I've been following some of the coverage of Harvard's presidential search, and was interested to see a Boston Globe article -- I believe it was last weekend -- that said FAS historian and Radcliffe Institute chief Drew Gilpin Faust was a front-runner. Now the Crimson reports Faust has been indeed been picked to lead the University, and pending approval of the Overseers, she will be named Harvard's next president, and Harvard's first female president.
I see some pros and cons in this selection. The Boston Globe article mentioned the perception among some members of the Harvard community that Faust was picked because she is so different from Larry Summers -- she is a woman, she is a careful concensus-builder, and she is FAS faculty-friendly.
I don't know if Faust is a concensus-builder, but I must say that the Summers episode was a sharp reminder that maintaining good relations with the FAS faculty is very important to leading the University.
The FAS faculty issue aside, I have two major concerns with the appointment. The first relates to her leadership experience. Harvard needs a visionary and a strong leader. Leading Radcliffe through a difficult transformation from a former women's college to a modern research institute has certainly been challenging, but the Radcliffe Institute is small -- just a few hundred employees, faculty and fellows -- and focussed on a handful of disciplines that touch women's studies.
The other concern I have relates to her academic background. At this stage in Harvard's expansion, and for that matter, this stage in human history, the University really needs leadership that is strong in the sciences and has a strong international outlook. As a history major and someone who has read her work (she wrote an excellent biography, James Henry Hammond and the Old South
, that was assigned reading for one of my first graduate school classes, back in 2003) I totally respect her academic credentials, but she does not have significant research experience in the sciences or modern global studies, beyond overseeing some activities and initiatives that may have taken place at the Radcliffe Institute. On the other hand, Faust will almost certainly have in her core leadership group people who have solid experience developing scientific and international programs. She was able to do this at the Radcliffe Institute, choosing for her academic leadership team Barbara Grosz, dean of science at the Radcliffe Institute and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the FAS; and Jennifer Leaning, senior advisor in international and policy studies at the Radcliffe Institute, and professor of international health in the Harvard School of Public Health, and assistant professor of medicine in the Harvard Medical School.
Additionally, Faust's Radcliffe Institute background has no doubt given her an understanding of the challenges that smaller tubs and programs face in the larger University community. The Extension School was sometimes overlooked under President Summers (which may have been a good thing; Dean Shinagel was one of the few deans who kept his job after Summers took office).
That's my take. What do other people think of this appointment?
7 comments:
At this point in history, we need leaders who have a sense of history. Actually, we need that sensibility at EVERY point in history.
Leaders with a sense of history? Of course that is necessary.
Does that mean they have to be historians?
Having followed and blogged about what I consider to be the show trials of Lawrence Summers, I'm inclined to be concerned that -- in the words of Heather MacDonald at City Journal -- "Harvard will now be the leader in politically correct victimology."
Here's my blog post on Drew Gilpin Faust's expected appointment:
"I love watching Harvard sink into the swamp of mediocrity"
Note: The title is meant to be ironic, a quotation of my Yalie husband. :-)
Oh, no-- one does not have to be a historian to have a sense of history. Just as one does not have to be a scientist, or have worked in the field of international relations, to appreciate the important role both will play in our future. That Faust happens to be an extremely well-respected historian can be taken at least as prima facie evidence that she does have a sense of history. I was merely responding to the notion that a person with a scientific background or work experience in the international arena would bring credentials likely more helpful to an academic institution than Dr. Faust's. I am biased, but it's nice to see someone from the discipline elevated to this position.
Dear folks:
While it's nice that Harvard has located a female scholar to head up the university, I am somewhat troubled by the fact that her scholarship of the confederacy is somewhat racist in character.
She seems overly empathetic to the white slaveowning south in all of her scholarship, and is in fact the author of a book called:
The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Library of Southern Civilization) by Drew Gilpin Faust (1981)
and was the editor of another books entitled
The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Library of Southern Civilization) by Drew Gilpin Faust (Paperback - December 1981)
Even her best work, Mothers of Invention (1996) is criticized as being a study of 500 white, upper class elite female slaveholders married to southern plantation owning aristocrats. It is a study of the rich, idle and leisure female ruling class of the old southern confederacy. More pertinently, Faust seems to deal matter of factly with slavery, without condemnation or moral negativity. It even seems to condone these women beating their slaves with abandon.
Sen. Charles Sumner, the author of the Civil Rights bill of 1875, a leading abolitionist and Radical Republican, and stalwart Harvard grad, whose statue still stands in Harvard Square, would be aghast that a Virginian apologist for the confederacy has become president of Harvard.
To expel President Summers for his remarks regarding women, and then to replace him with someone whose entire academic career is an apology for the racist actions of the antebellum Southern United States is an insult to all African Americans who have ever lived in this country or attended Harvard University, and to all of us who have ever worked on a civil rights case, as I have in the past and published law review articles on the subject. No knowledgeable person in the field of civil rights would ever waste time to pick up a pen to write a single word about the history of the white slave-holding South, even if they were white women, when so much remains to be written about the history of african americans in the 19th century and their struggles for freedom.
These are my feelings, and I must express them. We cannot champion feminism at the expense of racism and Civil War historical revisionism. Harvard, more than any other institution, stands for the proposition that the Civil War was fought to destroy the old south and to liberate African Americans from their chains. Apologists for the old south have no business leading our noble institution.
--art kyriazis AB 80/81 north of the mason/dixon line and an ardent northerner
Art,
You're making a very serious accusation. I am not sure if you have read any of the works that you cite in your comment, but the Faust book that I read -- the biography of James Henry Hammond -- did not reflect any apologist or racist agenda. In fact, it repeatedly references the failed ideology, politics, and society of the antebellum and Civil War South, and notes with unflinching detail Hammond's own slave-related dealings.
While Lawrence Summer's comments about woemn got a lot of attention,what should have gotten as much attention is his beliefs that Western countries should dump their hazardouz wastes in poor developing countries. THis information was revealed in an internal memo that he wrote while he was chief economist for the World Bank. See http://www.counterpunch.org/summers.html
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