Wellesley, Mass.—Pioneering educator Ruth J. Simmons will deliver the address at Wellesley College’s 148th commencement ceremony on Friday, May 15. Throughout her distinguished career, Simmons has championed the value of higher education and the importance of expanding opportunities for all students.
Wellesley’s commencement will take place at 10:30 a.m. EDT on the Wellesley College campus, and it will be livestreamed on the Wellesley Live website.
A groundbreaking leader in higher education, Simmons has served as president of a Seven Sisters college (Smith College, 1995–2001), an Ivy League university (Brown University, 2001–12), and a historically Black university (Prairie View A&M, 2017–23). She is currently a President’s Distinguished Fellow at Rice University and an adviser to the president of Harvard University on its HBCU initiative.
“Ruth Simmons is a champion of educational opportunity, equity, and excellence for all students. Her life story is a testament to the transformative power of higher education,” said Wellesley College President Paula A. Johnson. “During our 150th anniversary, we are honored to recognize her leadership and commitment to higher education, and to women’s education in particular, and to celebrate the role Wellesley played in her educational journey.”
The youngest of 12 children of sharecroppers and the great-great-granddaughter of slaves in Grapeland, Texas, Simmons was inspired by her teachers to become the second in her family to pursue a college education. While an undergraduate at Dillard University, she spent her junior year as a visiting student at Wellesley. In her 2023 memoir, Up Home: One Girl’s Journey, she writes that her experience at the College led her to rethink the way she treated people with differing points of view. “In that class full of people different from each of us, we heard opinions we never would have heard in our home communities,” she wrote in 2019 in the Washington Post. “The emphatic epiphany of that moment has remained with me throughout my life.”
Simmons returned to Dillard and received her B.A. in Romance languages and literatures in 1967. She earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. from Harvard, then studied at the Université de Lyon in France on a Fulbright Fellowship. She was a professor of French before entering university administration, was a professor of Africana studies at Brown, and served in various faculty and administrative roles at the University of Southern California, Princeton University, and Spelman College before becoming president of Smith in 1995.
Simmons’ many honors include the 2001 President’s Award from the United Negro College Fund, the 2002 Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Award, the Foreign Policy Association Medal, and the Centennial Medal from Harvard University. The recipient of numerous honorary degrees, including from Brandeis in 2024 and Harvard in 2002, Simmons also received Brown University’s highest faculty honor, the Susan Colver Rosenberger Medal, in 2011. She is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Council on Foreign Relations, among others. In 2012, she was named a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, and in 2024 she was promoted to the rank of officier. In 2024, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Joe Biden.