After 11 years at the helm, Harvard University president Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust will step down at the end of the 2018 academic year. Her retirement will coincide with the conclusion of the record-setting Harvard Campaign, which has raised a historic $8 billion so far.
In a message to the Harvard community, Faust said that it was the “right time” for the institution to make a transition in leadership.
“It has been a privilege beyond words to work with all of you to lead Harvard, in the words of her alma mater, “through change and through storm,’” Faust said.
Born and raised in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Faust is a historian of the Civil War and the American South. She was the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the first woman to lead Harvard in its 380-year history.
She took up the mantle from Dr. Lawrence H. Summers, who presided over the institution from 2001 until his ouster in 2006. Summer’s term was marked by a series of controversies and friction with members of the faculty that included the public departure of Dr. Cornel West from the Department of African and African American Studies in 2002.
West, who left to teach at Princeton University and subsequently the Union Theological Seminary, returned to Harvard earlier this year.
Faust stepped into leadership just in time for the start of the global financial crisis and saw the institution through the difficult times that followed. Harvard is the world’s wealthiest school, with an endowment of nearly $36 billion administered by the Harvard Management Company.
