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.
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
The Chinese Embassy in Manila yesterday said it has filed a diplomatic protest against a Philippine Coast Guard spokesman over a social media post that included cartoonish images of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela and an embassy official had been trading barbs since last week over issues concerning the disputed South China Sea. The crucial waterway, which Beijing claims historic rights to despite an international ruling that its assertion has no legal basis, has been the site of repeated clashes between Chinese and Philippine vessels. Tarriela’s Facebook post on Wednesday included a photo of him giving a
ICE DISPUTE: The Trump administration has sought to paint Good as a ‘domestic terrorist,’ insisting that the agent who fatally shot her was acting in self-defense Thousands of demonstrators chanting the name of the woman killed by a US federal agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, took to the city’s streets on Saturday, amid widespread anger at use of force in the immigration crackdown of US President Donald Trump. Organizers said more than 1,000 events were planned across the US under the slogan “ICE, Out for Good” — referring to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is drawing growing opposition over its execution of Trump’s effort at mass deportations. The slogan is also a reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother shot dead on Wednesday in her
RSS