Harvard's New Leader Rejects Labels, Saying She'll Be a President, Not a 'Woman President'
Chronicle of Higher Education 2/12/07
"I can imagine no higher calling and no more exciting adventure than to serve as president of Harvard," she said, while reading from prepared remarks at a news conference held here on Sunday.
Ms. Faust, 59, dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study since 2001 and a history professor (see article), was elected president on Sunday by Harvard's primary governing board, the six-member Harvard Corporation, and with the unanimous approval of the university's Board of Overseers, which has 29 members. She will take office July 1.
Since her presumed appointment was leaked to the news media late last week, Ms. Faust has been praised by members of both boards as well as faculty members for her reputation as a scholar, and as a well-liked consensus builder while she was running the Radcliffe Institute, among the smallest of Harvard's 11 schools.
However, the biggest buzz around Ms. Faust has been about what she is not: a man, the recipient of a Harvard degree, and anything like Lawrence H. Summers, the university's former president who announced last February that he would resign.
Ms. Faust is the first female president in Harvard's 371-year history and only the second of 28 presidents without a Harvard degree to lead the university. And her genial management approach and relatively low profile are in stark contrast to the credentials of Mr. Summers, a former U.S. secretary of the treasury who brought a well-established reputation of brash brilliance to the university when he was hired in 2001.
During Sunday's news conference, Ms. Faust pushed back against labels when she said, "I'm not the woman president of Harvard. I'm the president of Harvard," provoking a round of applause. But she acknowledged the "tremendous symbolic importance" of having a woman at Harvard's helm, telling reporters that in the last four days she had been inundated with e-mail messages, stopped on the street, and cheered on an airplane, often being told she was an inspiration to women.
"In academe there's no greater symbol than president of Harvard," said Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was the first to criticize Mr. Summers for comments he made in 2005 about the intrinsic abilities of women in mathematics and science. "It sends a very powerful message."
Trend Setter
While Ms. Faust's selection may be viewed by some as a response to the failures of Mr. Summers's five-year presidency, she also represents a growing trend in higher education for both female presidents and leaders who come from inside the institutions that hire them. A new study by the American Council on Education found that women account for 23 percent of college presidents, up from 9 percent two decades ago (see article). With Ms. Faust's appointment, women will now lead four of the eight universities of the Ivy League.
John Maguire, chairman of Maguire Associates, an educational-consulting firm in Bedford, Mass., which conducted a presidential survey for The Chronicle in 2005, said there has been a similar gain in the number of college presidents hired from inside institutions in recent years, with that category now making up about 19 percent of college leaders. Mr. Maguire predicts that in 10 years, women and insiders will both account for 40 percent of college presidencies.
A president who comes from outside a university has "the deck stacked against" him or her, Mr. Maguire said. "You don't know the place." Furthermore, he said, the attraction of hiring a luminary with little experience as a university administrator, such as Mr. Summers, has diminished as presidents have increasingly focused on budgets and fund raising.
"Today's president is an administrator," Mr. Maguire said.
Ms. Faust's administrative skills were praised by members of the university's two governing boards.
"I'm particularly in awe of her ability to bring people together, to set shared goals and to work to achieve those goals," Susan L. Graham, chairwoman of the Board of Overseers, said at the news conference.
But some faculty members wondered privately whether Ms. Faust's experience running the Radcliffe Institute, with a staff of about 80 and an annual budget of $17-million, has adequately prepared her to lead an institution with 25,000 employees and an annual budget of approximately $3-billion. Furthermore, Ms. Faust faces major challenges as president, such as filling four dean vacancies, steering the university's 130-acre expansion into Boston's Allston neighborhood, and navigating turf battles between faculty members over universitywide efforts to advance scientific goals.
Derek C. Bok, the former Harvard president who is now serving as interim president, said at the news conference that Ms. Faust was the right person for the job, in part because of her "understanding of academic life" and her ability to encourage people at an "institution where you don't order people around and expect to get much done."
Soft Touch?
Some of Ms. Faust's longtime colleagues said that all the talk of her consensus-building approach to leadership underplays her skills.
Bruce H. Mann, a professor at Harvard Law School who worked with Ms. Faust during her time at the University of Pennsylvania and has known her for 20 years, said that although Ms. Faust knows how to lead through encouragement, she can also make tough choices. For example, he cites the major cuts, including staff positions, she made when she arrived at a budget-strapped Radcliffe Institute in 2001.
"The only soft thing about Drew is that she's soft-spoken," Mr. Mann said. "She is a very strong personality."
Ms. Faust was all smiles at her public debut on Sunday, although she paused once while delivering her prepared speech, her voice catching with emotion. University officials appeared cheerful as well.
Ms. Faust was chosen by a search committee of the six members of the Harvard Corporation and three members of the overseers' board. At 11:30 a.m. on Sunday the full overseers' board met and unanimously ratified her selection.
After that vote, at 4 p.m., Ms. Faust was joined in the short stroll from Harvard's Loeb House, where the meeting had been held, to the news conference at the Barker Center led by James R. Houghton, chairman of the Harvard Corporation, who also led the search committee.
"We got the best candidate," Mr. Houghton said to reporters on the walk, as news photographers buzzed around Ms. Faust. "The fact that we got a woman is great."
Ms. Faust, asked what she had planned for Monday, told reporters that in addition to breakfast with Mr. Houghton and a later meeting with Mr. Bok, she would teach her Monday class, a 3 p.m. seminar on the Civil War and Reconstruction era.