FAUST: ‘A PRIVILEGE’ TO LEAD HARVARD
University’s first female president to leave in ’18
Harvard University’s first female president announced yesterday that she is stepping down after a decade leading the university.
Drew Faust, 69, who has served as Harvard’s president since 2007, will step down June 30 next year, according to an email sent to students and faculty members.
“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 wrote in the email. “We have shared ample portions of both over the last decade and have confronted them together in ways that have made the university stronger — more integrated both intellectually and administratively, more effectively governed, more open and diverse, more in the world and across the world, more innovative and experimental.”
William Lee, the senior fellow at the Harvard Corporation, the university’s highest governing body, told the Herald the board will create a search committee in the coming weeks. He said Faust will take a year on sabbatical after she departs.
“She has been a wonderful president and extraordinary leader,” said Lee, who noted her replacement should build on the work of the past.
“This will be an important transition for the university,” he said.
Faust is credited with making the university more accessible by expanding financial aid, expanding ROTC on campus, and establishing edX, an online program with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the i-Lab and allowing more hands-on teaching. Under her tenure, she also expanded the engineering department by offering three times as many concentrations and prioritized the construction of a building for the university’s engineering school in Allston.
She also helped raise $2.9 billion for science through the Harvard Campaign and launched a new data science initiative.
But her tenure was not without controversy. The men’s soccer team was suspended last year after a “scouting report” assigning female athletes sexual positions was discovered. She also called for a task force focused on preventing sexual assaults and guided the university through the 2008 financial crisis, when the school’s endowment plummeted from $37 billion to $11 billion.
In a statement, MIT President Rafael Reif applauded Faust’s performance.
“University leadership is a special art, one you only fully learn on the job,” he said. “In that learning process, I have been incredibly fortunate to be able to count on Drew Faust as a counselor, a friend — and an inspiration.”