Harvard Names 1st Woman President

Newly appointed President of Harvard University Drew Gilpin Faust listens to introductions at a news conference at Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., Sunday, Feb. 11, 2007. Harvard University named historian Faust as its first female president on Sunday, ending a lengthy and secretive search to find a successor to Lawrence Summers and his tumultuous five-year tenure. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer) (Michael Dwyer - AP)

Born Catherine Gilpin in the Jim Crow era, to a privileged family in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Faust wrote that a conversation at age 9 with the family's black handyman and driver inspired her to send a letter to President Eisenhower pleading for desegregation.

She then began to question the rigid Southern conventions where girls wore "scratchy organdy dresses" and white children addressed black adults by their first names.

"I was the rebel who did not just march for civil rights and against the Vietnam War but who fought endlessly with my mother, refusing to accept her insistence that 'this is a man's world, sweetie, and the sooner you learn that, the better off you'll be,'" she writes.

Faust joins an exclusive roster of former Harvard presidents that have included colonial clergymen, Bay State patricians and a cabinet secretary. Former President Derek Bok has been leading the university this academic year on an interim basis.

The other three female presidents of Ivy League schools are Amy Gutmann of the University of Pennsylvania, Shirley M. Tilghman of Princeton University, and Ruth J. Simmons of Brown University.

While the presidential search was marked by disciplined secrecy _ committee members met behind closed doors in a Georgian mansion and were quietly ushered away in idling Lincoln Town Cars _ it also revealed an embarrassing trend: several top-tier candidates said they weren't interested.

In January, Thomas R. Cech, head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Nobel prize winner, asked the search committee to remove him from consideration. The presidents of Columbia, Brown and Princeton all said they did not want the job.

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AP Education Writer Justin Pope contributed to this report.