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July-August 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 The cumulative value of these diverse activities paved Faust’s way toward consideration as the University’s leader. They also provided the will for her to accept the offer. For all its unexpected demands, she says, “In the course of this experience at Radcliffe, I found I just loved it. I loved working in a team with people. I loved defining organizational goals. I loved seeing things happen,” whether the renovation of the Radcliffe gymnasium into a gleaming conference space or institute fellows winning Pulitzer Prizes or earning tenure. “I just found that I liked it a lot, and I seemed to be getting feedback that I was pretty good at it.” And so, with that one last book in the pipeline (“a vestige of my scholarly identity”) and no illusions that her new position will leave time for another, Faust has plunged headlong into the Harvard presidency. “An unparalleled opportunity to make a difference”Speaking on February 11, Faust said, “I love universities and I love this one in particular.” Asked to amplify on her lifelong love affair with the academy, she says, “At the heart of it, universities are about renewal every minute. You’re always learning something new,” as a student or as a scholar. That learning comes as a refreshing surprise—“a surprise that in some way reinforces some things you know but at the same time changes them. I think to be in a community where everybody is dedicated to that expansion of themselves through an expansion of what they know is just the best thing I can imagine.” In that capacity, she says, universities affect not just individuals but society—a dual role that lies at the heart of her commitment to these institutions. Faust acknowledges that she was approached about other leadership positions earlier in her Radcliffe tenure—too soon in the institute’s transformation, she judged, for her to consider leaving. As time passed, she says, she contemplated returning to scholarly work full time (she is Lincoln professor of history) or pursuing “the right leadership opportunity” if it came around. When Summers resigned, unexpectedly creating a vacancy at Harvard, she says she realized that she had already been involved in trying to make the University work better. The presidency represented “an unparalleled opportunity to make a difference in higher education” in ways that mattered deeply to her. Moreover, she perceived that the institution was “crying out for a kind of intervention that I felt I might be able to make successfully.” “Harvard has the most extraordinary resources available to it of any higher-education institution in the world,” Faust declares—not just material assets such as the endowment, the Fogg Art Museum collections, and Widener Library, but also extraordinary students and faculties. From her first day at Radcliffe, she says, she felt that it was “just a totally overstimulating environment. “And yet,” she continues, “so many of the things we say about ourselves are true.” Referring to its decentralized schools, she says that Harvard is “not one university”—and so it has missed opportunities for collaboration. By investing in individual faculties and their facilities, “In a peculiar way, Harvard has not invested in itself. It needs to make the most of those extraordinary resources.” In some ways, the Radcliffe Institute has been an experiment in doing just that, by helping members of the community break down the boundaries separating “fields and schools and disciplines,” prompting beneficial new connections and “intellectual transformations.” She mentions research links between Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), ties between students and faculty members from different schools, and bridges over the divisions between the sciences and the humanities. Among the principal priorities she envisions, Faust details the wholesale improvements under way in undergraduate education, work on the Allston campus, and advances in science throughout the University based on collaboration among FAS, HMS, and the affiliated hospitals. “All of these questions seem at the core of what Harvard is about,” she says, “but none of them has been accomplished.” She intends to embrace each and “move forward as effectively as I am able to.” She also details important work to be done in securing broader student access not only to the College, but also to graduate education in the arts and sciences and in professional schools for those pursuing jobs in less remunerative careers. Similarly, in the wake of the 2005 task forces on science and engineering, she emphasizes the importance of enabling individuals to “choose fields out of preference and talent, and not because they are driven out of [other fields] by obstacles we should eliminate,” whether of gender or of other kinds. Even as Faust describes “spending a lot of time immersing myself” in the details of each of those issues—in part through searches for new FAS and HMS deans (see "Arts and Sciences Transitions") and other senior appointees—she is also trying, in the course of “a lot of listening this spring,” to identify “questions we’re not asking.” At least one important new effort, suggested during her February 11 remarks, is already emerging. Faust says Harvard needs to take a comprehensive look at the arts throughout the University. The art museum complex is about to be renovated; a new museum and performance facilities are to be erected in Allston; the American Repertory Theatre is searching for a new artistic director; the Graduate School of Design deanship is also vacant; and, in general, this is a “world in which the arts are taking on much more importance in undergraduate life in our peer institutions.” She suggests that a committee of senior advisers may be formed soon to look at Harvard and the arts in the broadest context, with significant implications for academic resources and facilities across the campus, not just in Allston. As she refines these and endless other priorities into an agenda (finding a scale for Allston that promotes both ambitious interdisciplinary work and personal interactions; refining which goals and programs to pursue around the world, as Harvard students and scholars now “live their lives internationally”), Faust may innovate organizationally, as she did at Radcliffe. She has already announced that she will create an executive vice presidency, to whom at least the administrative, financial, and human-resources vice presidents in Massachusetts Hall will report. An advisory group will examine the position’s reporting relationships and likely candidates; once filled, it will somewhat reduce the number of people and units (now numbering nearly 30) directly responsible to the president, making it easier for her to focus on her highest priorities. Of greater consequence: as soon as her decanal team is in place, Faust intends this summer to convene Harvard-wide academic planning, which has been in abeyance in recent years, to specify the mission of each school in teaching and research for the next decade, a process she describes as “defining our substantive purposes and hopes.” Through the planning process, she aims to “make us very self-conscious about how we use the resources we have—and what resources we don’t have”—to guide the schools’ daily work, to identify needs that fall between existing units, and, ultimately, to shape an “inevitable” capital campaign. (She is also searching for a new vice president for alumni affairs and development.) How those immediate objectives are pursued of course depends on the larger context. Faust spoke on February 11 of her concern that society has become ambivalent, even skeptical, about universities (“American higher education is hailed as the best in the world, and attacked as falling short”). As part of her presidency, Faust says, she wants to “try to articulate what a university is in American and world society. And why the very aspects of universities that make many people nervous are at the core of what we ultimately want universities to be—and why universities should not try to be like every other institution in society, and what the rationale for their continuing difference from other institutions truly is. People get exasperated with how collaborative they are, how long it takes them to get things done, how everybody has a voice, how we are in some ways embedded in the past. “Well, we need to be embedded in the past and embedded in the future at the same time. That’s a pretty complicated stance.” “But this is where we’re going”Those complications seem productively embodied in Drew Gilpin Faust’s career in and approach to the academy—as scholar, as dean, and, beginning July 1, as president. In Faust’s own passage from Virginia girlhood to the pinnacle of academe, there are echoes of those women in Mothers of Invention who drew strength from their trials—who “had come to a new understanding of themselves and their interests.” She is an historian who observed minutely the disastrous consequences for her native South of failing to adapt. And from her first days at Radcliffe, she pursued a sweeping agenda of institutional reform in support of innovative intellectual programs. In the fall of 2001, herself a newcomer to Cambridge, Faust told the entering Harvard College class of 2005, “When you hear—in this most wonderfully tradition-bound place—that something is because it has always been that way, take a moment to ask which of the past’s assumptions are embedded in this particular tradition. If men and women are to be truly equal at Harvard, not all traditions can be.” In her remarks as president-elect on February 11, she reprised the theme, albeit on a larger scale. Realizing the promise of “our shared enterprise…to make Harvard’s future even more remarkable than its past,” she said, “will mean recognizing and building on what we already do well. It will also mean recognizing what we don’t do as well as we should—and not being content until we find ways to do better.” Doing so, she said, involves creating more effective ways of working together, of removing barriers, and of overcoming habits “that lead us to identify ourselves as from one or the other ‘side of the river.’ Collaboration means more energy, more ideas, more wisdom; it also means investing beyond one’s own particular interest or bailiwick. It means learning to live and to think within the context of the whole University.” That, of course, has been the most difficult challenge in this notoriously autonomous place, a tradition-bound hothouse for cultivating new ideas. “[T]he character and meaning of universities for the twenty-first century,” Faust said on February 11, depend on “whether they can be supple enough, enterprising enough, ambitious enough to accomplish all that is expected of them—and no less important, whether they can do so while preserving their unique culture of inquiry and debate in a world that seems increasingly polarized into unassailable certainties.” How would she encourage the change that many members of the community wish to embrace—as they legislate curriculum reforms, discuss more effective teaching, and reorganize to promote scientific research? At Radcliffe, she responds, she immersed herself in the archives, rediscovering the institution’s roots and envisioning how to capture and fulfill its founders’ desires “in a way that’s appropriate for a new era.” More broadly, she explains, this suggests that “change often happens most easily if it can be shown to be embedded in long-held beliefs, values, traditions, rather than being just a total assault on everything everybody thought they were and wanted. “So it seems to me that part of moving through change effectively is making it seem seamless, or as seamless as possible, with what has gone before—of identifying continuities that can serve as bridges over the chasm of differences, building understanding and transparency about purpose and shared commitments, and using those as the fuel of change. And then saying, ‘Hope you’ll come, too, but this is where we’re going.’ So it begins with persuasion and collaboration and building a case, but I think ultimately it becomes a gesture of decisive movement.” Two days after her appointment as president-elect, Faust joined her Faculty of Arts and Sciences colleagues for a regularly scheduled faculty meeting—a familiar figure, toting her papers in her signature red Radcliffe canvas bag, now invested with new hopes and expectations. After an introduction by interim president Derek Bok, and a raucous ovation, FAS interim dean Jeremy R. Knowles welcomed her presence in the portrait-festooned faculty room in University Hall: In saying how delighted we are in this faculty to have a new president, and most of all, to have this new president, let me echo Charles Eliot Norton, speaking about Radcliffe and its first president, the redoubtable Mrs. Agassiz—there they both are, gazing down upon us. “She gives it,” he said, “by being herself, an impetus, a dignity, and an unwavering standard that it could not have without her.” Members of the faculty, let us welcome our new and unwavering standard: president-elect Drew Faust. John S. Rosenberg is the editor of this magazine.  
 
 
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