May/June 2007
Lady in Waiting
As Drew Gilpin Faust prepares to take Harvard’s helm, the president-elect remains a little-known figure to many faculty, students, and alumni. How did the Civil War historian and Radcliffe dean make her way to the top of the world’s most powerful university? And what does she intend to do now that she’s there? Richard Bradley reports on the big questions surrounding Harvard’s new president.
It’s not a shock that Faust isn’t well known beyond the worlds of Radcliffe and historians. What surprises is how little known she is within Harvard, especially among the professional schools. “She starts with a blank slate as far as we’re concerned,” says Jay Lorsch, a professor at the business school and a student of corporate boards. “We’ll judge her by what she does.”
Even within FAS, Faust’s ostensible power base, many professors simply don’t know her. Radcliffe is a small and isolated part of the university, and Faust has only been at Harvard since 2001, a very short time in Harvard years. Moreover, many of those who do know Faust don’t know her well. “She plays her cards close to the vest,” people say. Her colleagues speak of a polite but firm reserve. “It’s hard to get to know Drew,” says one professor who has worked closely with her. “She’s just not that revealing a person. You can sit with her in a committee meeting for hours and hours, and still not get much sense of her personality.” Faust asks incisive questions and listens carefully, but she rarely reveals her own inclinations, preferences, and opinions. She has also turned down almost all requests for interviews, including one for this story. Faust granted her only substantial audience to Jim Lehrer of PBS’s NewsHour. During the interview, Faust displayed the ability to dodge a question, but not the talent for answering one in a way that might inspire, challenge, or thrill an audience. Asked, for example, if her job as president was “to change things,” Faust responded, “Well, I think higher education in general and Harvard in particular are facing particular opportunities, challenges right now. And so the way we address those will involve certain kinds of important changes.” Et cetera.
With the women-in-science crisis, she was put in a position where she could become fundamentally more central to the institution and a much stronger candidate for president."
Faust’s intimates say that she is honest, warm, candid, and unexpectedly funny, particularly once she gets to know you. “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Drew Faust,” says historian Nancy Cott, the director of the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute. But the circle of Faust’s close friends is small and protective. (Meanwhile, many professors interviewed for this article asked to be anonymous, fearing the consequences of offending the incoming president.) Her closest advisers are her husband, historian of science Charles Rosenberg, and a group of senior female faculty said to include Nancy Cott, historian Laurel Ulrich, Radcliffe Dean of Science Barbara Grosz, Harvard Vice President for Policy A. Clayton Spencer, historian of education Patricia Graham, and political scientist Jane Mansbridge. Even they can’t always read Faust. “I’ve talked to her several times [since she was chosen] about how she’s feeling,” Cott says, “but I feel like she’s saying only a very small minority of the things that she’s experiencing and feeling.” Faust has admitted, Cott adds, to being surprised and moved by how many letters of support she has received from girls and women across the nation.
Faust’s reticence helps explain why she was so quickly categorized by her gender and her status as the un-Summers. Both labels fill a vacuum of knowledge about just who Drew Faust is and why she wants to be Harvard’s president.
“I grew up in a privileged family,” Faust once wrote. Indeed she did. Her father, McGhee Tyson Gilpin, was a Princeton alum and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune who devoted himself to breeding horses; her mother, Catharine Mellick, was a socialite from New Jersey. As the Globe has reported, Gilpin and Mellick met on a fox hunt.
Courtesy of Canaday Library/Bryn Mawr CollegeHear no evil, see no evil: Faust (standing) with fellow members of the Self Government Association at Bryn Mawr.Along with her three brothers, Catharine Drew Gilpin, who was born on September 18, 1947, grew up on the family’s Lakeville Farm, a substantial house on hundreds of acres of land in western Virginia. (“Faust” comes from an early marriage to Stephen Faust, now a Maryland orthopedist, which ended in divorce in 1976.) Nearby was her grandmother’s mansion, Scaleby, a massive home built in the first decade of the 20th century by Faust’s great-grandfather, Henry Brooke Gilpin, a Baltimore pharmaceutical dealer. Festooned with Tuscan columns, Scaleby had a six-car garage, a ballroom, and over a dozen farm-related buildings scattered about the 200-acre property. Its construction was an expression of social ambition. As the unnamed writer of Scaleby’s application to the National Register of Historic Places put it, “The design of Scaleby appears to be an attempt by the Gilpins to join the longstanding tradition in Clarke County of upper-class Virginia families who build large country houses.”
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