As a child, the mother of soon-to-be Harvard University president Drew G. Faust’s said, “This is a man’s world, sweetie, and the sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be.” Faust refused to believe that and told herself that she would make a difference in this world whether she was a woman or not.
In Harvard University’s 371-year history, there has never been a woman president of the university, until now. Faust will become the twenty-eighth president of Harvard University on July 1, 2007. She was elected by the seven-member Harvard Corporation and was unanimously confirmed by the alumni Board of Overseers.
Catherine Gilpin was born to a privileged family in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Faust had many conversations with the family’s black handy man and driver. From the cutthroat conversations that she had with him, she decided to write a letter to President Eisenhower for desegregation. She wrote this as a child on a piece of paper in block letters. That gesture alone, showed her sense of self in advance. It showed her desire to change the world. She must have had a great amount of innovative thinking.
Faust received a bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr in 1968 and graduated Magna Cum Laude with honors in history. She received her Masters’ degree in 1971, and a doctoral degree in 1975 in American civilization, from the University of Pennsylvania. Before going to Harvard, she served twenty-five years as a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and in 2001, she became the first dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.
She has written books on the history of the American South and the Civil War. Her fifth book, “Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War” has won the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize in 1996. Her next book, “This Republic of Suffering”? will be in bookstores next year.
With the many achievements that Faust has had in her educational career, no one could say that women do not have the leadership ability of men. “I’m not the woman president of Harvard, I’m the president of Harvard,” said Faust. She is an outstanding individual with the mind to change the world.
Of course, there is going to be pressure. Many people may not like the change in Harvard’s presidency. Life is not simple and is not at all fair. But the individual person could make a difference in life if they decide to truly fulfill their life’s purpose.
“I am a historian. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the past and about how it shapes the future. No university in the country, perhaps the world, has a remarkable a past as Harvard,” says Faust. She is a true historian who is now part of history itself.