Thursday, 4:30 PM
Source: Harvard will name its first female president
(AP Photo/Harvard University, Tony Rinaldo)
Drew Gilpin Faust is a historian and currently Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
By Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff
Harvard University's main governing board has chosen historian Drew Gilpin Faust as the university's next president, a person close to the search process said today.
If the selection is approved by an elected group of alumni, Faust, the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, will become the first woman to lead Harvard.
The Corporation, as the governing board is known, will present its recommendation Sunday to the Overseers, an oversight board of about 30 alumni, the Globe reported today.
The Overseers, who must approve the choice, wield far less power than the Corporation and are considered all but certain to approve the recommendation, as they have done in the past.
Faust, the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, has been the front-runner over the past week, and several people close to the search said they were unaware of any other candidates being considered in the final stages of deliberation.
Many people on campus believe that Faust would be a very different presence than former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers. She is known as a calm consensus-builder and a devoted scholar, while Summers was famous for a confrontational style and had left academia for government before taking the helm of Harvard.
Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute since 2001, has never run a major institution, and she did not attend Harvard, something the university usually prefers.
She is widely admired for her solid judgment and people skills, as well as her scholarly work on the Civil War and the American South. But some people on campus believe that she lacks the vision and experience for the job.
Born and raised in Virginia, she earned a bachelor's degree in history from Bryn Mawr College and a master's and doctorate in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. She taught history at Penn for 25 years and is the author of several history books.
Radcliffe, the smallest of Harvard's 10 academic units, has been her biggest management challenge. The former women's college has no students or full-time faculty.
But Faust won praise for transforming the college into a thriving think tank and eradicating an annual deficit of more than $3 million. She also laid off a quarter of the staff and transferred programs to other institutions without uproar. Today, Radcliffe houses a women's history library and hosts 50 research fellows a year.
She is married to medical historian Charles Rosenberg, a Harvard professor, and has two daughters.
A final approval Sunday would end nearly a year of work to find a replacement for Summers, who announced Feb. 21, 2006, that he would step down because of his repeated battles with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Former president Derek Bok has served as the interim leader since July 1.
Summers's comments two years ago suggesting that women have less "intrinsic aptitude" for science than men have made some alumni eager for a female president.
However, choosing a woman was not considered a major priority for the search, several sources have said.
Some members of the search committee preferred to name a scientist, because the university is undertaking a historic expansion of its campus in Allston, with a heavy emphasis on science, and because science is seen by many as the most important frontier of human knowledge today.
Two other insiders, Elena Kagan, the law school dean, and Steven E. Hyman, the provost, were on the short list last month.
Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.
