RUTH J. SIMMONS

The committee's work is not about whether or how we should pay reparations. That was never the intent nor will the payment of reparations be the outcome. This is an effort designed to involve the campus community in a discovery of the meaning of our past.

There is strong mentoring of women in the academy. Corporations appear more willing to resist affirmative action to advance women, and boards and shareholders are more tolerant of this approach.

I'm prepared to fight as hard as I can against unions entering the University on behalf of our students.

It's very important in a leadership role not to place your ego at the foreground and not to judge everything in relationship to how your ego is fed.

There's nothing worse than a leader who lacks ambition.

Probably the first time I was a boss was when I was associate dean of the graduate school at the University of Southern California. I was in my early 30s.

If I can give a very substantial injection of humanistic thinking into corporations, boy, that would change things a lot.

I often say that shareholders should feel very responsible for how responsive corporations are to the public trust.

I'm the youngest of 12 children. And although I was the youngest, I tried to organize things in my family. When there were disputes, I tried to mediate.

This democracy is shaped by equality of opportunity.

It really pains me greatly to hear from graduate students that graduate education is a lower priority here.

Governments have a legitimate concern with slowing population growth. But often this has been attempted with little concern for the individuals most affected.

When ownership is local and national, and various stakeholders work together, program innovations have a greater chance to take root and survive.

We felt that the Gates Foundation looked at our track record and our publications and decided that "this is persuasive; this needs to be done. Let's see what they can do."

International "experts" from technical assistance agencies or universities can make important contributions, but they certainly don't have all the answers. When ownership is local and national, and various stakeholders work together, program innovations have a greater chance to take root and survive.

I came to understand the value of education, not just to enable me to make a good living, but to enable me to make a worthwhile life.

If you want to scale-up, the first thing you have to do is to expand your own team.

My colleagues from the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education are working on participatory public health initiatives in Michigan, and there is much that we can learn from each other. In fact it is essential that we strengthen efforts to learn from each other, and stop considering public health in the third world and in the U.S. as separate intellectual and practical endeavors.

Our practical purpose is to facilitate expansion of service innovations on a larger scale to improve access to, and the quality of reproductive health care. We are very grateful to have received support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to continue our work.

One of the things we have learned in the first year is that if you want to scale-up, the first thing you have to do is to expand your own team.

Bureaucratic systems are not set up to be what we refer to as human service organizations. They were established to collect revenue and maintain law and order and they used a law and order approach in providing family planning services.

In the late 60s, 70s and possibly early 80s, social scientists were interested in researching the diffusion of innovation and studying the link between applied research and policy and program development. Recently there has been less interest in these issues and we feel that this interest must be rekindled.

Major changes become possible if you work in a participatory manner, listen to local people, diagnose what the problems are, provide training and identify where there are opportunities for mobilizing local resources to take action.

We wanted to see how access to care can be expanded and service quality can be improved when one uses a participatory approach to program development. We showed that major changes become possible if you work in a participatory manner, listen to local people, diagnose what the problems are, provide training and identify where there are opportunities for mobilizing local resources to take action. In time leaders from other municipalities expressed interest in replication and the project succeeded in expanding innovations to three other areas.

Strategies for research and policy development must simultaneously address people's needs, the capacity of programs to provide good quality of care, and the range of technological options available.