The ascent of Drew Gilpin Faust to the presidency of Harvard University culminates the rapid climb of someone who had no ties to the institution when she arrived six years ago. Ms. Faust is founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is the only one of the 10 members of the Council of Deans who represents an academic department without a full-time student body or faculty.
It is highly unusual for Harvard to choose such an “outsider.” She is the first Harvard president since 1672 who doesn’t hold a degree from the institution. In demonstration of how quickly Harvard has changed, when she was appointed, she was the only woman among the deans.
Many who know her had wondered if she would ever leave her previous home, the University of Pennsylvania, where she taught history for more than 25 years. She earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. from Penn in American civilization. Harvard had asked her to join its faculty, as did the Johns Hopkins University and Yale University. But it wasn’t until Neil L. Rudenstine, then Harvard’s president, offered her the job at the Radcliffe Institute that she packed her bags. She said at the time that shifting into academic administration “has been a move I’ve resisted for a long time, and one I didn’t think I ever wanted to make.”
Since then, her skills as an administrator have received wide notice. According to news reports, for example, she was widely considered to be a candidate for the presidency of the University of Chicago during its search, which concluded last March.
“She could have been president of any number of institutions by now,” said Lynn Hunt, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles, who worked with Ms. Faust for 11 years at Penn. “She decided not to do that because she thought it was better to be at a place she knew.”
Ms. Faust was Annenberg professor of history at Penn for her last 12 years there. She was also director of women’s studies from 1996 to 2000. She is an expert in Civil War history, and has specialized in writing humanist studies of the South. Her most recent book is Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). She also wrote four other published books, including a biography of a plantation owner and a study of the dilemmas faced by intellectuals in the slave-holding era. She has a sixth book, “This Republic of Suffering,” scheduled for publication in 2008.
Ms. Faust is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Society of American Historians. She is a trustee of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and Bryn Mawr College, where she earned her undergraduate degree in 1968.
When she arrived at Harvard, in 2001, she faced the task of defining what the Radcliffe Institute would become. The institute had been created when Harvard merged with Radcliffe College in 1999. Radcliffe had been established in 1894 to give women the opportunity to earn a Harvard education, and Harvard professors taught women there until 1947, when classes at Harvard became coeducational. Harvard assumed full responsibility for educating undergraduate women in 1977 (The Chronicle, April 30, 1999).
Ms. Faust helped to steer the institute to become a center for interdisciplinary study, with a focus on the study of women, gender, and society. The institute is best known for a fellows program, which annually brings 50 scholars to the campus. Ms. Faust has trimmed the administration and the budget and has attracted a number of new gifts.
While some at Harvard considered the mission of the institute to be too lightweight to warrant having its dean serve as an equal with the deans of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the School of Business, and others, Ms. Faust found herself a key figure in Harvard’s response to the controversy that, in part, led to the departure Lawrence H. Summers as president last year. After he was quoted as saying that women may not have excelled in science and mathematics because of innate differences between the genders, a firestorm rocked the campus. Mr. Summers asked Ms. Faust to serve on both of the committees he appointed to cool tempers and make recommendations about women in the faculty and women in science and engineering (The Chronicle, February 18, 2005).
Her friendliness, insight, and ability to build coalitions helped bring her to the attention of members of the Harvard Corporation, the body that last week asked her to become Harvard’s next president.
Ms. Faust is married to Charles S. Rosenberg, a professor of the history of science and the Ernest E. Monrad professor in the social sciences at Harvard. They have two daughters.
Background articles from The Chronicle:
Opinion:
