After 370 years, Harvard gets first female president
A quiet revolution has taken place amid the lawns and redbrick buildings of America's oldest university where officials at Harvard have chosen a woman to be their first president.
A year after Lawrence Summers, a former head of the US Treasury, stepped down against a backdrop of seething controversy, the 30-member board of overseers met to appoint Drew Faust. Dr Faust is dean of the university's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Harvard may be the wealthiest, and oldest, of the US universities - it was founded in 1636 - but in terms of promoting women to senior positions it has lagged behind many of its Ivy League rivals, three of which are led by women. The appointment of Dr Faust to be the university's 22nd president has drawn attention not just because of its historic nature but also because of the behaviour of her predecessor.
Mr Summers was all but forced out after claiming that natural ability may partly explain why women achieved such few senior roles in the world of science.
"The largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude," he said, in a speech at a private lunch.
His comments, made in January 2005, triggered a storm. In March that year the university's faculty of arts and sciences passed a vote of no confidence against him and from that point many people believed it was only a matter of time before Mr Summers left.
Ironically, Dr Faust was appointed by Mr Summers to head two committees looking at gender issues that were established in the wake of his comments.
As president of Harvard, Dr Faust, 59, a historian of the US Civil War, will oversee 11 schools and colleges with 24,000 employees and a budget of $3bn (£1.5bn), and an endowment worth 10 times as much.
"She will need to scale up, and she's shown all the qualities that suggest she'll do that superbly," Amy Gutmann, the president of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, another member of the Ivy League, told the Associated Press. "I think she's an absolutely outstanding choice. It's a challenging job that needs a leader with a vision who can also get people to follow her, and I think she's that kind of leader."
Carol Christ, the president of the Massachusetts-based Smith College, which only accepts women at undergraduate level, said: "It's a little like having a woman president of the United States. It's a public symbol of the progress women have made in being seen as equal candidates for the highest leadership positions."
The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper that broke the news of Dr Faust's appointment, wrote: "The new president will have to build consensus while making decisions bound to alienate, lead a 17th-century institution facing 21st-century problems, and respect Harvard's traditions while ... making bold changes for the future. Faust is a woman in a man's world - both as a historian of the Civil War South and now as the lone woman in a succession of 27 men.
"She is a woman who makes her living studying the past but who now must look to the future."
Another contender, Thomas Cech, a biochemist at the University of Colorado and president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, had removed himself from consideration after deciding he wanted to devote his time to medical research.
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02-11-07, 05:09 PM
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