"A New President Takes the Helm at Harvard: Drew Gilpin Faust" By Bobbi McKenna. Even rain showers and unpredictable wind gusts couldn't stop the drumbeat of change at Harvard University on October 12, 2007.   Harvard Alumni, board members, faculty, students and friends of the university huddled under rain ponchos and umbrellas.

As a member of the Women's Leadership Board of the Kennedy School for Government,  I was among those invited to witness this momentous day for Harvard and for women: One of the nation’s premier educational institutions (which had been closed to women for much of its history) would now be led by a woman.  President Faust addressed this new reality: “My presence here today,” she said, “and indeed that of many others on this platform – would have been unimaginable even a few short years ago."  (Photo: Bobbi McKenna and Barbara Beck.)

"Those who charge that universities are unable to change should take note of this transformation, of how different we are from universities even of the mid 20th century." (Photo: KSG Women's Leadership Board Members.)

"And those who long for a lost golden age of higher education should think about the very limited population that alleged utopia actually served. College used to be restricted to a tiny elite; now it serves the many, not just the few. The proportion of the college age population enrolled in higher education today is four times what it was in 1950; twelve times what it was before the 1920s. Ours is a different and a far better world.”  Near the end of her comments, she told a story that illustrated how dramatically Harvard and the world we live in has changed.  "Last week I was given a brown manila envelope that had been entrusted to the University Archives in 1951 by James B. Conant, Harvard’s 23rd president. He left instructions that it should be opened by the Harvard president at the outset of the next century “and not before.” I broke the seal on the mysterious package to find a remarkable letter from my predecessor. It was addressed to “My dear Sir.” In 1951, Conant could not imagine that the President of Harvard might be a woman!   More about President Faust provided by Harvard University: Drew Gilpin Faust took office as Harvard’s 28th president on July 1, 2007. Faust, a historian of the Civil War and the American South, is also the Lincoln Professor of History in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Previously she had served as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a post she took up on Jan. 1, 2001.  As the first dean of the Radcliffe Institute, Faust guided the transformation of Radcliffe from a college into a wide-ranging institute for advanced study. Under her leadership, Radcliffe emerged as one of the nation’s foremost centers of scholarly and creative enterprise, distinctive for its multidisciplinary focus and the exploration of new knowledge at the crossroads of traditional fields. In recognition of its roots in Radcliffe College, the Institute maintains a special commitment to the study of women, gender, and society. To support its mission, Faust directed a comprehensive administrative restructuring, secured the Institute’s finances, attracted major new gifts, and undertook an extensive renovation of Radcliffe’s historic campus. Radcliffe’s flagship fellowship program became a prized opportunity for established and emerging scholars throughout the academic world.  Before coming to Radcliffe, Faust was Annenberg Professor of History and director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where she served for 25 years on the faculty.  Faust was born Sept. 18, 1947, in New York City. Raised in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Faust went on to attend Concord Academy in Massachusetts. She received her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr in 1968, magna cum laude with honors in history, and her master’s degree (1971) and doctoral degree (1975) in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.  She is the author of five books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), for which she won the Francis Parkman Prize in 1997. Her most recent scholarship, studying the impact of the Civil War’s enormous death toll on the lives of 19th-century Americans, will be published in 2008 as This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf).