POLITICS OR PROGRESS


This past Sunday, students and professors gathered just beyond the stone covered archway at the Johnston Gate, along the icy covered path that fans itself out onto Harvard Yard. The modest crowd came together in support for the first woman president of Harvard University, Professor and Historian Drew Gilpin Faust.

Faust, 59, who becomes the twenty-eighth president of what the New York Time’s called on September 27, “The World’s most prestigious university,” faces the major task of not just reinventing the image of Harvard’s chief-executive-officer, but reinventing the overall university, after Harvard slipped into second place behind Princeton this past year in national college rankings.

“I’m not the woman president of Harvard,” Faust said in a press conference following the announcement by Harvard’s Board of Overseers. “I’m the president of Harvard.”

Faust, who will be raised to her new post on July 1, takes charge amidst the lingering public relations fiasco that Lawrence Summers, Faust’s predecessor, created after he made remarks that women lacked the biological faculties necessary to excel in mathematics and the sciences. Summer’s comments, which he made in January, 2005, stayed with him until his resignation this past summer. several key figures at Harvard site his remarks as the source of his demise.

Part of Summers’ cleanup campaign following his statement was the appointment of Faust, who has been Dean of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard since 2001, to a special committee intended to increase intellectual pursuits by women at the 371-year-old university founded originally as a seminary for men.

Faust, who was the first dean of the Radcliffe Institute since Harvard observed the college in 1999, helped reform the institute from a college in disrepair to a leading center for scholarship and research, dedicated to its mission of addressing the serious gender issues in modern society. Radcliffe was originally founded as The Women’s College in the shadow of Harvard.

Drew, who recalled her mother telling her as a girl that she better get used to living in a man’s world, was humbled in knowing she was an inspiration for women everywhere, what some might call a living expression of Radcliffe’s mission. However, she continues to draw attention away from the gender issue, and on the pressing needs Harvard faces. She has already announced her commitment to the sciences, even before the announcement of her new post was made official.

It’s safe to say that the Harvard Corporation, which is the official board comprised of the board members who make their recommendation to the Harvard Board of Overseers, made of alumni, seeks to enhance its scientific contribution. Faust’s appointment comes two weeks after front runner Thomas Cech, President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Nobel Laureate in chemistry, removed his name from the selection committee.

Faust has already announced her commitment to improving the scientific community at Harvard while dean of Radcliffe. Although Faust’s expertise lies as a historian on the Civil War and the American South. Far from the sciences, Faust’s own scholarship might help guide the un Faust, while at the University of Pennsylvania, where she taught for twenty-five years, published a study entitled Mothers of Invention, which looked at how white southern women after the Civil War had to reinvent themselves in a new economy, finding themselves learning the labors of domestic caregiving after their slave servants were liberated. The book received great acclaim by the National Historical Society.

Faust, like her subjects of study, finds herself in good company. Now that she becomes Harvard’s president, she is one of four women who hold such a distinguished position amongst the eight ivy league schools in America; the list including Brown, Princeton and Faust’s own almamater, Pennsylvania. Penn. President, Amy Gutman, was a front runner against Summers in 2001, against Summers who had high publicity after serving as the Secretary of the Treasury during Clinton’s last year and a half in office.

Gutman, who knew Faust from Penn., told the press that she never could have dreamed of their successes years ago.

What weighs on Faust’s success is not just her ability to disprove nay sayers that argue she was a political pawn in light of Summers comments on gender bias--Harvard’s student publication, The Crimson, was already critical on this rumor on the eve of Faust’s appointment.

What barrier Faust also faces--perhaps greater than the gender card--is making progress amongst the politics of America’s oldest corporation. On another point of interest, Faust is the first president of Harvard in 335 years who holds no degree from the institution. Harvard’s first school master, Nathaniel Eaton, and the first two presidents who followed, received their education in England, Harvard graduating a fraction of the number of students at Oxford or Cambridge between its first freshman class of 1636 and 1672, when Harvard’s first alum finally took charge of the school. The college was more concerned in those days puritan ministers rather than presidents of higher education, during a time when the Massachusetts Bay was comprised of English immigrants who could still feel the sway of the sea beneath their step. They were not just educating Harvard’s first class. They were educating the first generation of colonial Americans.
Having to invent America’s Academy of higher education, Harvard is known for conducting business in one way, the Harvard way. It is a way of proceeding that Faust has had to learn since taking the title of Radcliffe Dean six years ago. For some, the question will not be how long Faust can change the letterhead from Chairman of the Harvard Corporation to Chairwoman, but how soon she can learn all the names and faces of Harvard’s prestigious alumni base who help endow the funds necessary to sustain Harvard’s 3 billion dollar annual budget. However, Daniel Bok, Harvard’s twenty-fifth president and the serving interim president during the search process, told the press that Faust knows Harvard, and is confident of her success.
iversity as it tries to reclaim is status as America’s research university.

In 1640, following allegations of misconduct, Harvard’s first school master was forced to resign from his post. Tensions were also reported between Schoolmast Eaton and, then, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop, over claims that Eaton supported the theological view known as antinominism. This belief ascribed that moral law was relative and changing, rather than a fixed unchanging biological law, which was a major belief of the Puritans. Eaton eventually had to flee Massachusetts and moved to Virginia. His view that moral laws are in flux, rather than biological or natural law, casts an interesting light amidst the comments made by former President Summers. And it raises the question whether or not whispers are carrying through the halls at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, that if Harvard could finally accept a woman president, is the rest of America ready to accept a woman president? For the academy-at-large, that collection of intellectual minds in American society, Faust offers great hope for the future.


RELATED LINKS:

"HARVARD SAID TO MAKE PICK..."--THE BOSTON GLOBE ON-LINE

THE CRIMSON's continued coverage, Harvard's daily newspaper


Harvard University

The radcliffe Institute

I find it interesting that during the Super bowl the announcers put in a plug for watching the commercials on-line after the game at CBS Sportsline. Between that and one of the better half-time shows I've seen in many years, Prince prooving that he still is a master showman, I have come to wonder if anyone actually watches the Super Bowl for the football.