The Aspen Institute

Featuring Ruth Simmons, former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M University, and Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Rice University, in conversation with Aspen Institute President and CEO Dan Porterfield. Dr. Simmons will discuss her 2023 memoir, “Up Home: One Girl’s Journey,” which is at once a stirring narrative of her trajectory from growing up as the twelfth child of sharecroppers in the segregated South to becoming the first Black president of an Ivy League university, and a circumstance-defying story of a girl who stretched beyond the boundaries imposed upon her—and the extraordinary people who made it all possible.
Paepcke Auditorium, doors at 5:30 pm

While attendance at the events is free and open to everyone, registration is required, and capacity is established on a first-come, first-served basis. Register here.

Parking
Parking is very limited. Please carpool, walk, bike, or ride RFTA. 

You can purchase her book “Up Home: One Girl’s Journey” here. Books will also be available for purchase at the event. Book signing to follow.

“Simmons’s evocative account of her remarkable trajectory from Jim Crow Texas, where she was the youngest of twelve children in a sharecropping family, to the presidencies of Smith College and Brown University shines with tenderness and dignity.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

“A riveting work of literature, destined to take its place in the canon of great African American autobiographies.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

Ruth J. Simmons is the former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M University, Texas’s oldest HBCU, and the former vice provost of Princeton. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Dillard University and her master’s and doctorate from Harvard in Romance languages and literatures. The president of France named her chevalier of the French Legion of Honor and President Biden named her to the White House HBCU Advisory Board. She is currently a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Rice University. She lives in Texas.

Dan Portfield, Ph.D., is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute. He previously served for seven years as president of Franklin & Marshall College. Earlier in his career, he was senior vice president for strategic development and an English professor at his alma mater, Georgetown University, and a senior public affairs official in the US Department of Health and Human Services. Recognized as a visionary leader and advocate for expanding educational opportunity and improving the human condition, Dr. Porterfield was named a White House Champion of Change in 2016. He was awarded a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities from The City University of New York Graduate Center, where he earned his PhD.

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