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Harvard chooses first woman as school president

Harvard University announced on Sunday that a woman is to lead the prestigious US school for the first time in its 371-year history.

Drew Gilpin Faust, a 59-year-old US Civil War scholar, was named the next president of the US' oldest university during a special meeting of a school governing body on Sunday, Harvard said in a statement.

Faust succeeds former US treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, who resigned last year after a series of public disputes and behind-the-scenes battles with faculty members.

Faust has served as an administrator at Harvard since 2001, when she became head of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Prior to joining Harvard, she spent her academic career at the University of Pennsylvania, rising through the professorial ranks after receiving her doctorate there in 1975.

Her confirmation as president was widely expected after local newspapers reported last week that she was the final choice of a selection committee designed to find a permanent replacement for Summers.

Harvard is the latest elite US university to appoint a woman to the top job, following Princeton, Brown, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania. Faust said it would be wrong not to acknowledge the significance of her gender, but urged people not to dwell on it.

"I'm not the woman president of Harvard. I'm the president of Harvard," she told a news conference shortly after her appointment was announced.

Faust, saying she was grateful for the trust placed in her by the university's governing boards, spoke of the task ahead of her.

She indicated she sees her new job not just as leading Harvard but also championing the cause of higher education in the US, which she noted is often hailed as world-class but also criticized as badly managed and self-indulgent.

"We find ourselves wondering in 2007 whether we -- at Harvard or at any other university -- have the resources, the organizational capacity, the relentlessness, and the leadership to generate continuing excellence," she said.

"What Harvard does in this next decade will serve as an important part of the answer to these contradictions and challenges."

Faust built a reputation for consensus-building during her tenure at the Radcliffe Institute.

"She combines a powerful, broad-ranging intellect with a demonstrated capacity for strong leadership," said James Houghton, who headed Harvard's presidential search committee.

Her reputed ability to forge consensus would contrast sharply with Summers, who bruised egos as he tried to overhaul the undergraduate curriculum and centralize power from various academic fiefdoms within the school.

Summers was never able to recover from the 2005 uproar that followed his remark that intrinsic differences between the sexes may help explain why fewer women lead in science and math fields.
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