Harvard University names 1st female president in its history

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- 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, after his tumultuous five-year tenure.\nThe 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.\nFaust, 59, recognized the significance of her appointment.\n"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."\nWith Faust's appointment, half of the eight Ivy League schools will have a woman as president. Her selection is noteworthy given the uproar over Summers' comments that genetic differences between the sexes might help explain the dearth of women in top science jobs, comments which sparked debates about equality at Harvard and nationwide.\nFaust oversaw the creation of two faculty task forces, formed in the aftermath of Summers' remarks, to examine gender diversity at Harvard. She has been dean of Radcliffe since 2001, two years after the former women's college was merged into the university as a research center with a mission to study gender issues.\n"This is a great day, and a historic day, for Harvard," said James R. Houghton, chairman of the presidential search committee.\nSome professors have quietly groused that -- despite the growing centrality of scientific research to Harvard's budget -- the 371-year-old university is appointing a fifth consecutive president who is not a scientist. No scientist has had the top job since James Bryant Conant retired in 1953; its last four have come the fields of classics, law, literature and economics.\n"Faculty turned to her constantly as someone whose opinion is to be trusted," said Sheldon Hackney, a former president of The University of Pennsylvania and southern historian who worked closely with Faust. "She's very clear, well-organized. She has a sense of humor, but she's very even-keeled. You come to trust in her because she's so solid."\n-- AP Education Writer Justin Pope contributed to this report.