Faust, Drew Gilpin

President of Harvard University

B orn Catharine Drew Gilpin, September 18, 1947,in New York, N.Y.; daughter of McGhee Tyson Gilpin (a horse breeder) and Catharine Ginna (Mellick) Gilpin; married Stephen Faust (divorced, 1976); married Charles Ernest Rosenberg (a professor), June 7, 1980; children: Jessica Marion (from second marriage), Leah (stepdaughter). Education: Bryn Mawr College, B.A., 1968; University of Pennsylvania, M.A., 1971, Ph.D., 1975.

Addresses: Office—Office of the President, Harvard University, Massachusetts Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Career

U niversity of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, seniorfellow, 1975-76, assistant professor, 1976-80, as sociate professor of American civilization, 1980-84, chairman of department, 1980-83 and 1984-86, professor 1984-88, Stanley Sheerr Professor of History, 1988-89, director of women’s studies, 1996-2000, An-nenberg Professor of History, 1989-2000; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, professor of history, beginning 2001, founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, beginning 2001, professor of Afro-American studies, beginning 2002, Lincoln Professor of History, beginning 2003, president, 2007—.

Sidelights

I n February of 2007 Drew Gilpin Faust was chosen as the 28th president of Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States whose founding even predates America’s as a nation. Faust had been at the school just a few years, having spent much of her academic career at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a professor of history and specialist in the U.S. Civil War period. She was 59 years old at the time of her new appointment, and had come of age in an era when women were not even allowed as full students at Harvard and the other schools of the Ivy League. “One of the things that I think characterizes my generation—that characterizes me, anyway, and others of my generation—is that I’ve always been surprised by how my life turned out,” she told New York Times writer Sara Rimer. “I’ve always done more than I ever thought I would. Becoming a professor—I never would have imagined that.”

Born in New York City in 1947, Faust was named after her mother, Catharine Mellick Gilpin, but her family called her by her middle name, Drew, from an early age. The Gilpins lived in Clarke County, Virginia, where her father, McGhee Gilpin, was a breeder of thoroughbred horses. It was an affluent county in the northern part of the state, known for its nineteenth-century architecture and picturesque estates. Faust grew up with three brothers, and had a difficult time adjusting to the different behavioral standards of the era that were demanded of Southern women, even young girls, who were expected to be quiet, demure, and remain close to home even as adults. She had memorable battles with her mother over these issues, and recalled that she was often told, “it’s a man’s world, sweetie, and the sooner you learn that the better off you’ll be,” she recalled in the New York Times interview with Rimer.

Faust also began questioning the segregated nature of her Southern world when she was still very young, and recalled hearing a news report one day over a statewide movement in Virginia to reject the landmark ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case, which outlawed segregated schools. Upon listening to the news report, she suddenly realized that she had no black classmates at her Millwood elementary school, and even asked one of her family’s African-American household employees that if she painted her face black, would that mean she would not be allowed into her school? His evasive answer let her know this was a topic on par with religion or sex—that is, never discussed in polite society— and her interest in the civil rights movement began to grow. She even sent a letter to U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a fifth-grader in 1957 in which she voiced her support for integration. The letter wound up in the Eisenhower Presidential Library, and many years later Faust tracked it down. “Please Mr. Eisenhower please try and have schools and other things accept colored people,” she had urged, according to a 2003 article she wrote for Harvard Magazine.

In her teens, Faust attended Concord Academy, a private boarding school in Concord, Massachusetts, that was an all-women institution at the time. In the early 1960s, many of the nation’s elite schools remained closed to women, and she might have entered Princeton University as a “legacy,” meaning she had family members who had graduated—in this case, her father and several others—and was to be granted preferred admissions status, but the New Jersey school did not admit its first women undergraduates until 1969. This was a year after Faust graduated with an undergraduate degree in history from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, considered one of the top women’s schools of the era.

During her college years, Faust continued the social activism of her teen years, when she took part in civil-rights marches and anti-Vietnam War rallies. At Bryn Mawr, she and other students agitated to abolish what were known as “parietal rules” which, she explained in a commencement address she delivered at the school in 2001, “were the restrictions that required us to be back in the dorm by 2 a.m. and that did not permit men in the halls except during certain very limited hours,” she said in her speech, which appeared on the college’s Web site. “I take some satisfaction in the fact that not only was women’s freedom from these rules achieved but this is now so taken for granted no one even knows what parietals were.”

Faust went on to earn two graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, completing her doctorate in American civilization in 1975. Often referred to in its shortened form of Penn, this was also one of the eight “Ivy League” schools, along with Princeton, Harvard, and five other East Coast colleges, but had a longer record in admitting female students and hiring female faculty members. After earning her Ph.D, she remained at the school as a senior fellow, and was hired as an assistant professor in 1976. Four years later, she was promoted to associate professor of American civilization and the department chair, and her career began to flourish. She was active on several campus committees, made contacts off-campus in professional organizations, and began writing well-received books on life in the pre-Civil War South, such as 1982’s James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery, the biography of a slaveholder.

Faust became a full professor at Penn in 1984, and the Annenberg Professor of History five years later. She also served as director of the women’s studies program for a time in the late 1990s. Another book, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, was published in 1996 to effusive reviews in the academic press, and then re-issued in trade paperback form a year later. In it, Faust drew upon the correspondence and diaries of 500 Southern women whose lives were drastically uprooted by the war and the end of slavery. Reviewing it for the Historian, Wendy Hamand Venet noted that Faust “provides convincing evidence that Confederate women, far from supporting Southern independence uncritically, resented the changes that the war forced upon them. Slavery became a burden, as mistresses reluctantly attempted to manage an increasingly unruly slave labor force in the absence of their husbands. Many had to cope with household drudgery for the first time in their lives when African Americans fled to advancing Union armies.”

Faust was recruited by Harvard University and joined its faculty in 2001 as a professor of history. She was also hired to serve as the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Radcliffe College was once the women’s school of Harvard, and when she arrived to head it the Institute was just a small, flagging unit on a campus rich with es- teemed academic organizations, such as its Center for European Studies. Over the next five years, Faust worked to turn it into a respected center of interdisciplinary scholarship for researchers on gender.

Faust became Harvard’s Lincoln Professor of History in 2003, and was named to head two separate task-force committees created by Harvard’s president, Lawrence H. Summers, in 2005 in the wake of his controversial remarks about women and their intellectual aptitude. Speaking at a conference of the National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER) in January of 2005 Summers’s speech discussed several possible reasons in response to the question of why there were so few female chairs of departments in math, engineering, and science. The difficulty presented by working extremely long hours in the first two decades of their careers, when many women were also new parents, was one reason they lagged behind the professional paces of their male colleagues, but Summers also noted that there was still ongoing research about “intrinsic aptitude,” meaning that women were simply not born with the same intellectual capabilities as men. Summers’ remarks made national headlines and rocked the Harvard campus and many others, too, where women had struggled to achieve the pay, perks, and respect commensurate with their achievements since the 1970s. Furthermore, it was not the first controversy in Summers’ tenure as Harvard’s president, and he was disliked by many faculty members for his autocratic style. Despite the creation of the task-force committees, whose goals were to hire and promote more women in the sciences, Summers was forced to resign in early 2006, effective June 30 of that year.

Faust’s name was one of several advanced as possible successors, including former U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, and Shirley Ann Jackson, the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ANo-bel Prizewinning chemist, Thomas R. Cech, was also on the list of finalists, but when he announced he was removing himself from the final list of candidates, Faust suddenly emerged as the most likely choice of the Harvard Corporation board, a six-member panel that governs the school, and the announcement that she was to become Harvard’s next president was made over the second weekend in February.

Faust became the first woman to lead the school, which was founded in 1636 and is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Even the governing board, founded in 1650 and formally known as the “President and Fellows of Harvard College,” used a charter of governance that made it the oldest corporation in all of the Americas. Faust, noted Christian Science Monitor journalist Ben Ar-noldy, “will not only sit at the pinnacle of higher education, but will oversee a budget on a par with top corporations. Of the 20 female CEOs in the Fortune 1000, only one runs a firm with assets greater than Harvard’s.” Unusually, Faust was also the first Harvard president without a Harvard degree to hold the office since 1672.

Faust joined an illustrious list of women heading Ivy League schools: Of the eight colleges or universities, fully half now were led by female presidents. Her husband, Charles Ernest Rosenberg, is a specialist in the history of American medicine and teaches at Harvard, and their daughter, Jessica, is a Harvard graduate. As president, Faust had even more ambitious plans for the generation of students to come. “None of us imagined that, in our lifetimes, four out of eight Ivy League presidents would be women, let alone considered that those presidents would be us,” she was quoted as saying in an article by David Pluviose for Diverse Issues in Higher Education. “Now it is all the more important that this expansion of opportunity be demonstrable for members of other groups who have been discriminated against throughout history.”

Selected Writings

Nonfiction

A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

The Ideology of Slavery: The Proslavery Argument in the Antebellum South, Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery, Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

The Creation of Confederate Nationalism:Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South, Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War, University of Missouri Press, 1992.

A Riddle of Death: Mortality and Meaning in the American Civil War, Gettysburg College, 1995.

Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, University of North Carolina Press, 1996; Vintage Books, 1997.

Sources

Periodicals

Christian Science Monitor, February 12, 2007, p. 1.

Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 2007.

Diverse Issues in Higher Education, March 22, 2007, p. 19.

Financial Times, April 27, 2007, p. 6.

Harvard Magazine, May-June 2003.

Historian, Spring 1998, p. 624.

New York Times, February 10, 2007; February 12, 2007.

Online

“Bryn Mawr College Convocation Address by Drew Gilpin Faust, Saturday, May 19, 2001,” Bryn Mawr College, http://www.brynmawr.edu/news/2007-02-11/faust_speech.shtml (August 1, 2007).

—Carol Brennan