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July-August 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Still, it was a decisive step to accept a full-time position such as the deanship of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (RIAS). Asked what led to the change, she replies, “Neil Ruden-stine,” then Harvard’s president, who first engaged her in thinking about the post during a conversation that began in the fall of 1999 and ultimately extended several months. “I had understood the job to be one in which I could do a substantial amount of my scholarship and run an organization,” she recalls. In fact, from the time her appointment was announced in April 2000 through the first four years of her deanship, Faust found herself absorbed in untangling “impenetrable financial records,” explaining the new institute to Radcliffe College’s alumnae, and building a lively academic community of scholar-fellows—women and men. (During a sabbatical last year, she worked on her sixth book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, on the impact of that war’s enormous death toll. She delivered the manuscript in January, just before her election as president, and so describes it as her “scholarly denouement.” Knopf will publish the book next year. She also returned to the classroom, teaching an undergraduate seminar on the Civil War and Reconstruction this past spring.) 
Kris Snibbe / Harvard News Office May 2005: Meeting at Massachusetts Hall, Drew Gilpin Faust, who led University task forces on women faculty, with professors Evelynn M. Hammonds and Barbara J. Grosz, who directed the two efforts. Hammonds, now senior vice provost, oversees implementation of the recommendations; Grosz succeeds Faust as Radcliffe’s interim dean. Whatever the short-term obstacles, Faust made the most of her own administrative knowledge, the suggestions of the intellectually eminent advisers she convened, and the opportunity presented by the founding of the institute as a full affiliate of Harvard. From her very first messages about the new institute, Faust emphasized “Radcliffe’s potential to create interest and engagement across the University.” She realized that potential in a variety of ways, not all of them widely known:
In this basic intellectual sense, Faust wrote early in her decanal tenure, “Crossing boundaries is fundamental to the Radcliffe experience.” Effective administration has been fundamental, too. As dean, she:
Meanwhile, as at Penn, Faust became involved in Harvard priorities well beyond the demands of her day job. As RIAS dean, she was a member of the Academic Advisory Group, through which the president, provost, and deans consider matters of University policy—and so become acquainted with one another and with broader academic issues. In 2004, she served on the task force exploring the role of and opportunities for undergraduate life in Allston—one of the elements that figured in the master plan for campus development there, published in January (see “Harvard’s 50-Year Plan,” March-April, page 58). In early 2005, following his controversial remarks on women in academic science and engineering, President Lawrence H. Summers appointed her to lead two University task forces, on women faculty and on women in science and engineering. Their comprehensive recommendations, produced quickly and under enormous pressure, provoked fresh thinking about faculty development, student learning, and diversity; multiple measures are now being implemented under the direction of a senior vice provost (see “Tenure Task Forces,” May-June 2005, page 67, and “Engineering Equity,” July-August 2005, page 55). Outside her two university communities, Faust has been an active intellectual leader. Beyond her professional involvement in the principal historical associations, and her service on the Pulitzer Prize history jury, she is, among other affiliations, a trustee of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (a powerful supporter of the arts and scholarship in the humanities and higher education); the National Humanities Center; and her alma mater, Bryn Mawr College—perhaps a useful perspective for working with Harvard’s governing boards. Those experiences—and the Radcliffe Institute’s role in assessing the work of scholars from all fields—have given Faust an unusually broad overview of faculty members across a research university. As a past department chair, a member of the 2005 task forces, and a dean nurturing younger faculty members during their Radcliffe fellowships, she arrives at Massachusetts Hall extensively prepared for one of the Harvard president’s most important responsibilities: helping schools to identify the next generation of scholars and to advance their academic careers. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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