Civic Activities
Simmons is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She has served as chair of the Council of Ivy Group Presidents and is an honorary fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge.
Simmons also serves on the boards of Texas Instruments and Goldman Sachs. She announced in 2007 that she would not seek re-election to the board of directors of Pfizer after serving on the board for 10 years.
On June 17, 2009, The White House announced that President Barack Obama had appointed Dr. Simmons to the President's Commission on White House Fellowships.
In February, 2010, Simmons received a BET Honors award for her service as president of Brown University. She accepted the Honor along with other nominees, including Sean Combs, Queen Latifah, and music legend Whitney Houston at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.
In 2010, she was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor for her many humanitarian efforts.
Read more about this topic: Ruth Simmons
Famous quotes containing the words civic and/or activities:
“It is hereby earnestly proposed that the USA would be much better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the City of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like any individual mental defective.”
—Westbrook Pegler (1894–1969)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)