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Harvard Names Faust to Be First Female President (Update3)

By Brian K. Sullivan and Matthew Keenan

Feb. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Harvard University named Drew Gilpin Faust its president, appointing the first woman to lead the oldest college in the U.S. as it tries to mend faculty-administration relations damaged under predecessor Lawrence Summers.

A panel of 29 alumni today ratified the Harvard ruling board's selection of Faust, a historian who is dean of the university's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Faust, 59, will become the Cambridge, Massachusetts, university's 28th president on July 1.

``This is a great day, and a historic day, for Harvard,' said James R. Houghton, the senior member of the ruling board, called the Harvard Corporation, in a statement. ``She combines a powerful, broad-ranging intellect with a demonstrated capacity for strong leadership and a talent for stimulating people to do their best work, both individually and together.'

The appointment at the 371-year-old university marks the first time that half of the eight Ivy League schools will be run by women. Faust's tasks will include reconciling an undergraduate faculty divided on Summers's tenure, replacing departing deans and overseeing the development of a new campus across the Charles River in Boston.

``The faculty and the university as a whole need to think of collaborative ways of working together,' Faust said at a news conference today. ``I feel tremendous positive energy.'

Faust's priority is filling deanships for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the medical school, the design school, and her own vacancy.

``If I can have the team in place when I start on July 1, that would be very helpful,' she said

Overseers

The alumni-elected board of overseers met for about two hours today, according to Paul Buttenwieser, a psychiatrist in Cambridge who is a member of the panel.

Frances Fergusson, former president of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and a member of the overseers and presidential search committee, said Faust addressed the 22 overseers present for about 45 minutes at a meeting at Loeb House on the Harvard campus.

Faust left the room and the board, after deliberating briefly, voted unanimously to make her president.

``We definitely had a toast,' Buttenwieser said after the meeting. ``What I can say is we chose a great new president for Harvard.'

The university's presidential search committee started seeking a replacement for the 52-year-old Summers last February, after he announced his plan to resign. Summers, a former U.S. Treasury Secretary, stepped down in June and was succeeded on an interim basis by Derek Bok, who first led Harvard from 1971 to 1991.

Candidates

The search committee was made up of six members of Harvard's ruling board and three alumni from the school's Board of Overseers. The group chose Faust from candidates such as Nobel Prize winner Thomas Cech, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Candidates reported by the student-run Crimson newspaper and the Boston Globe as being on the short list also included Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan, 46, and Provost Steven Hyman, 54. Cech withdrew from consideration on Jan. 31. Several of the reported candidates, including Alison Richard, vice chancellor of University of Cambridge in England, said they weren't interested in the job.

Student Advisers

The search committee formed a student advisory board for the first time to help with the process, Matthew Murray, who served on the student board, said in the university statement.

``I hear great things about Dean Faust,' Murray said.

The choice of Faust to lead Harvard might set an example at research universities nationwide, said Clair Van Ummersen, vice president of the American Council on Education's Center for Effective Leadership in Washington.

``This will begin to advance the research institutions in terms of the number of women presidents,' said Van Ummersen, 70, who was president of Cleveland State University from 1993 to 2001. ``There will be some national recognition of this.'

Women Leaders

Women make up 23 percent of college and university presidents across the U.S. and almost 14 percent of the presidents at research institutions similar to Harvard's size, according to a report on collegiate presidents that the council plans to release tomorrow. Females constitute a third of full- time faculty even as women earn more graduate degrees than men, the American Association of University Professors said in October.

Faust said she had two things to say about the precedent she's setting.

``I am not the woman president of Harvard,' she said at the press conference. ``I am the president of Harvard.'

Faust received a bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College, a women's school in suburban Philadelphia, and her master's and doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, where Amy Gutmann is one of three Ivy League presidents serving currently. Shirley Tilghman leads New Jersey's Princeton University and Ruth Simmons is president of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Faust will be the first leader without a Harvard degree from the university since Charles Chauncy, who served as the school's second president from 1654 to 1672.

Before joining the Radcliffe Institute in 2001, Faust was a professor of history for 25 years and director of the women's studies program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Five Books

She has written five books, including ``Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War' (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). The work won the Francis Parkman Prize in 1997 for the best book on U.S. history.

Faust serves as a trustee at Bryn Mawr, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York and the National Humanities Center, an institute for advanced study in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park.

Harvard President Neil Rudenstine appointed Faust the first dean of Radcliffe Institute, assigning her to transform what had been an independent women's college into a functioning part of the university.

Radcliffe is Harvard's smallest institute or school, with 85 employees and a 2005-06 budget of $16 million, less than 1 percent of the university's $3 billion budget. The institute hosts about 50 professionals and scholars each year for study and research in a variety of disciplines, with a commitment to issues of gender and society.

Rita Nakashima Brock, director of Radcliffe's fellows program from 1997 to 2001, said Faust isn't ``seduced by the Harvard status and she won't be awed by it' as president. As an outsider coming into Cambridge in 2001, Faust sized up the institute's potential and worked to integrate it into Harvard, Brock said.

Preparation

``She came into a very old institution that had all of these traditions and she had clearly scoped things out before she came in,' said Brock, 56, visiting scholar at the Starr King School for the Ministry at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. ``She came in with a vision of how she wanted the new institute to be and she just went right about implementing it.'

Paul LeClerc, 65, president of the New York Public Library, said Faust is well-prepared to make the jump from leading a smaller institute to the presidency of the entire university.

``There's no doubt whatsoever she's going to be a huge success,' said LeClerc, who serves with Faust on the Mellon foundation board. ``This is a person of immense capability and capacity, and I think she's just going to be perfect.'

Summers Tenure

The Harvard campus was roiled by comments Summers made at an economic conference in Cambridge in 2005, in which he suggested women lacked an aptitude for science. Those statements and a drive to centralize authority at the university to increase efficiency drew criticism from faculty used to Harvard's decentralized system of governance that largely leaves decision- making to the deans.

Summers quit as president after a series of battles with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which teaches most of the undergraduate courses. The professors approved a no-confidence vote on Summers in 2005 and were preparing a second ballot in 2006 when he resigned. Summers retained support from faculty at Harvard's graduate and professional schools, and he remains a professor at the university.

Harvard is in the midst of a curriculum review that might change undergraduate academic requirements for the first time since 1978. The reassessment began under Summers four years ago. A draft proposal in October called for students to study religion, among other subjects. The religion provision was dropped in a subsequent version in December.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is scheduled to discuss the report on Feb. 13.

`Notoriously Ungovernable'

Bruce Mann, 56, a professor at Harvard Law School, has known Faust for 20 years, since their days in the University of Pennsylvania's history department. Faust is well-suited to oversee the ``notoriously ungovernable' university, he said.

``She brings to it uncommon common sense, and exceptionally good judgment and a very calm, unflappable leadership style,' Mann said. ``She understands very clearly that you can get people to follow you a lot more effectively and farther if you persuade than if you drag them.'

Faust served on two task forces on the sciences and engineering that Summers created after the initial criticism of his remarks. She also sought to increase Radcliffe's influence in the sciences at the university.

Expansion

As president, she will oversee the biggest expansion in Harvard's history across the river in Boston's Allston neighborhood. The university plans to break ground this year on a science-research facility and an arts center as part of a proposed 250-acre (100-hectare) campus.

She said that the school had to work on breaking down barriers between humanities and the sciences, barriers that cause people on campus to identify themselves as being on one side or the other side of the Charles River

``I have many, many people to talk with and much more to learn,' she said. ``Today is about affirming the idea and ideals of the university.'

Faust will also be charged with filling top jobs such as her Radcliffe position and those of Medical School Dean Joseph Martin and Graduate School of Design Dean Alan Altshuler, who plans to return to teaching and research.

Harvard probably will see other leadership changes as well, said Richard Hunt, who served as university marshal, or protocol chief, from 1982 to 2002. Hunt, 80, said most presidents tend to make personnel changes, such as at the provost and vice president level, within a year of taking the job.

While Harvard had its second-best fund-raising year in fiscal 2006, bringing in $595 million, undergraduate alumni giving to the university hit a 17-year low.

Lost Donations

The school also lost donations, such as a $115 million pledge from Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison, who said through a company spokesman last year that he was withdrawing his gift because of turmoil caused by Summers's decision to resign.

Faust is married to Charles Rosenberg, professor of the history of science at Harvard. Her step-daughter, Leah Rosenberg, is an assistant professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Daughter Jessica Rosenberg, a former co-president of the Radcliffe Union of Students, is a fact checker for the New Yorker magazine.

Harvard's ruling board, officially known as the President and Fellows of Harvard College, includes the 76-year-old Bok; Houghton, 71, who is the senior member and chairman of Corning Inc.; James Rothenberg, 60, president and director of Capital Research & Management Co. in Los Angeles, and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, 68, who is director and chairman of the executive committee at Citigroup Inc.

The remaining members are Robert Reischauer, 66, president of the Urban Institute in Washington; Princeton University Professor Nannerl Keohane, 66, who previously served as president of Duke University and Wellesley College; and Patricia King, 64, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian K. Sullivan in Boston at bsullivan10@bloomberg.net ; Matthew Keenan in Boston at mkeenan6@bloomberg.net .