A new face in the ivory tower.

ON SEPTEMBER 30, ACADEMIC LEADERS FROM across the country will gather in Northampton, Mass., as Ruth J. Simmons is installed as the ninth president of Smith College. The ceremony will bear a striking similarity to Smith's inaugurations of years gone by. Backdropped by the vibrant fall foliage of the Berkshire mountains, it will feature plenty of pomp and circumstance and heartfelt speeches about Smith's mission as one of the nation's few remaining colleges for women.

But in a subtle--yet no less striking way--this inauguration will be different. For one, there are sure to be more African Americans present. And there will also be more press. Because Simmons, unlike her predecessors at Smith or at any of America's top-tier academic institutions, is black. And that makes this inauguration news.

"I can't tell you how elated I am about this appointment," says Frank L. Matthews, publisher of Black Issues In Higher Education. "This is a watershed event. Smith is a premiere institution, considered to be among the best in the world. If she succeeds, this will resonate very positively throughout the Ivy League and the academic community generally."

There are currently 28 black presidents of predominantly white four-year colleges in the U.S., according to Deborah Carter of the American Council on Education in Washington. The significance of those breakthroughs should not be minimized.

But, with one exception, the nation's top colleges--its most universally respected and most wealthy have not offered a CEO slot to an African American. Clifton Wharton, who served as Michigan State University's president in the '70s, is the exception. Although he went on to become chancellor of the 64-campus State University of New York and then CEO of the world's largest pension fund, TIAA-CREF, his breakthrough 1970 appointment at Michigan State was not duplicated at any of the nation's major research universities or elite liberal arts colleges. At least, not until now.

Why? There are many reasons, and surely each school has its own. But what they all have in common is money, lots of it. And a constant need to attract more. That's the CEO's job, along with innumerable other responsibilities that go with running a major institution (Smith has an endowment of $473 million and an annual operating budget of $117.2 million). The fear, explains Matthews, is that African Americans won't have the connections or the appeal that keeps the money rolling in. Particularly at conservative institutions like Smith, one has to wonder how deep-pocketed alums (who contributed $14,625,768 to the college in 1993) will react to a black president (both Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan attended Smith). And so, the December announcement of Simmons' appointment was an eye-popper.

A MULTIFACETED CHALLENGE

It's easy to see why Ruth Simmons was tapped for the job. She has incredible presence, tempered by a soothing warmth and easy laugh. At 50, she is exuberant, focused and reflective. And she is confident enough to generally speak her mind. Luckily, she has a gift for saying in a perfectly palatable way things that might otherwise raise a few eyebrows.

For someone who has always fashioned herself "a worker-bee," Simmons has quickly and gracefully adapted to the glare of the spotlight. And, perhaps better than anyone, she understands that long after the inauguration festivities end, many will still be watching her. But while the attention thus far has been almost dreamlike in its positiveness, Simmons knows what's waiting around the bend--and it won't all be good. If she's lucky, the honeymoon will last through her first year. But, she says, "By the time I get to year two, I will have to grapple with real problems and make unpopular decisions. The issue of my being black will be gone and all the other issues will rise to the fore. Those are the ones I'll be judged on."

At Smith, those issues are multifaceted and many. They include the challenges all college CEOs face today: how to attract and retain a renowned, diverse and caring faculty; how to adapt an aging physical plant to the demands of state-of-the-art equipment; how to balance the enormous cost of providing a high-quality education against the desire to provide financial assistance to those in need (this year's tuition and room and board: $26,484); and, of course, how to draw the proverbial best and brightest students--only women need apply. Which brings us to the trickier issues...

The viability of single-sex education, and the education of women in particular, has been the subject of widespread, emotional debate for decades. But when the all-male Ivy League opened to women in the early '70s, things heated up for the Seven Sister schools, including Smith. As the daughters of women who had graduated from Radcliffe, Barnard and Smith chose to enter Harvard, Columbia and Yale, application and enrollment numbers at women's colleges began to slide. Smith was no exception. By the late '80s, there were faculty concerns that in the battle to maintain its all-women status, Smith was compromising on student quality. As time went on, some instructors became increasingly vocal about it. Needless to say, students were outraged.

Smith has also had to grapple with a reputation for being a lesbian mecca, a portrayal that intensified a few years ago when ABC's 20/20 reported that one out of seven women in Northampton are thought to be lesbians. As idyllic and genteel as Smith may be in other respects (Friday afternoon tea is still served in the large houses that are the dorms), that alone repels some parents and potential students.

For African American students, Smith has never been regarded as ideal. Its biggest drawback for black students is simply their dearth. Although African American enrollment is up 29% this year, the percentage of black students overall still hovers below 5% (about 87 of Smith's 2,700 students are African-American). The faculty numbers are even worse. Only 15 of the 254-person teaching staff are black; 10 of those are in tenure-track positions, but only one is tenured.

Simmons knows what she has gotten into by taking the helm at Smith. "The first thing to work on is how the campus feels about itself," she says. Despite the fact that women's colleges seem to be entering something of a renaissance (Smith applications poured in in record numbers last year), Simmons acknowledges that there is still "a lot of angst about attrition, single-sex versus coeducation; there is damaged faculty and student morale. I have to deal with those issues and mend some fences. How can you recruit people if you don't have an environment that is confident, committed, healed and happy? You can't raise money with those kinds of liabilities."

Simmons' own position on the single-sex education issue is definitive: Smith will not go the way of Vassar and other formerly all-women's colleges; at least, not on her watch. "What a women's college does is give women an experience similar to that of men in the real world," she asserts. "It lets them see how they can stretch, evolve and advance when it's assumed and accepted that that's what they'll do." Indeed, recent studies have shown that women's colleges produce a disproportionate number of leaders and graduates who excel in male-dominated fields. Laura Tyson, President Clinton's foremost economic advisor, and Thelma Golden, the first black curator of New York's Whitney Museum, are both Smith alums. And one fifth of BE's 21 Women of Power and Influence (August 1991), attended women's colleges.

Simmons is openly committed to luring more black and other minority women to Smith, saving, " If it's not a good place for them, it's not a good place for me." But Simmons also hopes her presence will attract top-notch white students and faculty who may have viewed Smith as a stuffy, patrician scat of conservatism but now see her appointment as having exploded that image.

As confident as she seems, Simmons readily admits to being overwhelmed by the task before her. But she is also unable to suppress her sheer excitement at the possibilities. "If I turn out to be a great president," she says with a sly grin, "Smith is going to be able to live off that for the next hundred years because they led the way; they conducted the experiment."

AN ELECTRIC BOLT CALLED WELLESLEY

Experiment. Given Simmons' remarkable background, it's a rather odd characterization for this appointment. But she is a realist, and she knows what comes with being "a first." She was born in Texas, the youngest of twelve--five girls and seven boys. She credits her earliest teachers in all-black schools for nurturing a spark in her that might have just as easily been snuffed out. She speaks often about the ability of such encouragement--particularly in an educational setting--"to transform a child," and has spent her career aiming to have that effect on others.

As a junior on scholarship at historically black Dillard University in New Orleans, Simmons was handpicked by its president to go on exchange to Wellesley College, the all-women alma mater of Hillary Clinton. Simmons had never ventured beyond the South, rarely been in a classroom with whites or had white teachers. She was a sharecropper's child soon to be living in New England among the most privileged of young white women.

But her only concern was the curriculum: "Would I be able to handle it?" she wondered. Indeed, she found, she would.

"What happened for me in the classroom at Wellesley probably shaped my life," Simmons says now. "It was 1966, and while watching the civil rights movement unfold on TV, I came to recognize that my mind was just the same as the students in the classroom with me. I could do everything that these very wealthy, very well prepared white women could do. I had sort of suspected that there wasn't very much to all this hype that blacks were inferior to whites. But now I knew the truth, and an electric bolt went through me."

Simmons graduated summa cum laude from Dillard, studied for a year in France, then went on to earn her Ph.D. in romance languages from Harvard in 1973. The next decade would take her through teaching and administrative positions at the University of New Orleans, California State University (Northridge) and the University of Southern California. She also married and had two children--a son and a daughter. She later divorced.

She arrived at Princeton in 1983, becoming associate dean of the faculty in 1986, as well as acting director of Afro-American Studies, a department she pushed the school to develop and value. She was key to bringing Cornel West and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison to the university to teach. She left Princeton to become provost of Spelman College in 1990, only to return two years later as vice provost in charge of academic and budgetary planning.

That position, says publisher Matthews, was a significant benchmark, particularly at Princeton, regarded as a very tough institution for anyone. But black women there have to go through things white people can't even imagine." Simmons does not dispute this. "Princeton is a very conservative place," she says. "It has tested me in every conceivable way. It's a tough circle to break into, but once you're in, you're in!"

THE WINDING ROAD TO NORTHAMPTON

The Smith presidency is a position Simmons neither sought nor aspired to, particularly since she concedes, "Never in my lifetime did I expect a school like Smith to appoint a black president." But Simmons has since come to believe, as Smith's board of trustees did several months ago, that she is uniquely suited to the role.

In announcing her appointment, Smith couldn't have bought better P.R. The December 16 story was carried on the front page of the New York Times: From among 350 candidates, Simmons had been the unanimous choice to lead Smith into the 21st century. Joyce Moran, a Smith alumna who chaired the search committee (and who happens to be black), says that while the process took almost a year, ultimately, their choice could not have been clearer.

Moran's recounting of the presidential profile the committee constructed fits Simmons dead-on.

"We were looking for a scholar, an intellectual leader for the community, Moran recounts. "Someone who valued teaching, [who had] good management skills; someone with fund-raising experience and public relations savvy; someone who would take an active role in the life of the college, who was warm, eloquent and who had a great deal of stamina; someone who could be particularly eloquent about the value of women's education."

Having solicited candidates from college presidents and administrators, foundation directors and alumnae, "Simmons' name appeared from every source," says Moran, who is also vice chair of Smith's board of trustees. "We heard over and over again that when someone wanted something done, she was the person they got involved."

Such accolades made Moran, the Chicago-based assistant general counsel of Sears, Roebuck and Co., quite eager to meet Simmons. But the road to that meeting was long and winding. "I made many a phone call to get to her, to talk to her, to get her to talk to us, Moran recalls. "She was not at all eager to be a part of the search."

Truer words were never spoken. "It was a slow and agonizing dance," Simmons admits. "They had to bring me along to the point of believing I could move from worker bee to leader of this institution." In fact, they had to make her believe they were sincere in their consideration of her at all.

This was not the first time Simmons had been contacted by a college's presidential search committee. In fact, she had a form letter that she frequently asked her assistant to send out. In essence, it said, "Thanks, but no thanks." She would take no part in a sham, she says, adding, "Ninety-nine percent were clearly searches that wanted to appear that they were considering a minority, but that would never appoint a minority president."

There are two major hurdles facing African Americans in a bid for such a position, and these are particularly daunting at institutions such as Smith. The first is demonstration of academic excellence, an assessment process that typically involves all sorts of subjective factors. "The second--and this is the biggie," says Simmons, "is, `Will our alumnae support you, and will they continue to send money to the college?' The big fear--the one that no one talks about--is that those checks will stop coming."

It was in broaching that fear that Simmons recalls first "bonding" with Smith College. "I asked [the search committed] if they were concerned that alums would walk away with their money. The answer was, `There may be some, but if that's how they feel, we're prepared to do without their financial support.' I was floored."

So was the committee. Says Moran: "I came out of our first meeting saying, our questions aren't hard enough for her. She understood all the issues in a very clear way. She'd already thought about all this. She'd done it."

While those who'd met her may have been sure, they were less certain of how the rest of the community would respond. Simmons, too, had her doubts. "When I accepted their offer, I asked the committee, `Are you ready for this,' meaning not just the first black woman president, but for a woman who is really black--unselfconsciously, unapologetically black?"

Simmons got her response at the all-college meeting at which she was introduced to the campus community. As Simmons' name was called and she rose to approach the podium, the thundering ovation almost tipped her off course. And it went on, and on. What Moran refers to as "the love-fest" that began on that day, has manifested itself in more tangible ways as well. Within weeks of her appointment, Simmons received notice that two donations had been made in her honor. One was for $30,000, the other for $10,000. She has also become sought after by corporate boards. In June, she joined the board of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.

But as Simmons enters what will probably be a 10-year term (as the two previous presidents have served), she is prepared for the skeptics. "Certainly there will be people who wonder if Smith simply set out to appoint a minority, to make some sort of political statement," she says. "There will be people who think, well, there have to be several white women out there who are better qualified. There will be people who cannot conceive of the fact that Smith chose the person who fit what they were seeking, and she just happened to be black. I can't worry about those people. I'm peaceful with myself and what I offer."

Johnnetta Cole, who lured Simmons to Spelman shortly after her own historic presidential appointment there, says that whatever the sideline reaction, no one is better suited to lead Smith today. "Higher education is struggling in a time when resources are scarce and criticism is in abundance," notes Cole. "These are times when you need an extremely resourceful and seasoned leader. Ruth Simmons is both. Smith should be congratulated for having captured the best."