In a historical first, Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, has been named the 28th president of Harvard University. According to a press release issued on the university’s Web site, Faust, a Civil War scholar, was confirmed by the Board of Overseers on Sunday.
“This is a great day, and a historic day, for Harvard,” said James R. Houghton, the senior member of the Harvard Corporation and chair of the presidential search committee. “We share with Drew an enthusiastic commitment to building on Harvard’s strengths, to bridging traditional boundaries, and to embracing a world full of new possibilities.”
This high-profile appointment comes on the heels of a report being released today by the American Council on Education which shows that although the proportion of women presidents more than doubled, from 10 percent of all presidents to 23 percent, in the past 20 years, the rate of change has slowed since the late 1990s.
According to “The American College President: 2007 Edition,” women continued to be least likely to be president of doctoral-granting institutions, although the proportion of women presiding over such institutions increased from nearly 4 percent in 1986 to 13 percent in 1998, with little progress since then.
In the past 20 years, the percentage of women among minority presidents has increased. More than one-third of Hispanic presidents, and nearly one-third of presidents who are African-American, were women, compared with only 22 percent of Whites, says the report.
