Two American Women Academics

We do not have many Sri Lankans writing about achieving great success after being born disadvantaged, and even discriminated against. We had a political VVIP who came from a poor home and poor parents but he hid that fact and even built up evidence of a higher beginning. How many academics have traced their education to poor government schools and remote central schools and made known these facts?

When my generation was very young the basis of discrimination, even ostracism, was caste. I remember in the early 1940s no padu and other lower caste parents sent their children to schools. Maybe sometimes, to learn the rudiments of the three Rs, but the boys soon apprenticed themselves to the family business whether it was washing others’ clothes, making jaggery or jewellery crafting. The races got on amicably and no racial discrimination was present. That was until SWRDB’s Sinhala Only Act came into being sorely dividing children language wise and people ethnically.

These were my thoughts as I read the New York Times article by Martha Southgate – August 23 – titled The making of an Ivy League President: two women’s stories. She briefly recounts their lives through commenting on the two books they wrote recently: Up Home by Ruth J Simmons and Necessary Trouble by Drew Gilpin Faust. Simmons is a black American from a very poor Texan home and Faust from a very conservative well-to-do white family in rural northern Virginia. Both baby boomers, born in 1945 and 1947, and reaching the top of academia: Presidents of Ivy League Universities: Ruth Simmons at Brown University and Faust at Harvard University.

What I got by googling was that Ruth J Simmons serves as President of Prairie View and A&M in Texas. She was president and Prof of Comparative Literature and African Studies at Brown University from 2012-2017. Under her leadership Brown University made significant strides in improving its standing as one of the world’s finest research universities. Before this she was Prez of Smith, one of the largest of the Seven Sister colleges. She created history by being the first black woman to be President of a university.

Drew G Faust was President of Harvard University from 2007 to 2018. She expanded financial aid to improve access to Harvard College for students of all economic backgrounds and advocated increased federal funding for scientific research. She is a historian and the author of six well regarded books, one of which – This Republic is Suffering: death and the American Civil War- was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. Incidentally, the second black university president is Claudine Gay who in 2022 was elected Pres of Harvard, the first Black American in its 145 years.

As Martha Southgate says in the article I quote from, it is a remarkable coincidence that these two women professors 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.”

Ruth J Simmons

“’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.’” She was born in a dilapidated house, the youngest of 12 children, the older of whom helped the parents by working grueling hours picking cotton.

She recounts there was never enough food, and the clothes they wore stitched from whatever available material. They were scared of white people in the vicinity: “One lived on edge because any of them, no matter their station, could summarily condemn a Black person to injury and or punishment.” Southgate says the word ‘trauma’ is absent from the book, but ‘gratitude’ recurs often. “Up Home shows us well how this dignified, powerful woman looks back in wonder at how she got over it all.”

Drew Gilpin Faust

Commenting on Faust’s memoir Necessary Trouble, Southgate says it opens with the memory of the night her mother died, Christmas eve 1966, when Faust was 19. She recalls the fury of a neighbor and her accusation “you killed her, you know.” Her relationship with her conservative upper crust mother had always been tempestuous. It would have been the time young Drew was bent on fighting injustice and joining protests. She then goes on to recount her family history: white, wealthy, complicit in segregating blacks in rural northern Virginia. She was shocked as a schoolgirl hearing the word segregation and what it meant. She felt compelled to express her anger at such, to her, unfairness.

She knew it would only get her reprimand and ridicule if she spoke to her parents or neighbours. So she decided to write to the President of the US, Dwight Eisenhower (1953-‘61). Her faded letter is reproduced in the book’s frontispiece. She was nine at the time and she pleaded with the President to end segregation. And thus her lifelong resolve to fight for equity which was given expression in youthful activism as a college student in the 1960s and later as a historian of the South.

She was involved in the Civil Rights Movement and missed a midterm exam at Bryn Mawr to join the march at Selma. She had asked a friend to type a term paper and submit it on her behalf and got into serious trouble with her professor. But it did not matter as she felt impelled to stand up against injustice. She was also anti-Vietnam war and participated in public protests. The title of her memoir – ‘Necessary Trouble’ is a phrase from a speech by civil rights leader John Lewis, who gave her permission to use it just before he died in 2020.

Faust was supposed to turn out to be a privileged socialite Southern belle; Simmons an impoverished sharecropper. Education and their determined fighting spirits empowered them to battle family and societal prejudices and elitism in Faust’s case and poverty and colour prejudice in Simmon’s case to realize their dreams, and of course being in academia and in charge, other young adults’ dreams as well. This fact is summed up by Simmons in her conclusion in her memoir, as author Southgate says. “Thanks to the opportunities granted me to learn, I am not the person I was supposed to be. Rather, I am the person that I dreamed of becoming.”

After reading the article on these two recent publications and reading up on the lives of the two women who became presidents of most prestigious universities, I admired them. With it was the gut feeling that even now, people of this country shy away from saying they were born poor or underprivileged. It may be legitimately rag to riches but not made known. I cannot but add that many now rich have to hide how they succeeded in wealth, status and power; and others dare not expose them!