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It was a sparkling June day. Almost a thousand people—including alumnae/i of Radcliffe and Harvard colleges; alumnae/i of the Bunting Institute and the Radcliffe Institute; and Harvard faculty members, staff, and students—gathered under an enormous tent in Radcliffe Yard. They had come to hear Radcliffe Medalist Toni Morrison, to recognize the 2007 alumnae award winners, and to celebrate Drew Gilpin Faust’s last Radcliffe Day as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

After Faust welcomed them, she reflected on the meaning of Radcliffe. True to her profession as historian, she invoked the past, quoting the second president of the College, LeBaron Briggs, who described Radcliffe as “an experiment in faith.” A student at the Annex from the 1880s expressed it differently, saying, “We were all more or less pioneers, treading little-trodden paths, and the mere fact that we were doing the unusual gave us a mildly stimulating sense of adventure.” Relating past to present, Faust said, “We have all shared that sense of adventure as we have undertaken the transformation of Radcliffe College into the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study over the past seven years.”

In her quietly charismatic way, Faust didn’t mention her new position as president of Harvard University, which she would officially begin on July 1, though she had unofficially started work right after the Harvard Corporation appointed her, in mid-February. Nor did she mention the fact that she would be the first woman to lead the University in its 361 years. Rather, she reported on the state of the Institute, which she said is thriving.

A Radcliffe and Harvard Education

When Faust began her deanship, in January 2001, anticipation was high. She had been appointed in 2000, but delayed her arrival to complete obligations at the University of Pennsylvania, where she had served on the faculty for twenty-five years.

She had also spent part of that year traveling around to other institutes for advanced study, meeting with faculty members, staff, and alumnae/i at Harvard and Radcliffe, and consulting with the Ad Hoc Committee that Harvard President Neil Rudenstine had invited to assist her in shaping the Radcliffe Institute. The committee—a group of twelve eminent scholars and heads of institutes for advanced study—was led by scholar Caroline Bynum ’62, AM ’63, PhD ’69, BI ’84 and included Shirley Tilghman, a molecular biology professor at Princeton who later became its president.

In February 2001, the group submitted its report, which included recommendations to integrate the new Institute as a single entity, to retain faculty leadership for the Institute’s programs, and to bring the residential scholars together in a central location. The fellowship program—with approximately fifty fellows—would be at the Institute’s core.

Faust says that Rudenstine and Jeremy Knowles, then dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, advised her as she shaped the Radcliffe Institute. After Rudenstine stepped down as president, she and Knowles would go out to dinner about once a month. “He was a great person to bounce things off of,” Faust says. “He explained the culture and mores of the place.”

Before the end of her first year at Radcliffe, Faust spoke to Harvard students about her vision of the Radcliffe Institute. “I can see myriad ways in which the Institute can make a difference for women and thus for all of us at Harvard,” she told the Class of 2005 in her lecture “Mingling Promiscuously: A History of Women and Men at Harvard.” “We can help increase the numbers of women faculty, the quality of their experience, the excellence and importance of gender studies at the University, and the richness of undergraduate intellectual life as well.” 

Building Communities

With inclusive instincts, Faust reached out to share the work of the Radcliffe Institute with a wide audience. Harvard faculty members became involved in various ways—as Radcliffe fellows, as advisors to the Institute, and as participants in research projects, seminars, and conferences.

Harvard students flocked to the Radcliffe Research Partnership program, through which they provide paid research assistance to Radcliffe fellows. “This was the first time I’d really interacted with a professor as a partner,” says Claire Pasternack ’05. Art historian and Stanford University Professor Wanda M. Corn RI ’04 says that in addition to getting invaluable help on the book she was writing, she gained “a very healthy respect for Harvard undergraduate education, which was not something I knew much about.” 

Faust and other Institute leaders planned a range of public events that drew scholars from Harvard and other universities. Some conferences were geared primarily to scholars—such as one on tissue engineering that described the fertile territory where materials science, stem-cell biology, and micro- and nanotechnology meet. Others were planned for the public as well, such as one on lethal school violence, which presented the results of a study conducted by the National Research Council and was cosponsored by the Graduate School of Education and the Kennedy School of Government. Many of the Institute’s conferences are collaborative efforts, involving schools and departments throughout the University.

Radcliffe alumnae appreciated the Institute’s continuing commitment to intellectual excellence and to the study of women, gender, and society. Linda Greenhouse ’68 recalls introducing Faust at a reunion event shortly after the launch of the Institute. Almost no one in the room had met Faust, and many were skeptical, uncertain about where this stranger intended to take their College. But even the doubters were won over. “She was and is straightforward, candid, confident, engaged with ideas, allergic to bureaucratic jargon, and able to generate and sustain real intellectual excitement,” says Greenhouse.

Susan S. Wallach ’68, JD ’71, who served on the Radcliffe Board of Trustees, tells a similar story: “Drew’s a great listener and a great communicator. She has been able to communicate clearly, even to difficult audiences, what her aspirations are for the Institute. She brought a lot of people on board by articulating her vision.”

Radcliffe fellows are an integral part of the Harvard community during their fellowship year, and Faust worked to ensure that they consider themselves members of the alumnae/i community after they leave the Institute. Every spring at the close of the academic year when the fellows receive their certificates, she made the symbolic gesture of leading them in singing the College song, “Radcliffe Now We Rise to Greet Thee,” marking their entrance into that community.

Extraordinary Fellows

The year Faust arrived at the Radcliffe Institute, applications to the fellowship program doubled, from 277 to 569; they now stand at more than 770. As she said at Radcliffe Day 2007, “Winning a Radcliffe fellowship remains statistically more difficult than getting into Harvard College.”

But it’s the accomplishments of the fellows themselves that tell the most interesting stories: Novelist Gish Jen ’77, BI ’87, RI ’02 says she found the courage to adopt an unconventional style in her novel The Love Wife (Knopf, 2004) as a result of her interactions with other fellows. Caroline Elkins AM ’96, PhD ’01, RI ’04, the Hugo K. Foster Associate Professor of African Studies in Harvard’s history department, was able to start and finish her Pulitzer Prize–winning book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (Holt, 2005). Every year, Radcliffe fellows tell stories of breakthroughs and advances in their work. In the past two years alone, three fellows have won Pulitzer Prizes and one received a MacArthur award.

A signal achievement of the fellowship program is its inclusion of prominent scientists: approximately a dozen from each fifty-member class are scientists, including bench scientists who must travel back to their home institutions to oversee their laboratories. Others come from local institutions, such as Susan Lindquist RI ’08, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on protein misfolding, which has been implicated in Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases.

Salil Vadhan ’95, RI ’04, the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard who led a Radcliffe research cluster on the use of randomness to improve efficiency in computation, says of Faust’s achievements at the Radcliffe Institute, “One of the remarkable things about Radcliffe under Drew’s leadership is how it managed to foster a sense of community and interaction across a wide range of academic disciplines, while at the same time giving individual researchers and groups the freedom and support to advance their own research projects.”

That may be Faust’s greatest accomplishment as founding dean—establishing the Radcliffe Institute as neutral ground where interdisciplinary mix-ups occur. Lizabeth Cohen RI ’02, the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in Harvard’s history department, compares Radcliffe to other institutes for advanced study. “What distinguishes the Radcliffe Institute from its peer institutions—the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in California, the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC—is its much larger range of focus to include not only humanities and social science, but science and the creative arts as well,” she says. “Remarkable cross-fertilizations take place across the usual disciplinary boundaries. When I was a fellow, I learned an extraordinary amount from the photographers, fiction writers, and scientists, with whom I would otherwise never have shared my work.”

Strengthening the Schlesinger Library

When she first came to Radcliffe, Faust remarked on how thrilled she was to live across the street from Radcliffe’s world-renowned library of women’s history. During her years as dean, she has strengthened the library in various ways: by appointing faculty leaders, by renovating the library building, and by underwriting the processing of library collections to make them available to researchers. The library and the fellowship program form the intellectual core of the Institute.

Faust proudly points out that Radcliffe alumnae have been especially generous to the Schlesinger Library: the Classes of 1954 through 1957 have directed their fiftieth reunion gifts to it, and other alumnae have also established endowments there.

Adept Administrator, Active Scholar

In addition to her work shaping the Radcliffe Institute, Faust was actively involved in broader University efforts. She spent the spring of 2005 coordinating two task forces to improve the representation of women faculty members and women in science and engineering at Harvard, at the request of Harvard President Lawrence Summers. Barbara J. Grosz, Radcliffe’s dean of science, chaired the Task Force on Science and Engineering, and Evelynn Hammonds, a professor of the history of science and African and African American studies, led the Task Force on Women Faculty. In May 2005, the groups presented their recommendations, and the University designated $50 million to begin implementing them.

In January 2006, Faust arranged to take a sabbatical semester to finish her sixth book, which she had started before she accepted the Radcliffe job. She had always planned to remain an active scholar, and those who established the Institute expected the dean to continue to publish and teach. She spent the winter and the summer on Cape Cod writing about death in the Civil War.

President-Elect

Rumors abounded during the search for a new president of Harvard, but Faust said little. At the announcement of her appointment, in February 2007, she spoke from the heart: “I love universities and I love this one in particular. I can imagine no higher calling, no more exciting adventure than to serve as the president of Harvard.”

As president-elect, succeeding Derek Bok, who led the University after Summers resigned, Faust focused on filling several deanships, including the post she would vacate on July 1. She made her first decanal appointment in early May, when she named Barbara J. Grosz interim dean of the Radcliffe Institute. In early June, she appointed a new dean for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences: Michael D. Smith, the McKay Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and associate dean for computer science and engineering. Also in early June, Faust named an interim dean of the medical school, Barbara J. McNeil, the Ridley Watts Professor of Health Care Policy and a professor of radiology. The dean of the design school, Alan A. Altshuler, agreed to stay on until Faust could appoint a permanent dean.

“Universities Want to Upset People”

With the momentum behind her of successfully founding the Radcliffe Institute, Faust is setting out on a new agenda. At its heart is achieving a unified University. “We’ve been talking about it for a long time, and now we really have to do it,” she says. “We have to do it because of the nature of knowledge, which is much more collaborative and interdisciplinary than it was in the past.” One of her goals at Radcliffe, which she accomplished, was to integrate its units. She also aims to achieve University priorities set by the Harvard Corporation: building the Allston campus, strengthening the sciences, and expanding access to education.

An overarching goal is to elucidate universities to the world at large. “Universities want to upset people—give them new ideas, make them doubt what they’re thinking,” Faust says. “We need to explain these institutions and make sure that they’re maintained as the curious, complicated organizations they are.”

Keeping the Faith

In Faust’s view, Radcliffe has always been about change. “In 1879, it was about changing women’s opportunities and changing American higher education,” she wrote in her letter in the fifth-anniversary edition of the Radcliffe Quarterly. “Now, as an institute for advanced study, it is about changing knowledge and changing lives.”

On her last Radcliffe Day, Faust emphasized her continuing belief in Radcliffe: “My commitment to this experiment in faith will remain unfaltering. I have loved being Radcliffe’s founding dean, and I thank you for giving me this opportunity and for helping me all along the way. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.” With those words, the audience under the tent rose to give her a standing ovation.

Photo by Webb Chappell