadership roles and capacity for critical decision making may be told that they are unattractive and unappealing. Girls who singlemindedly pursue an interest may be deemed peculiar and awkward. Yes, one hundred twenty years after Smith opened and as we approach the end of this century, these stereotypes continue to undermine achievement and choice for girls and women in many of our school systems, colleges and universities.

But I am happy to say that, at Smith, every woman who has the desire and the will can work as high and as hard as her own efforts will permit her. There are no special classes–no special streams for them. Our task at Smith is not only to ensure that women at Smith can learn unimpeded by these obstacles to achievement but also that wherever women enter the academy, their intellectual capacity and promise are respected.

Though much of it remains to be recorded, women have over time given much to the march of human progress. They have been inventors and investors; they have been artists and soldiers; they have been martyrs and mavericks, politicians and principals. But no one could begin to suggest that we have seen even an iota of what women could truly accomplish, provided that the best in education remains available to women for years to come.

And so Smith prepares to enter the next century with a purposeful agenda–to carry its mission forward in such a way that women will help our nation and the world thrive as a place of freedom, a place of justice, a place of promise, a place of cooperation. At Smith, we lack no animating theory of our work. We are here as we were in 1875 to make good on Sophia Smith’s promise to women of ability. Our central purpose is and ever will be the teaching and pursuit of knowledge at the highest level. We are not at a loss for ideas, and our former students prove that daily. Like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, they have created political movements. Like Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan, they have developed and campaigned for critical national health and family initiatives. Like Julia Child, they have brought to the art of living great taste and gusto. Like Kate Webster, they have reared their children and helped their mates build important institutions while, at the same time, leading a few important ones themselves in their spare time. Like Thelma Golden, they have pushed the frontier of art in ways that others would not have dared. Like Laura d’Andrea Tyson, they have sat at the seat of power and provided ethical and wise guidance.

There is no confusion here. We have made a place for the ideas of women to flourish. They flourish here because of a faculty of scholars who treasure teaching above all else. They flourish here because of a curriculum that spurs rather than silences exploration. They flourish here because of the unrelentingly high standards of faculty, staff and students. They flourish here because this is a place where the earnest pursuit of knowledge still lives unimpeded by the expectation of failure.

People who seek to know why the expectation of failure did not overtake me when I was growing up should know this. In this audience today are teachers who saw in me at an early age the potential to think, to act, and to lead. I could not have seen that myself but, no matter, they did. From the time that I set foot in their classrooms, these teachers set a standard for me to follow, and the path to excellence has led me to this platform today. Such is the teacher’s calling. Whatever fancy things we do in the academy–and there are many–none is as central, none as elegant, none as powerful as a teacher guiding a student’s mind toward discovery, knowledge and achievement. For students, the gift of a teacher’s time can never be repaid. For students, the gift of a teacher’s encouragement is beyond compare. For a student, the gift of a teacher’s belief in her is never to be betrayed.

If I have not said it clearly before, let me say it now. I am what teachers and education made of me. When I was a child searching for knowledge, the academy pulled me into its orbit because it held up values toward which I could aspire. It is my hope that in this time of debate about regulation, quality control, and cost and productivity in the academy, we do not lose sight of this essential story. That righteously broad education puts us in touch with the ways in which our forebears have known, created, suffered and imitated human experience. And from that contact, we come to understand how we can in turn make our mark on progress. Education is at its heart just one formula: teachers plus students equal learning. That is why learning can flourish in Cambridge and Northampton, but it can also flourish in Houston’s 5th ward.

I am pleased to accept the responsibility to lead Smith College. As I do so, I shall remember always with reverence the teachers who cared about learning and in turn imparted that to me. For that is the story of the academy; that is the story of Smith College. Vivat academia. Vivant professores. Vivant studentes.