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Harvard nears 1st female president

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published February 10, 2007

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Harvard, the nation's oldest university, plans to name Drew Gilpin Faust, a historian of the Civil War South, to be the first female president in its 371-year history, university officials said Friday.

Her selection by a search committee, if ratified as expected by Harvard's Board of Overseers on Sunday, would make Harvard the fourth Ivy League university to choose a woman. It comes two years after then university president, Lawrence Summers, set off a storm by suggesting that a lack of intrinsic aptitude could help explain why fewer women than men reach the highest ranks of science and math in universities.

Some Harvard professors, particularly women, greeted the decision with euphoria. "Harvard's waited a long time - since 1636," said Patricia Albjerg Graham, an emeritus professor of the history of education at Harvard, recalling that when she first came to the university as a postdoctoral fellow in 1972, she was not allowed to enter the main door of the faculty club or eat in the main dining room.

Mary Waters, the acting chair of the Harvard sociology department said: "It's been a lonely place for women, very lonely. There aren't many of us."

Faust, 59, the author of five books and a former professor of history and women's studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is currently the dean of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, the smallest of Harvard's 12 schools. It is the remaining remnant of Radcliffe College, once the women's college at Harvard. Much of the research sponsored by the institute emphasizes the study of women, gender and society. She is a native of Virginia.

Faust emerged in recent weeks as a finalist among the candidates being considered by the university's search committee, particularly after Thomas Cech, a biochemist who is the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Nobel Prize winner, took the unusual step of announcing publicly that he had withdrawn from the competition.

His withdrawal prompted some Harvard professors to raise last-minute concerns about Faust. While declining to speak on the record, they said they thought she lacked the toughness and vision to be a strong leader of an unruly and factionalized university and noted that the Radcliffe Institute, with about 80 staffers, is a tiny part of Harvard. Others wondered why it had taken a nearly yearlong search to choose someone who was already a Harvard dean.

"The real import of this choice is that it is a cautious pick, which seems targeted at healing the wounds of the Summers years and restoring Harvard's momentum as quickly as possible," said Richard Bradley, who wrote Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University.

Bradley said there were legitimate questions about Faust's qualifications, like her lack of experience running a large university.

Harvard has 12 schools and colleges with an annual budget of $3-billion and an endowment of nearly $30-billion.

A university spokesman would not comment. Faust also declined to comment.

Faculty members and officials familiar with the search said that Faust's leadership style - her collaborative approach and considerable people skills - would be vital for soothing a campus ripped apart by the battles over Summers, whom many accused of having an abrasive, confrontational style.

"She combines outstanding scholarship with an uncanny ability to administer both well and with a heart," said Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and former president of the University of Pennsylvania.

Fast Facts:

Drew Gilpin Faust

Age: 59

Home: Cambridge, Mass.

Family: married to Charles Rosenberg, Monrad professor of social sciences at Harvard University; two daughters.

Occupation: dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard since 2001; Lincoln professor of history.

Experience: trustee, Bryn Mawr College, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the National Humanities Center; Civil War and American South historian; Annenberg professor of history and director of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania; author of five books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War.

Education: Bryn Mawr College, bachelor's degree, 1968; University of Pennsylvania, master's degree, 1971, and doctorate, 1975.

[Last modified February 10, 2007, 01:44:45]