Harvard elected its first female president, Civil War historian Drew Gilpin Faust to replace the lovely Lawrence Summers, who pissed off a whole lot of people at Harvard — and not just because of his remarks that women don’t have what it takes to succeed in math and science.
Summers faced a revolt by faculty members after he suggested that intrinsic aptitude might explain why relatively fewer women reach top academic positions in math and science — comments for which he later apologized.
He was also embroiled in a public feud with the African-American Studies department that erupted shortly after he became president in 2001. The once-vaunted department saw an exodus of top faculty.
Faust is viewed as a consensus-builder, something Summers definitely was not.
The Harvard Crimson, a student newspaper, said in an editorial that Harvard was now at a cross-roads and managing much-needed reform will be among Faust’s foremost challenges.
“Harvard’s radically decentralized structure overly empowers its faculties and inhibits reform, encouraging wide disparities in funding among schools, and promoting internecine squabbling over major initiatives,” it said.
“Managing this entrenched academic sphere was the puzzle that cost Summers his job,” it added.
Faust will oversee 25,000 employees and a $3 billion budget, compared with a $16 million budget with 81 staff and fewer than 15 faculty members at Radcliffe, the smallest of Harvard’s schools and a former college for women.
Congratulations, Dr. Faust. And congratulations to Harvard.
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I think it’s a great thing, but – her name is Faust. Hee hee. Hee. Hope she doesn’t make any shady deals to increase that endowment!
ha! saw that today.
actually, just to make this more ironic – Drew Faust has written some great stuff in woman’s history.
Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Now, I’ve been defending Radcliffe (both the College and the Institute for Advanced Study) all weekend, but I have a little difficulty defending this particular appointment. Naming a woman with so few credentials (I’m familiar with her impressive academic career, but so far as I can tell it really only includes teaching and advising positions, along with being Dean of the Institute) just reeks of tokenism. I mean, compare her resume with past presidents- Summers (ugh): youngest tenured professor at Harvard, World Bank, secretary of the treasury, member of the national academy of the sciences; Rudenstein: dean of students, dean of the college and provost at Princeton, executive VP of the Mellon Foundation; even Derek Bok was dean of the law school before he assumed the position (the first time).
Now compare Faust’s resume (taught at Penn and Harvard, dean of the only tub at Harvard without students, educational advisory board of the Guggenheim Foundation) with just one other woman who was reportedly in the running. Elena Kagan: professor at U of Chicago and Harvard, Associate Counsel to Clinton and Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Counsel, currently dean of Harvard Law.
Now, I’m not a huge Kagan fan (given the way she buckled to Summers over military recruiting on campus), but she certainly looks more qualified for the job. Here’s my worry: the corporation wants Faust to fail. Then, they can claim a woman was never cut out for the job.
And look how well that worked out!
I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t think that having experience is the only qualification for the job. I think that probably, after the hugely divisive Summers administration, they’re looking for some particular qualities that are more important to them than administrative experience. Whether that’s the right or the wrong call, I don’t know.
I will say that I don’t envy Faust one itty bitty little bit. Being a university president seems to me like an entirely thankless job, and being president of Harvard seems like the most thankless job of all.
I don’t envy anyone the job, but I particularly don’t envy Faust. She already has critics (mostly Summers apologists) assuming that because she’s dubbed the “quiet administrator” she won’t have the strength to bring the university into its next phase (by occupying Allston). I’m just really worried they’re setting her up for failure. The graduate schools in particular are already pissed because the FAS faculty appeared to have so much sway in ousting Summers. Those who lauded Summers’ financial successes (I’m talking just the size of the endowment, his own pay raise notwithstanding) are no doubt nervous about a dean whose tub has the smallest endowment.
Of course, in keeping with its tradition of fine college journalism, the Crimson has a new opinion piece up: The Apotheosis of Dr. Faust. Some particular gems:
(Emphasis mine.)
I’m pretty pleased to see a Mawrtyr in charge of Harvard, myself. woo!
Those quotes from the Crimson are disgusting. She spoke at Bryn Mawr’s commencement six years ago, and her speech was considerably better than Summers’ public speaking engagements.
Faust may be quiet, but she’s also brilliant and tough. This is not tokenism. From a NYT article today:
I think she’ll do an excellent job. Just because she doesn’t have a stereotypically “masculine” leadership style doesn’t mean she can’t lead effectively.
Hey, maybe with a female president, Harvard will stop allowing rape on campus!
It hurts me not to make a Faust joke, but that will be my penance for the time I unwittingly made fun of zuzu’s last name ;)
oh p.s. defenestrated = trillian.
p.s. That Crimson op column is despicable, and moreover shows complete ignorance of Faust’s work. It’s funny, really – she writes about the Civil War! Her most recent book is about soldiers and death! What could be more traditional a topic? She’s pretty far from being a po-mo academic. (not that there’s anything wrong with that) Yes, she takes women’s history seriously. Yes, she is dean of the Radcliffe institute. That alone is not enough to draw conclusions about the way she thinks.
It’s ironic, too – the guy who wrote that is a history concentrator. I wonder if he thinks the faculty/TFs who grade him won’t see that? Such a poorly-reasoned, hateful column about a highly-respected historian certainly isn’t going to earn him any points with most of them.
I love this bit of the Crimson column:
Is the implication there that gender didn’t acquire meaning until people started challenging the dogma of traditional roles? And that before that, of course, everyone was just acting the way god intended, so it didn’t mean anything.
First of all, I don’t think they could’ve handled a non-internal-candidate. She was chair of the exploratory committee that resulted in the fallout from Summers’ comments on women and science, which put her at the forefront of Harvard politics. She oversaw Radcliffe’s transition from a defunct college to productive institute. She’s also a respected researcher and teacher (this shouldn’t be overlooked, because the folks she’ll be leading care). She’s totally grounded in Harvard’s system.
Harvard’s a university, not a corporation, or governmental organization. Academe has a very peculiar structure. Harvard, for all its prestige and money, is still a traditional university. She doesn’t need a laundry list of non-academic accomplishments. Frankly, her first job is to get the faculty to stop boiling long enough to get them on the next ship to the new Allston colony… I mean, campus. And to do that, the faculty is going to have to like her, and they’ll like her better if she talks like one of them.
As for the other candidates: maybe they just didn’t have great ideas for the University. A lot of this is image and PR, but there’s a chance that Faust actually wowed the Search Committee and Corporation with her intellect, insight, passion and gravitas. Maybe they see something in her; they grilled her for half a year. She wasn’t my favorite candidate, but I have some (possibly misplaced) faith in the judgment Search Committee (and the fact that half were highly accomplished women, two of whom were college/university presidents themselves).
Still and all: this IS going to be like watching an misogynistic trainwreck. Specifically one running across the Charles River.
Seriously. What krystyna said.
Update: today the Crimson ran a cartoon of “presidential neckware”- 2000 is a necktie, 2005 a noose, and 2007 a dog collar (with a Faust tag) and leash.
But she’s a total bitch! Get it? Bitch? Dude, it’s completely funny.
Well, at least we know who to turn to to continue the strip when the individual who does Mallard Fillmore dies.
Actually, the first thing it made me think of was Spinal Tap.
“Well, she should be made to smell the glove…”
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