A student at Brown University assesses the presidency of Ruth Simmons.
Simmons took a voluntary pay cut from Brown of about $100,000, but that turned out to be a symbolic gesture when she stepped down from her $323,000-a-year gig on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs with $5.7 million in company stock.
Her resignation from Goldman, though, came only after she had tied Brown to the billions in bailout-backed executive bonuses she approved as a member of Goldman’s compensation committee, drawing the ire of the national media and dragging the University into the recession’s starkest example of tone-deaf corporate greed.