A new day at Harvard

Drew Faust being named president is also a story about Harvard and women

I would have bet big money that we’d have a female president of the United States before we had a female president of Harvard University. It’s not just that Harvard predates the United States by more than a century and a half. There’s actually a higher percentage of women in the Bush Cabinet than in the tenured faculty ranks of Harvard.

But now comes Drew Gilpin Faust . The dean of the Radcliffe Institute has been chosen to take over the helm of what is often referred to — fondly, arrogantly, and sarcastically — as the “world’s greatest university.” As she said, “I

am the president of Harvard, not the woman president of Harvard. Nevertheless, people see this as part of a new day.”

How fitting that this accomplished historian should find herself making history. How fitting that the scholar who has studied change and resistance, the interaction of individuals with the times they live in, should find herself at this moment.

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In the double helix of social change, this is a story about Harvard and women. A college that once regarded itself as an “incubator for virility” had no place for women. As far back as 1869, Harvard President Charles Eliot expressed doubts about the “natural mental capacities of the female sex.” As recently as 2005, President Larry Summers suggested that a lack of “intrinsic aptitude” was partly why few women made it in academic science… Faust’s appointment is a generational marker and a turning point. She replaces Summers, a man who suffered from what cell phone advertisers call “connectile dysfunction.” In contrast, she comes praised and perhaps patronized for her “people skills.” We don’t know yet whether her change will breed changes for the institution.

But as someone who spent four years here in the 1960s without a single female professor, I am eager to toast the “new day.” If a woman can make it here, maybe, just maybe she can make it anywhere. Don’t bet against it.

Excerpted from an article by Ellen Goodman in ‘The Boston Globe’, February 16