Cover Article
A Scholar in the House
President Drew Gilpin Faust
by John Rosenberg
Tradition and the twenty-first century were tangled together in Barker Center’s Thompson Room on the afternoon of February 11, when Drew Gilpin Faust conducted her first news conference as Harvard’s president-elect.
Daniel Chester French’s bronze bust of John Harvard, perched on the mantelpiece of the enormous fireplace behind the lectern, peered down on Faust and the other speakers—and a stone veritas crest backed up the bust. Carved into the heraldic paneling on either side of the fireplace were great Harvard names: Bulfinch and Channing, Lowell and Longfellow, Agassiz and Adams, Holmes and Allston. Huge portraits of iconic Harvardians hung on the walls: astronomer Percival Lowell, for science; Le Baron Russell Briggs, professor of English and of rhetoric and oratory, a humanist and University citizen who served as dean of Harvard College and—nearly simultaneously—dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and president of Radcliffe College; and, from the world of public service, Theodore Roosevelt, A.B. 1880, LL.D. 1902, an Overseer from 1895 to 1901 and from 1910 to 1916, among other offices held. And there was as well, in the corner, a smaller portrait of Helen Keller, a 1904 Radcliffe alumna to whom Harvard awarded an honorary doctorate 51 years later—the first woman so recognized.
Photograph by Jim Harrison
President Drew Gilpin Faust, on April 26 at the Radcliffe Institute's Fay House.
But for all the weight of the Georgian Revival setting and the late Crimson celeb-rities, the event was thoroughly modern. The coffered ceiling had been retrofitted with energy-efficient fluorescent lights when the Harvard Union was renovated in 1997. A thicket of television cameras filled the risers erected for the occasion, attesting to worldwide interest in the University’s leadership transition. And of course Faust, about to become Harvard’s twenty-eighth president, would be the first woman to hold that office. She acknowledged the significance, saying, “I hope that my own appointment can be one symbol of an opening of opportunities that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago.” Asked by a reporter about her gender, Faust responded levelly, “I’m not the woman president of Harvard. I’m the president of Harvard.” (See “Crossing Boundaries,” March-April, page 60A, and the more extensive on-line report at www.harvardmagazine.com/2007/02/11/crossing-boundaries.html.)
Perhaps too neatly, the colliding style and substance of the occasion symbolized an ancient university (nearing its 375th anniversary, and in the 400th year of its namesake’s birth) preparing itself for contemporary challenges and opportunities. But the obvious news angles—that Harvard had appointed a president after a period of upheaval, and a woman at that—deflected attention from two other story lines that may prove far more consequential during the administration that begins July 1. Both themes involve a return to tradition as the likeliest route to move the University forward expeditiously.
First, in selecting Faust, Harvard determined that it would best be led by someone whose career has been that of a scholar (she is an accomplished historian), to an extent not matched since chemist James Bryant Conant became president in 1933. Second, because Faust has been dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study since 2001, Harvard has turned to one of its own—the first truly internal candidate since Derek Bok, then dean of Harvard Law School, became president in 1971. In the intersection of those paths, one may perceive the prospects for a presidency rooted in the University’s past and ambitious about its future.
“An unprecedented rate of progress”
Faust sketched elements of her childhood “in a privileged family in the rural Shenandoah Valley” of Virginia in “Living History,” an essay published in this magazine in 2003. “I was the only daughter in a family of four children,” she wrote, and subject to her community’s prevailing expectations for girls. As she noted in the bracing preface to her widely acclaimed 1996 book, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War:
When I was growing up in Virginia in the 1950s and 1960s, my mother taught me that the term “woman” was disrespectful, if not insulting. Adult females—at least white ones—should be considered and addressed as “ladies.” I responded to this instruction by refusing to wear dresses and by joining the 4-H club, not to sew and can like all the other girls, but to raise sheep and cattle with the boys. My mother still insisted on the occasional dress but, to her credit, said not a negative word about my enthusiasm for animal husbandry.
Looking back, I am sure that the origins of this book lie somewhere in that youthful experience and in the continued confrontations with my mother—until the very eve of her death when I was 19—about the requirements of what she usually called “femininity.” “It’s a man’s world, sweetie, and the sooner you learn that the better off you’ll be,” she warned. I have been luckier than she in that I have lived in a time when my society and culture have supported me in proving that statement wrong.
At least a few elements seem to have impelled “Drew” (she did not go by her given name, “Catharine”) beyond the settled circumstances in which she lived. In the 2003 essay, she described the all-white school she attended (she was a fifth-grader during the 1956-1957 academic year), the all-white Episcopal church to which the family belonged, and her growing awareness of racial inequality in that era of Southern resistance to Brown v. Board of Education—an awareness that prompted her to write a “Dear Mr. Eisenhower” letter to the president that winter to express her “many feelings about segregation.”
That dawning social conscience combined with some inner spirit to direct Faust far beyond needlework: “Did my sense of the privileges allotted my brothers—who did not have to wear scratchy organdy dresses or lace underwear, sit decorously, curtsy, or accept innumerable other constraints on freedom—make me attuned to other sorts of injustice?” Or as she put it more piquantly at the Harvard College Women’s Leadership Awards ceremony on April 25, “I think I was born a pain in the neck.”
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