<p>Oh, please. I was glad to see Summers go, and am happy with the replacement.</p>
<p>"It is just sad, sad, sad that the faculty of Harvard insisted in tossing overboard middle-of-the-road (actually rather liberal) Summers for a hard left feminist. The school is gradually losing its edge over all the others..."</p>
<p>It is just sad, sad, sad that you've made this judgment even before Faust has had a chance to do anything. I can't tell whether you are misogynist or reactionary or both. Or maybe you didn't mean for your comments to come out this way?</p>
<p>It'll be interesting to see what Faust does. There are two basic types of presidents: the stewards (like Rudenstine) who are a little more hands-off and essentially stay the course and the visionaries (i.e. Summers) who seize on some new ideas and go charging ahead, which has the side effect of upsetting some people. My initial impression is that Faust is more in the steward mold, but we'll see.</p>
<p>Rudenstine headed an extremely successful fund-raising campaign. The consequences of his involvement in this campaign were two-fold: he could not make his mark on the university as much as he might have, since he was always on the road; and he made it possible for Summers to be "visionary" with the money that Rudenstine had brought in.</p>
<p>A new fund-raising campaign was postponed for several years because of the ruckus caused by Summers on campus and his own faux pas in his relations with some prospective donors. So now Faust will have the task of leading the fund-raising campaign. How much time and energy she will have to devote to launch new initiatives remains to be seen.</p>
<p>To be fair, the Crimson's headline didn't say anything about her gender. It was the teaser headline in CC that stated "Harvard's New Pres is a Woman" which is kind of a silly statement if you consider the other choice was "Harvard's New Pres is a Man." ;) Better would have been "Harvard Chooses First Female Pres."</p>
<p>Rudenstein raised more than a $1 billion dollars, setting a new record, I believe, in fundraising by American college presidents. He was a very successful president. If that's what it means to be a "steward," most colleges would welcome such presidents.</p>
<p>"He was a very successful president. If that's what it means to be a 'steward,' most colleges would welcome such presidents."</p>
<p>Perhaps the bottom line is whether the President makes a university better or worse, compared to its peers, than before his/her term. Like it or not, the reality is that Harvard is becoming weaker compared to its peers (particularly Stanford and MIT), largely because its infrastructure in science, technology, and engineering isn't as solid. This is inevitably the way the world is headed, and the institution that best adapts to this reality will emerge as the winner.</p>
<p>Harvard certainly has tremendous strengths in this area (particulalry in medicine and basic science), but it needs to move quickly to keep from falling behind. Along those lines, anybody who understands the Harvard system knows that there are significant barriers to this type of progress. </p>
<p>Although the current situation was probably no single person's "fault," Larry Summers was the only Harvard president who appeared to understand how presssing of an issue it is in today's world. I personally disliked Summers as a president, but he did have a clear vision of Harvard in the 21st century -- which is where his predecessors were beaten left and right by Stanford and others IMO.</p>
<p>The challenge for Faust will be to implement this vision, and to supplement it with her own -- which of course has nothing to do with her gender, academic background, etc...</p>
<p>Keep in mind that the Allston land--where much of the new Science complex will be built-- was acquired by Rudenstine, not Summers and that many of the new buildings, including the Science buildings in Cambridge, were also started during Rudenstine's tenure. Summers did not preside long enough to undertake major new initiatives besides the curricular review.</p>
<p>Summers should not be touted as some moderate martyr sacrificed by the 'evil communist FAS'. He not only adhered to an imaginary hierarchy of academic and social value, but he was more simply a very very very poor leader. The Harvard Corporation picked Faust since she was the best candidate to guide our univeristy forward.</p>
<p>These days, the main job of a university president is to raise money.</p>
<p>Provosts, deans and faculty set the direction for the university.</p>
<p>I stand by my comments, Momwaiting. I don't recognize most of the posters here, but I've seen northstar a lot and like her posts, even though we disagree often. You can call it mysogynist or whatever you want, but in virtually every spat between Summers and the faculty HE was right and THEY were wrong. It is an abomination--admittedly, a small abomination, in the overall scheme of things--that he was ditched and replaced in this way.</p>
<p>How long are Harvard Presidents allowed to remain in office? Is there a limit?</p>
<p>Does anyone know why Elena Kagan wasn't selected?</p>
<p>To Satie: It seems odd for anyone to think Summers was "right" in the face of the integrity issues raised by faculty about his purported lack of knowledge of his Ec colleague's misdealings in Russia, all of which was reported in detail in the Crimson. It cost him his some of his staunchest faculty supporters.
Certainly, leaders are called to lead, but ultimately his style rapidly failed and he was hurting the brand, and fortunately the Corporation took action. Also, Howard Gardner's analysis in the Crimson is telling.
Your ad hominem attack on President Faust should be removed from this board.</p>
<p>Another new trend may be that Faust has no degree from Harvard. Not that this would be necessary - having taught at Harvard for the past couple of years she is certainly more familiar with the place than Gutman was with Penn when taking the helm there.</p>
<p>It just means that this is another tradition that seemed uncompromisable for centuries and now went over board.</p>
<p>There's no limit to how long a president stays in office at Harvard. However, the constant fund raising that being a president requires causes most college presidents in the U.S. to resign or retire in less than 10 years.</p>
<p>anothernycdad, how was Summers hurting the brand when he told a hack like West to shape up or ship out, and when he restored the ROTC program? It is simply disgusting that Summers got flack for either of those moves, for starters. Also, where did I make an ad hominem on Faust? I didn't say she was a crook or even a hack, just a far leftie...</p>
<p>why was my post deleted? can the moderator please ping me and tell me what rules I broke? My point about West being a hack was more than demonstrated this very morning here:
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/15/AR2007021501270.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/15/AR2007021501270.html</a>
Last Saturday, Obama's name was raised at the State of the Black Union, a gathering of some 10,000 black people in Hampton, Va., in a forum on the social and economic challenges facing black America. Top black scholars, intellectuals, civil rights leaders and opinion makers were present. Princeton professor Cornel West took Obama to task for not attending.</p>
<p>Sorry, it wasn't deleted; it is two posts up from this one. Thanks to all who work hard to keep CC up and running!</p>
<p>Bruno said:
What makes this a bit different (and more striking) to me is not just that this is Harvard, but that she is a humanities scholar. It seems that women scientists or engineers (hard science types) have been slowly awarded more respect, as if they are OK because they have proven their intellectual rigor through their scientific backgrounds. </p>
<h2>Actually, on the contrary, haven't Ivies been traditionally biased against appointing "hard" scientists and engineers to positions of power in the university's central administration ? Shirley Tilghman for example is not only Princeton's first female president, but also the first hard scientist to hold that office (she's a molecular biologist). In fact, take Harvard's 5 last presidents: Summers was an economist, Rudenstine had a Ph.D in English literature, Bok taught Law, Pusey was a historian like Faust, and Conant (a chemist) was the only "hard" scientist in the group (his predecessor, Lowell, despite having an undergraduate degree in Math, eventually also became a historian and professor of government/political science).</h2>
<p>Interestingly, while president of Harvard in the early 1900s Pusey made real steps toward making Harvard admissions a meritocracy. He made an admissions exam the main determining factor of success in admission. When Lowell became president, he reversed this trend as too many undesirables (read: Jews and other minorities) were getting in Harvard. Lowell made "character and personal qualities" more important in admissions than the admission exam as a device to keep out undesired ethnicities. Interviews and pictures of the candidates helped them weed out those from the wrong families. This happened at all the ivies.</p>
<p>I tend to believe that Pusey's scientific background explains his idealism as well as his belief in the importance of raw intellect rather than being of "good breeding." (Lowell, in contrast, was a classics professor.) For this reason, I think that Harvard would be in better hands if a scientist was running the place.</p>