Harvard's Historic Choice

Praised for her leadership of a small institute, new chief must prove she can tame a bigger beast

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Biography: Drew Gilpin Faust

Text: Saying no to Harvard

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By ROBIN WILSON

In the stratified world of higher education's most elite institutions, where professional jealousies abound, Drew Gilpin Faust appears to have achieved the seemingly impossible. She is a career academic who has risen to the top job at Harvard University while apparently making no enemies along the way.

"I truly have known her for 20 years, and I have yet to meet anyone who dislikes her," says Lynn Hunt, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Ms. Faust's finely tuned people skills — her willingness to listen and reach out to newcomers — have earned her the respect of her colleagues as well as of high-placed university officials in the three decades she has spent in higher education.

Her predecessor, Lawrence H. Summers, came to consider Ms. Faust a trusted counselor, not only on gender issues but also on other matters as he battled to regain respect from professors and retain the loyalty of the Harvard Corporation, the university's governing board.

Yet even as she advised him, Ms. Faust was careful to keep her distance, steering clear of the warring factions on Harvard's faculty and avoiding a label as one of Mr. Summers's supporters or detractors.

Some at the university see Ms. Faust's actions as having been calculated, moving her ever closer to the presidency at Harvard. But professors who know her insist she is genuine. "Becoming president of Harvard is not a dream for Drew," says Bruce H. Mann, a law professor at Harvard. "She's doing it because she cares about the university."

While Ms. Faust might seem an unusual choice for the job — she has no Harvard degree (the first Harvard president without one since 1672) and has spent only six years at the university, running the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, one of its smallest units — her colleagues say she is a natural. Interviews with two dozen professors and administrators, inside Harvard and out, portray Ms. Faust as an unflappable administrator and as a consensus builder with "uncommon common sense," as one professor puts it, who will care more about the success of the university than about making her own mark.

"She knows what universities are about," says William G. Bowen, a former president of Princeton University who is frequently consulted in high-level university searches. "She knows that you don't just order people around — you have to lead by persuasion."

Still, Ms. Faust will face stiff challenges. Foremost among them is persuading Harvard's scientists that she understands their work and knows how to guide an expansion of the scientific enterprise that is already under way at the university. It could be a difficult task for Ms. Faust, a lifelong historian, some observers say. She must also shepherd a continuing effort to reform Harvard's undergraduate curriculum.

And her fund-raising skills will surely be put to the test. At Radcliffe, Ms. Faust has raised more than $17-million to endow fellowships and professors' chairs. But that is only a pittance compared with the estimated $5-billion that Harvard is expected to set as the goal of its forthcoming capital campaign.

"Getting major donors to write $100-million-plus checks, that's what we need," says one professor, who asked not to be named. "What everyone around Cambridge is asking is, Will Drew Faust be able to do that?"

'I Just Came to Trust Her'

People who know Ms. Faust describe her foremost as a first-rate scholar. Her background as a historian is shared by only two of the 27 men who have led Harvard since it opened, in 1636. Her expertise is the American South. This semester she is teaching an undergraduate seminar on the Civil War.

Ms. Faust's colleagues say the questions she has explored through her scholarship will serve her well as Harvard's president. Her second book, a 1982 biography of a slaveholder (James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery,) is "a long meditation on authority and its power and abuse," says Linda K. Kerber, a professor of history at the University of Iowa who studied at Radcliffe in 2003. "In an odd way, by choosing this subject, she was thinking through a lot of big questions that will face her as a university president — equality and inequality, power and its uses, and what leadership requires: forgiveness, humanity, and a generosity of spirit."

Her academic work is highly respected, but those who know Ms. Faust say it would be a mistake to view her as a professor buried in her scholarship, detached from the rest of university life. In fact, the opposite is true.

"She is someone who is intrigued by institutions and understands how they operate," says Janice A. Radway, who directs the literature program at Duke University and has known Ms. Faust for 30 years, including the 11 they worked together at the University of Pennsylvania. "How people make the decisions they make, why they make the decisions they make, this is a function of her basic orientation to the world."

At Penn, Ms. Faust became intimately involved in the inner workings of the university, and its leaders frequently sought her advice. She was one of a half-dozen professors who met each Tuesday at 7 a.m. during the late 1980s and early 90s to talk informally with the provost about such topics as the expansion of the medical school, the reorganization of the library, and the place of ROTC on the campus. She also became a close friend and confidante of Sheldon Hackney, who led Penn from 1981 until 1993 and is now a professor of history there.

"University presidents have a hard time making new close friends because you have to be careful about what you say, and you can never be sure when people are talking to you because they might want something," says Mr. Hackney. "But she and her husband became good friends with my wife and me because I just came to trust her."

Mr. Hackney tried to persuade Ms. Faust to become dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn, but she turned him down, he says, telling him that she wasn't ready to leave her teaching or her scholarship.

She finally decided to accept an administrative position in 2000, but not at Penn. Neil L. Rudenstine, Harvard's president at the time, asked her to become founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute. By all accounts, she has transformed it from a sleepy institution without a clear mission into something special: a center for interdisciplinary study with a focus on the study of women and gender. The institute is best known for its fellows program, which brings 50 scholars to the campus each year.

As dean of science at Radcliffe, Barbara J. Grosz has seen Ms. Faust up close as she has made the institute a place where top-notch scientists want to study. Ms. Faust has accomplished that by doing what she has long done: listening to what people say they need.

While other scholars must commit to an entire year of study at Radcliffe, Ms. Faust was willing to allow scientists to spend just a semester there after they told her it was difficult for them to leave their laboratories for long periods of time. She has also given scientists extra money to travel back to their labs each month to check on their work while they study at Radcliffe. "She is wonderful at backing you up," says Ms. Grosz, a professor of computer science, "and helping you succeed in what you do."

But Radcliffe is small — only 87 employees, compared with Harvard's 24,000 — and it has no full-time faculty members or students. "Radcliffe is a pretty tiny fiefdom, and she's supposed to have done a really good job there," says Louis Menand, a professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard. "But Harvard is a much bigger monster."

Defining a Course

Other scholars say it is wrong to believe that Ms. Faust has been confined to Radcliffe during her six years at Harvard. "I don't think they understand that this may be a small-budget institution, but it put her right in the center of the action as a member of the Council of Deans and gave her an amazing ability to see what was working at Harvard and what wasn't," says Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a historian who is a university professor at Harvard and sits on the Faculty Council of the university's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

In fact, people outside Harvard have been eyeing Ms. Faust for leadership posts for quite some time. "She could have been president of any number of institutions by now," says Ms. Hunt, the UCLA historian.

Ms. Faust was widely considered to be a candidate for the presidency of the University of Chicago during its search, which concluded last March. Ms. Hunt says Ms. Faust turned down outside offers before accepting Harvard's because "she thought it was better to be at a place she knew."

Howard Gardner, a professor of education at Harvard, says Ms. Faust was chosen in part to help smooth over relations between the Harvard Corporation and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which he says was "estranged not only from President Summers but from the general mission of the corporation."

Ms. Faust, he says, is seen as someone "who is trusted by the arts and sciences, who certainly isn't opposed to the corporation's agenda, but can pursue it in a way that can bring people along rather than stiffen opposition." Her leadership style, he says, is also a plus. "She doesn't think she knows everything better than everybody else."

Some at Harvard wonder whether it has, in fact, long been Ms. Faust's mission to maneuver herself into the presidency.

"I think she's wanted this job ever since she came to Harvard," says a professor who asked to remain anonymous. "She hasn't necessarily campaigned for it, but she's positioned herself for it. I think she saw three or four years ago that Larry's days were numbered, and she was clever in being conciliatory and she got the respect of both sides."

But other professors say it is ridiculous to think that Ms. Faust plotted for the presidency.

"Each successive move has come as a surprise to her," says Mr. Mann, who along with his wife, Elizabeth Warren, another law professor at Harvard, has a standing dinner date every other month with Ms. Faust and her husband, Charles S. Rosenberg, a well-known historian of medicine at Harvard. "She's not someone who said, 'I want to get from point A to point B.' It was: 'I'm having a lot of fun at point A, and I never thought I'd be doing this, and here I am at point B, and I'm having the time of my life.' And pretty soon you find yourself at point D, which is the Harvard presidency."

Pink Balloons

As a child in the 1950s, Catharine Drew Gilpin never expected to become a Harvard professor, much less president. Ms. Faust, who is 59, has always gone by Drew (she has kept her first husband's surname). She grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, raised by a father who bred Thoroughbred horses and a mother who advised her to marry well and never expressed high hopes for her daughter's career.

With Ms. Faust's appointment, four of the eight Ivy League presidents are women.

"As recently as a decade ago, I think none of us were imagining this," says Amy Gutmann, president of Penn. Ms. Gutmann, who publicly declared she was uninterested in the Harvard job, says that when its search committee asked her about Ms. Faust, she told the members, "She is a natural for this position."

For women in academe, capturing the presidency of Harvard is huge. "I think of it as the last really big glass ceiling in higher education," says Susan C. Scrimshaw, president of Simmons College, a women's institution in Boston. "A woman becoming president of Harvard is breaking the last barrier."

Ms. Faust says she does not want to be defined by her gender. "I'm not the woman president of Harvard," she said last week. "I'm the president of Harvard." But on the campus there was much celebration over her selection. Pink balloons with the words, "It's a girl" floated in Radcliffe Yard.

Nannerl O. Keohane, one of the seven members of the Harvard Corporation, says it did not choose Ms. Faust because she is a woman. "I think it would be unfair to her and to us and to Harvard to say that," she says.

But the National Association of Scholars issued a statement last week saying the selection has "all the hallmarks of a penitential act." The university chose Ms. Faust because "Harvard has been anguishing over its imagined sins against women" ever since Mr. Summers was forced out, said Stephen H. Balch, president of the association, an advocacy group that supports tradition-minded education. "Her installation as chief executive is the ultimate mea culpa."

People at Harvard say Ms. Faust's success in the top job will hinge on her ability to bring Harvard's famously independent and fractious faculty members together. Science is the key battleground. In January the university created an institutionwide planning committee on science and engineering to recommend a major restructuring in those fields and to make connections between the life sciences and the university's hospital.

"I think this is going to be tricky because you run into departmental autonomy," says one professor, who asked not to be named. "Professors don't want some cross-school committee getting into decisions like which appointments should be made in a particular department."

If anyone can handle the challenge, however, Ms. Faust's proponents say she can.

"Harvard's major issues have to do with getting people to work together, across different schools," says Radcliffe's Ms. Grosz. "She's wonderful at that."

In her remarks on the campus last week, Ms. Faust, who takes over July 1, made it clear that making Harvard more cohesive is part of her agenda, and she sent a strong message to professors: It is time for them to step up to the challenge. "We need to break down barriers that inhibit collaboration among schools or among disciplines," she said, "barriers that divide the sciences and the humanities, ... barriers that lead us to identify ourselves as from one or the other side of the river."

Making connections has long been one of Ms. Faust's specialties. "She brought me together with various people when I first came to the University of Pennsylvania and introduced me to people who became my very, very closest friends," says Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard who worked with Ms. Faust at Penn.

"She's the person who called me up while I was moving in at Penn and said, 'Hi. I just wanted to welcome you. Let's get together for lunch,'" says Ms. Hunt.

Ms. Faust did the same when Ms. Keohane joined the Harvard Corporation, in 2005. "When I took the post," recalls Ms. Keohane, a former president of Duke University, "she reached out to invite me to dinner and help me get accustomed to thinking about what it means to be a fellow at Harvard College."

Ms. Keohane ended up serving on the search committee that recommended Ms. Faust for the job. "There were a lot of people we talked to, and she just kept emerging as being really strong. In the end, we all came up with Drew."

Having a personal relationship with Ms. Keohane couldn't have hurt Ms. Faust's chances. Some might call Ms. Faust's dinner invitation a strategic move. Others would say it's just her style.