Drew Gilpin Faust: Woman in the News (NYT) (A ‘Rebellious Daughter’ to Lead Harvard)
Recalling her coming of age as the only girl in a privileged, tradition-bound family in Virginia horse country, Drew Gilpin Faust, 59, has often spoken of her “continued confrontations” with her mother “about the requirements of what she usually called femininity.” Her mother, Catharine, she has said, told her repeatedly, “It’s a man’s world, sweetie, and the sooner you learn that the better off you’ll be.”
Instead, Dr. Faust left home at an early age, to be educated at Concord Academy, then a girls’ prep school in Massachusetts, and at Bryn Mawr College, a women’s college known for creating future leaders, and to become a leading Civil War scholar. And Sunday, through the convergence of grand changes in higher education, her own achievements and the resignation of Harvard’s previous president under pressure, she became the first woman appointed to lead the Ivy League university founded in 1636.
“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,” Dr. Faust said in an interview Sunday at Loeb House just after the university announced that she would become its 28th president, effective July 1. “I’ve always done more than I ever thought I would. Becoming a professor — I never would have imagined that. Writing books — I never would have imagined that. Getting a Ph.D. — I’m not sure I would even have imagined that. I’ve lived my life a step at a time. Things sort of happened.”
Sunday morning, she said, she found herself lying in bed thinking in near disbelief, “Today I think they’re going to vote for you for the president of Harvard.”
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.”...
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Instead, Dr. Faust left home at an early age, to be educated at Concord Academy, then a girls’ prep school in Massachusetts, and at Bryn Mawr College, a women’s college known for creating future leaders, and to become a leading Civil War scholar. And Sunday, through the convergence of grand changes in higher education, her own achievements and the resignation of Harvard’s previous president under pressure, she became the first woman appointed to lead the Ivy League university founded in 1636.
“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,” Dr. Faust said in an interview Sunday at Loeb House just after the university announced that she would become its 28th president, effective July 1. “I’ve always done more than I ever thought I would. Becoming a professor — I never would have imagined that. Writing books — I never would have imagined that. Getting a Ph.D. — I’m not sure I would even have imagined that. I’ve lived my life a step at a time. Things sort of happened.”
Sunday morning, she said, she found herself lying in bed thinking in near disbelief, “Today I think they’re going to vote for you for the president of Harvard.”
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.”...