Harvard University on Sunday named historian Drew Gilpin Faust as its first female president, ending a lengthy and secretive search to find a successor to Lawrence Summers and his tumultuous five-year tenure.

The seven-member Harvard Corporation elected Faust, a noted scholar of the American South and dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, as the university's 28th president. The board of overseers recommended her for the post.
Faust, 59, recognized the significance of her appointment.
"I hope my appointment can be one symbol of an opportunity that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago," she said at a news conference. But, she added, "I'm not the woman president of Harvard, I'm the president of Harvard."...

Faust is the first Harvard president who did not receive an undergraduate or graduate degree from the university since Charles Chauncy, an alumnus of Cambridge University in England, who died in office in 1672. She attended Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pennsylvania, where she was also a professor of history....

In Faust, Harvard not only has its first female leader, but a president who has candidly discussed her feminist ideals in a memoir,"Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections."

Born Catherine Gilpin in the Jim Crow era, to a privileged family in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Faust wrote that a conversation at age 9 with the family's black handyman and driver inspired her to send a letter to President Eisenhower pleading for desegregation.

She then began to question the rigid Southern conventions where girls wore"scratchy organdy dresses" and white children addressed black adults by their first names."I was the rebel who did not just march for civil rights and against the Vietnam War but who fought endlessly with my mother, refusing to accept her insistence that 'this is a man's world, sweetie, and the sooner you learn that, the better off you'll be,'" she writes.