Drew Gilpin Faust - Appointment As President of Harvard University

Appointment As President of Harvard University

On February 8, 2007, The Harvard Crimson reported that Faust had been selected as the next president. Following formal approval by the university's governing boards, her appointment was made official three days later.

Her appointment followed the departure of Lawrence H. Summers who resigned on June 30, 2006, after a series of controversial statements that led to mounting criticism from members of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Derek Bok, who had served as President of Harvard from 1971–1991, returned to serve as an interim president during the 2006-2007 academic year.

During a press conference on campus Faust stated, "I hope that my own appointment can be one symbol of an opening of opportunities that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago." She also added, "I'm not the woman president of Harvard, I'm the president of Harvard."

On October 12, 2007, Faust delivered her installation address as the president of Harvard at Cambridge, Mass., saying, "A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future".

One of Faust's first initiatives after assuming the presidency was a significant increase in financial aid at Harvard College. On December 10, 2007, Faust announced a transformative new policy for middle-class and upper-middle-class students that limited parental contributions to 10 percent for families making between $100,000 and $180,000 annually, and replaced loans with grants. In announcing the policy Faust stated, “Education is the engine that makes American democracy work.... And it has to work and that means people have to have access.” The new policy also expanded on earlier programs that eliminated contributions for families earning less than $60,000 a year and greatly reduced costs for families earning less than $100,000. Similar policies were subsequently adopted by Stanford University, Yale University, and many other private U.S. universities and colleges.

In addition to promoting accessibility to higher education, Faust has testified before the U.S. Congress to promote increased funding for scientific research and support of junior faculty researchers. She has made it a priority to revitalize the arts at Harvard and integrate them into the everyday life of students and staff. Faust has worked to further internationalize the University and has been a strong advocate for sustainability and has set an ambitious goal of reducing the University’s greenhouse gas emissions, including those associated with prospective growth, by 30 percent below Harvard’s 2006 baseline by 2016.

In May 2008, Christina Romer, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, was not offered tenure at Harvard despite support from the members of the Harvard Economics Department. Because of the confidential nature of the process, which at Harvard includes a panel consisting of outside experts and internal faculty members from outside the department, Faust has declined to discuss press reports related to Romer’s tenure case. Romer was later nominated by President Barack Obama to chair the Council of Economic Advisers.

In the wake of a series of layoffs in June 2009, Faust drew criticism for her refusal to accept a pay cut in an effort to save jobs. In the months preceding the layoffs, various campus groups called upon Faust and other administrators to reduce their salaries as a means of cutting costs campus-wide. Reports on Faust's salary differ: The Boston Globe reports that Faust made $775,043 in the 2007-2008 school year., while the Harvard Crimson reports that Faust made $693,739 in salary and benefits for the 2008-2009 fiscal year. In early 2009, the Harvard Corporation approved salary freezes for the president, deans, senior officers, management staff, and faculty and offered an early retirement program. The University also undertook an involuntary reduction in staff of 2.4 percent of its employees.

In December, 2010, Faust and President John L. Hennessy of Stanford University cowrote an editorial in support of passage of the DREAM Act; the legislation was unsuccessful in passing the 111th United States Congress.