[referred to on FTL 2/12/07]

Woman will lead Harvard
Historian chosen as first female president

By JESSE HARLAN ALDERMAN
The Associated Press
February 12. 2007 8:00AM

By age 9, Drew Gilpin Faust had already begun to challenge race and gender [sic - the correct term is sex] roles of the Jim Crow South.

Born Catherine Gilpin to a privileged family in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Faust recalls a conversation with the family's black handyman and driver that inspired her to send a letter - in block letters on school notebook paper - to President Eisenhower pleading for desegregation. [Please, Ike, please use your federal bayonets to send proper young White girls to school with blacks. Otherwise, how will the niggers be able to rape them?]

The awakening soon prompted her to question her entire upbringing, in which girls wore "scratchy organdy dresses" and white children addressed black adults by their first names.

"I was the rebel who did not just march for civil rights and against the Vietnam War but who fought endlessly with my mother, refusing to accept her insistence that 'This is a man's world, sweetie, and the sooner you learn that, the better off you'll be,' " she wrote in a memoir, Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections.

Yesterday, Harvard University named Faust the first female president in the school's 371-year history. The school's governing body thought Faust, a Civil War scholar and university insider, would be well-suited to cool tensions within the faculty after the tumultuous five-year presidency of Lawrence Summers. She is the school's 28th president.

"I hope that my own appointment can be one symbol of an opening of opportunities that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago," she said at a news conference on campus. But she also added, "I'm not the woman president of Harvard, I'm the president of Harvard."

Two years ago, Summers created an uproar when he said that genetic gender [sic - the correct term is sex] differences may explain why few women rise to top science jobs. At the height of the controversy, Faust oversaw two panels that examined gender [sic - sex] diversity on the campus.

She has been dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study since 2001, two years after the former women's college merged into the university as a research center with a mission to study gender [sic] issues.

Faust, 59, was elected by the seven-member Harvard Corporation, the school's governing body, and ratified by the 30-member Board of Overseers.

"All the reports have been 'gender, gender, gender,' [sic sic sic sex sex sex] and I'm thinking to myself, 'Isn't that funny? That has not been something we've talked about at all,' " said Robert Reischauer, a corporation member.

With Faust's appointment, half of the eight Ivy League schools have woman presidents. She will go from managing Radcliffe, a think-tank with 87 employees and a $17 million budget, to presiding over Harvard's 11 schools and colleges, 24,000 employees and a budget of $3 billion.

Faust becomes the first president without a Harvard degree since Charles Chauncy died in office in 1672. She attended Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pennsylvania, where she was also a professor.

"Faculty turned to her constantly as someone whose opinion is to be trusted," said Shelton Hackney, a former University of Pennsylvania president. "She's very clear, well-organized. She has a sense of humor, but she's very even-keeled. You come to trust in her because she's so solid."

As Faust emerged from a champagne toast with Corporation members and overseers, she greeted reporters and grinned as she said, "Tell my students I will be prepared for class tomorrow."

She teaches a Civil War and Reconstruction seminar at 3 p.m.

http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070212/REPOSITORY/702120360/1013/48HOURS