Drew Gilpin Faust: Early Bold Streak for New Harvard President
In September 1967, just shy of her 20th birthday, Drew Gilpin Faust led a delegation of Bryn Mawr College students to ask trustees to abolish their 2 a.m. curfew.
At the women's college near Philadelphia, students had to sign a log when they went out at night, saying where they were going and with whom. When they returned to campus in darkness, "lantern men" guided them to their dormitories. Amid Vietnam War protests, the civil rights movement, and the sexual revolution, they felt that their world was opening up and the college had no right to rein them in.
Faust, who was student government president, and other student leaders met with a handful of trustees in a small conference room in an Atlantic City hotel that, to everyone's amusement, was filled with Miss America contestants. Faust would win the trustees over with a quiet, confident, persuasive style that many say led Harvard University to tap her two weeks ago as its next president.
She didn't make grand declarations or raise her voice as she made the case to trustees that the young women were responsible adults.
"In those days, some students were in an all-out pitch, and those who were very activist could also be somewhat unpleasant," said Mary Patterson McPherson , a former Bryn Mawr president who was a dean at the time that Faust spoke to the trustees. "Drew was so much more sensible than that. She was a wise person."
Faust, 59, has always been viewed as a leader in the worlds she has inhabited -- her hometown in rural Virginia; at Concord Academy in Concord, Mass.; Bryn Mawr; the University of Pennsylvania; and Harvard, where she spent her career as a Civil War historian and dean.
Some Harvard professors and alumni have questioned whether Faust has the fortitude or experience to take on the university's notoriously fractious faculty or oversee the building of a multibillion-dollar, science-focused campus in Allston. But Faust's friends and colleagues say she has proven she can handle those challenges. Since childhood, they say, she has exuded wisdom and toughness....
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At the women's college near Philadelphia, students had to sign a log when they went out at night, saying where they were going and with whom. When they returned to campus in darkness, "lantern men" guided them to their dormitories. Amid Vietnam War protests, the civil rights movement, and the sexual revolution, they felt that their world was opening up and the college had no right to rein them in.
Faust, who was student government president, and other student leaders met with a handful of trustees in a small conference room in an Atlantic City hotel that, to everyone's amusement, was filled with Miss America contestants. Faust would win the trustees over with a quiet, confident, persuasive style that many say led Harvard University to tap her two weeks ago as its next president.
She didn't make grand declarations or raise her voice as she made the case to trustees that the young women were responsible adults.
"In those days, some students were in an all-out pitch, and those who were very activist could also be somewhat unpleasant," said Mary Patterson McPherson , a former Bryn Mawr president who was a dean at the time that Faust spoke to the trustees. "Drew was so much more sensible than that. She was a wise person."
Faust, 59, has always been viewed as a leader in the worlds she has inhabited -- her hometown in rural Virginia; at Concord Academy in Concord, Mass.; Bryn Mawr; the University of Pennsylvania; and Harvard, where she spent her career as a Civil War historian and dean.
Some Harvard professors and alumni have questioned whether Faust has the fortitude or experience to take on the university's notoriously fractious faculty or oversee the building of a multibillion-dollar, science-focused campus in Allston. But Faust's friends and colleagues say she has proven she can handle those challenges. Since childhood, they say, she has exuded wisdom and toughness....