Some say move may spur more gender diversity
By Sharon Jayson and Mary Beth Marklein
USA TODAY
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Harvard University broke with some hallowed traditions on Sunday in choosing a woman and a non-alumnus — Drew Gilpin Faust — as its 28th president, effective July 1.
“I’m not the woman president of Harvard. I’m the president of Harvard,” Faust, 59, said from a podium in an oak-paneled room, just below a bust of the university’s namesake, John Harvard.
“Young women have come up to me and said, ‘This is really an inspiration.’ So, I think it would be wrong not to acknowledge that this has tremendous symbolic importance,” she said.
James Houghton, chairman of the presidential search committee called it a “historic day” for the 371-year-old institution, the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university.
Harvard is the fourth of eight Ivy League campuses with a woman at the helm, a move that may spur more gender diversity in the top ranks of academe, suggests David Ward, president of the American Council on Education (ACE).
“A half is a half,” Ward says. “Everybody will say these are among the best universities and their management is 50-50. These have a more powerful effect on public perception.”
A new ACE study of 2,148 college and university presidents found that the percentage who are women more than doubled in 20 years, from 9.5% in 1986 to 23% in 2006, but the progress has slowed in recent years.
In higher education overall, 58% of undergraduates were women, according to an ACE study last year based on data from 2003 to 2004.
Since 2001, Faust has been dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a research body at the university that studies women, gender and society.
“Drew Faust has all the qualities Harvard needs: a sharp analytic mind, a broad university-wide perspective, outstanding people skills and a deft administrative style that enables her to get things done,” says Judith Singer, professor of education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “She’s also not afraid to take a stand and make tough decisions.”
Most of Faust’s career was spent at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her graduate degrees and taught in the history department. The Virginia native is an expert on the Civil War and the South. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
Her promotion comes a year after Lawrence Summers resigned the Harvard presidency amid faculty discontent. Summers’ troubles reached a boiling point in January 2005 after he suggested that “intrinsic aptitude” could explain why fewer women than men reach the highest ranks of science and math in universities.
In the wake of the controversy, Summers created two committees designed to improve the university’s recruitment, retention and promotion of women in those fields. Summers chose Faust to head those panels.
Former Harvard president Derek Bok has served as interim president.
Faust is married to Charles Rosenberg, a Harvard professor of social sciences. The couple’s daughter, Jessica Rosenberg, earned her degree from Harvard in 2004 and is a fact-checker at The New Yorker magazine. Leah Rosenberg, Faust’s stepdaughter and a scholar in Caribbean literature, is an assistant professor at the University of Florida at Gainesville.
Nancy Hopkins, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology biology professor, says the Faust appointment has significance for students, faculty and young women overall. “Students, because she will emphasize rigorous education. Faculty, because she is a great scholar, and perhaps young women in both categories, who will see that barriers are falling and who will aim higher as a result.”
Faust’s appointment comes on the heels of Wednesday’s announcement of Harvard’s first major curriculum overhaul in 30 years.
Freshman Jason Wong, 18, of San Francisco says the naming of a new president isn’t something that “dominates” students’ lives. But he says they are relieved to have the lengthy process behind them. “A lot of my friends are very pleased, especially my female friends, that she’s a woman,” he says. “I think all of us are really glad that we’ll finally have a president.”
