DG Faust, Harvard's first woman president

Boston, Feb 12: A celebrated historian became Harvard's first female president since its founding in 1636, succeeding Lawrence Summers whose short tenure was dogged by controversial remarks about women and a faculty revolt.

Drew Gilpin Faust, 59, a scholar of the US South, was named 28th president of the oldest US institute of higher learning, making Harvard the fourth of the nation's eight elite Ivy League schools to name a woman leader.

Harvard said Faust was elected to the job, long called the most prestigious in higher education, after a vote by the university's Board of Overseers, an alumni body. The appointment is effective July 1.

''No university in the country, perhaps the world, has as remarkable a past as Harvard's,'' Faust, who has never managed a big organization, said in a statement. ''And our shared enterprise is to make Harvard's future even more remarkable than its past.'' Her major challenges include uniting nine powerful, highly decentralized faculties, steering the biggest undergraduate curriculum changes in three decades and presiding over an ambitious multi-billion dollar campus expansion, according to students and faculty familiar with Harvard's administration.

Winning support of Harvard's feifdom-like faculties eluded Summers, a former US Treasury secretary whose confrontational style led to a faculty vote of no confidence and his resignation last year despite his popularity with students.

In another break with Harvard tradition, Faust was never a Harvard student. She earned her undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia and her doctorate from University of Pennsylvania, where she taught for 25 years.

CONSENSUS BUILDER

A specialist in US Civil War history and author of five books, Faust gave up a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania to become the first permanent dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2001 where she earned praise as a consensus-builder.

Summers faced a revolt by faculty members after he suggested that intrinsic aptitude might explain why relatively fewer women reach top academic positions in math and science --comments for which he later apologized.

He was also embroiled in a public feud with the African-American Studies department that erupted shortly after he became president in 2001. The once-vaunted department saw an exodus of top faculty.

The Harvard Crimson, a student newspaper, said in an editorial that Harvard was now at a cross-roads and managing much-needed reform will be among Faust's foremost challenges.

''Harvard's radically decentralized structure overly empowers its faculties and inhibits reform, encouraging wide disparities in funding among schools, and promoting internecine squabbling over major initiatives,'' it said.

''Managing this entrenched academic sphere was the puzzle that cost Summers his job,'' it added.

Faust will oversee 25,000 employees and a 3 billion dollar budget, compared with a 16 million dollar budget with 81 staff and fewer than 15 faculty members at Radcliffe, the smallest of Harvard's schools and a former college for women.

Reuters