Drew Gilpin Faust (center) appeared three years ago with Shirley Tilghman and Christina Paxson, who were presidents of Princeton and Brown Universities, respectively, at a discussion among female leaders of major institutions. Faust has endorsed her replacement at Harvard, Lawrence Bacow, who will take the helm this summer.Mike Cohea, Brown University
Harvard University’s announcement on Sunday that Lawrence S. Bacow would be its new president has triggered inevitable questions about the university’s choice of a leader who in many ways represents the status quo at the Ivy League institution.
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Drew Gilpin Faust (center) appeared three years ago with Shirley Tilghman and Christina Paxson, who were presidents of Princeton and Brown Universities, respectively, at a discussion among female leaders of major institutions. Faust has endorsed her replacement at Harvard, Lawrence Bacow, who will take the helm this summer.Mike Cohea, Brown University
Harvard University’s announcement on Sunday that Lawrence S. Bacow would be its new president has triggered inevitable questions about the university’s choice of a leader who in many ways represents the status quo at the Ivy League institution.
At a time when college campuses are a key part of the national conversation about gender, race, and the #MeToo movement, naming Bacow — a former leader of Tufts University — as Harvard’s next president plays into patterns of longstanding leadership inequities, both in American society as a whole and in higher education specifically.
One observation repeated on Twitter Monday was this by David McCabe at the news website Axios: Harvard, he said, has now had more presidents named Larry (three) than it has presidents who are women (one).
A Harvard Ph.D. student tweeted: “I really can’t stop laughing at the fact that this isn’t even Harvard’s first president who’s a white male economist named Larry.” She later clarified the intention of her Tweet:
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to be clear: none of my comments should be taken as a critique of Bacow. I am sure he has sound positions on many issues and will be a good steward and leader for Harvard.
my critique is of the process that judged yet another white male economist to be most-qualified to be pres. https://t.co/9Wx7DbBQ5I
The June departure of Drew Gilpin Faust will push Harvard out of a select group of Ivy League institutions — soon-to-be just Brown University, Cornell University, and the University of Pennsylvania — that provide some of the most highly visible examples of women in the president’s office. At all three of those institutions, their first permanent female leader was succeeded by another woman.
“It makes people nervous and disappointed when a woman loses that prominent position. They’re nervous that the progress that’s been made will disappear,” says Susan R. Madsen, a professor of organizational leadership at Utah Valley University whose research includes female leaders in higher education. “Without the continuation of leadership in that top post, it makes people feel like they’ve lost ground. There’s a sense of loss.”
Beyond the Ivy League as well, the record of back-to-back female leaders at top colleges is mixed, with institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, the University of Arizona, and the University of Virginia all hiring men as presidents when women stepped down.
Although Harvard’s status thrusts its choice for president — man or woman — into the national spotlight, Faust initially rejected the label of first female leader when she assumed the role in 2007.
“I’m not the woman president of Harvard,” Faust said at the time. “I’m the president of Harvard.” But she did acknowledge that in the days after her presidency was announced, she was overwhelmed with email messages and stopped on the street by people who wanted to tell her she was an inspiration to women.
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Eleven years later, Faust seems to have settled into accepting what her gender brings to the job. In an article published last week in The Harvard Crimson, Faust said she “wanted to be the president of Harvard, but I recognized that there was this kind of parallel track where I was being the woman president of Harvard in a way that mattered.”
How Bacow approaches the presidency will matter as well. Harvard’s presidential pick will, of course, be closely watched.
“Regardless of how you set up the standards of judgment about candidates, it’s inevitable that they’re going to be compared to your former president,” says Dennis M. Barden, a senior partner with Witt/Kieffer, an executive search firm.
Bacow, 66, is a veteran higher-education leader who was president of Tufts for a decade. He spent 24 years at MIT, where he was chair of the faculty and then chancellor. He is the Hauser leader-in-residence at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Center for Public Leadership.
Faust herself has given her stamp of approval, saying in Harvard’s announcement of Bacow that she “could not be happier contemplating Harvard in his hands.”
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Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.
Audrey Williams June is the news-data manager at The Chronicle. She explores and analyzes data sets, databases, and records to uncover higher-education trends, insights, and stories. Email her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @audreywjune.