Drew Gilpin Faust is Harvard's 28th President and first woman. And she sounds cool as hell. She chaired the women's studies department at Penn for 4 years, not to mention being quite the radical as a child.
Catharine Drew Gilpin was born on Sept. 18, 1947, and grew up in Clarke County, Va., in the Shenandoah Valley. She was always known as Drew. Her father, McGhee Tyson Gilpin, bred thoroughbred horses.Dr. Faust has written frankly of the “community of rigid racial segregation� that she and her three brothers grew up in and how it formed her as “a rebellious daughter� who would go on to march in the civil rights protests in the 1960s and to become a historian of the region. “She was raised to be a rich man’s wife,� said a friend, Elizabeth Warren, a law professor at Harvard. “Instead she becomes the president of the most powerful university in the world.�
In her professional career she graduated from Bryn Mawr and has a Phd in American Civilization.
At Penn, Dr. Faust, who was divorced from her first husband, Stephen Faust, in 1976, met Charles Rosenberg, a professor who is regarded as a leading historian of American medicine, and who became her second husband. She and Professor Rosenberg have a daughter, Jessica, a Harvard graduate who works at The New Yorker. She also has a stepdaughter, Leah. Dr. Faust’s fifth book, “Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slave Holding South in the American Civil War,� won the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize for the year’s best nonfiction book on an American theme. Her sixth book, to be published by Knopf, explores the impact of the Civil War’s enormous death toll on 19th-century Americans.
Certainly a good move after Summers.
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Definitely news for celebration, and she sounds like a great choice. But as I noted on my own blog, if the time it took Harvard to appoint a woman is any indication, the U.S. will not elect a woman president until 2147.
I've already expressed my concerns about Faust over at Feministe (shorter me: given her resume v. Kagan's, as just one example, I'm a little worried the corporation named her, plans to set her up for failure, and will then chuckle about how you can't send a woman to do a man's job), but now that undergrads
have started weighing in the topic (I think "women's studies henhouse" has to be my favorite from Mr. Lacaria) I have to officially come out in total support of Faust.
(Also, see today's editorial cartoon, which I sincerely hope draws the outrage and criticism it so deserves.)
Just wanted to let you know you spelled Bryn Mawr incorrectly above.
Yay! Yay! 50% of the Ivy Leagues are headed by women. There is now going to be enormous pressure on other colleges (esp. Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, and Yale) to look seriously at women.
Susan Hockfield seems to be going a great job over at MIT.
Most important thing she's said so far:
"I'm not the woman president of Harvard, I'm the president of Harvard."
Not exactly blown away by Harvard finally getting wtih the program -- I mean, aren't most ivy league schools at least half women, if not more? Check out the posting on http://www.damenation.blogspot.com