Harvard University named Drew Gilpin Faust its 28th president Sunday. Faust, a Civil War historian and current dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is the first woman to hold the post.
The announcement followed Faust's unanimous confirmation by Harvard's alumni Board of Overseers at a special meeting Sunday. Word of the impending appointment had been circulating for days, and the university's student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, broke news of the appointment late Thursday night.
Faust is an accomplished historian who has served as the dean of the Radcliffe Institute since 2001. The Radcliffe Institute is a research institute with a focus on gender and women's studies that is the smallest of Harvard's 12 schools.
In a statement yesterday, Faust said she is honored by the appointment and stressed the importance of collaboration and breaking down barriers.
James Houghton, the member of the Harvard Corporation who chaired the search committee, called Faust "an inspiring and accomplished institutional leader, a superb scholar, an outstanding teacher and a wonderful human being" in an e-mail sent to members of the Harvard community Sunday afternoon.
Early in the search process, President Ruth Simmons' name was linked to the position. She never emerged as a serious candidate as the search progressed, though her name was reported to have been on a list of 30 candidates submitted by Harvard's search committee to the Board of Overseers. She explicitly disavowed any interest in the job in a statement last month.
Simmons was traveling over the weekend and could not be reached for comment.
Faust succeeds Lawrence Summers, a former secretary of the treasury, who resigned the post a year ago after just five years on the job. Summers' administration was marked by controversy and ended abruptly amid intense faculty criticism focused on his brusque leadership style and comments he made suggesting that intrinsic differences between males and females could contribute to the under-representation of women in the sciences.
Harvard senior Will Marra, who until recently led the Crimson's coverage of the search as the newspaper's president, said the lack of interest from high-profile institutional leaders like Simmons and other more seriously considered candidates may indicate that Harvard's presidency is not the "plum job" it was once considered - perhaps a consequence of the tumult that marked Summers' administration.
Simmons' denial was accompanied by similar statements from Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman and University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann - the two other women currently presiding over Ivy League universities - and leaders at Stanford and Cambridge universities, among others. Reports had identified Thomas Cech, a Nobel-prize winning scientist and president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, as a serious contender, but he too withdrew himself from consideration in recent weeks.
Harvard's provost, Steven Hyman, and law school dean Elena Kagan had also been considered candidates.
Despite lacking the high-level administrative experience of other candidates - the Radcliffe Institute accounts for just $16 million of the roughly $3 billion annual budget she will now oversee as president - Faust has a reputation for being an effective leader and working well with other faculty members, Marra said.
Professor of History Omer Bartov, who worked with Faust as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute during the 2002-2003 academic year, wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that the announcement was "delightful" and that he is confident that she will be "an excellent president."
In her prepared remarks for a press conference yesterday afternoon, Faust alluded only indirectly to her status as the first woman to lead Harvard in its 371-year history. "I hope that my own appointment can be one symbol of an opening of opportunities that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago," she said.
Asked at the press conference about the milestone, Faust acknowledged the "tremendous significance" of her appointment but indicated she would not be defined by her gender. "I'm not the woman president of Harvard. I'm the president of Harvard," she said, according to a report posted on the Crimson's Web site.
Faust will take office on July 1, exactly one year after Summers' departure. The job has been held on an interim basis this year by Derek Bok, a former Harvard president who left the post in 1991.
