President

Institutional context

Harvard University, founded in 1636, is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. The President is the senior officer. From 1640 through 2007 — a span of 367 years and 27 male presidents — no woman had held the role.

Career path

Drew Gilpin Faust (born 1947) earned a BA from Bryn Mawr in 1968 and an MA and PhD in American civilisation from the University of Pennsylvania. She joined Penn's faculty in 1975 and was appointed founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard in 2001. She is among the dataset's few entries to lead an institution from which she did not herself graduate.

Appointment

The Harvard Corporation elected her President in February 2007 effective 1 July 2007. She is the first woman President of Harvard in the institution's 371-year history at the time of her appointment.

Tenure

Eleven years. Tenure included the institution's response to the 2008–2009 financial crisis (which substantially affected the Harvard endowment), the launch of HarvardX as the university's online-learning programme, the construction of the Allston science complex, and the largest capital campaign in the history of higher education. She left office on 1 July 2018.

Cluster context

Faust's 2007 appointment closes the dataset's 1994–2007 academic cluster. The Ivy concentration — Rodin (Penn 1994), Tilghman (Princeton 2001), Simmons (Brown 2001), Hockfield (MIT 2004), Faust (Harvard 2007) — completes across thirteen years. The pipeline argument the academia domain page sets out predicts the broader institutional cluster downstream; that prediction is observable in the post-2018 dataset.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Drew Gilpin Faust
• Wikipedia — President of Harvard University