Challenging History

She had breast cancer.

"She handled that the way she handles everything," Hunt says. "She did what she had to do."

"I had a 6-year-old child," says Faust, who had a later bout with thyroid cancer as well. "I wanted to see her graduate from high school. I wanted to see how her life unfolded. At the same time, I was so incredibly grateful that this was happening to me and not her."

Did her experience help her understand the belief many 19th-century Americans had -- as she explains in "This Republic of Suffering" -- that their lives would be enhanced by an awareness of death?

"Oh, yes," she says quietly.

A minute later, she's smiling again.

"I was a big fan of 'Six Feet Under,' " Faust says.

'Is This Really Happening?'

Time to flash forward a couple of decades. Faust is being formally installed as Harvard's 28th president -- the first to be blessed with two X-chromosomes. In the crowd are a cadre of historian friends who shared her journey from "Don't bother to apply" to this not-quite-believable day.

"We were pinching ourselves and saying, 'Is this really happening?' " Hunt recalls.

It was. But how it had happened still wasn't precisely clear.

Did it begin, perhaps, when Faust -- after joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty straight out of graduate school -- found herself, as a sensible-seeming female, being asked about administrative jobs?

"People would look at me and say, 'Here's a sane one,' " she says, laughing. "I decided I didn't want to do that."

For academic women, everything was new, everything was unknown. It was impossible to look too far ahead. "She just looked to the next step," McCurry says. "At every point you enter, your head is already hitting the ceiling."

Says Faust, summing up for her imaginary biographer: "I have been the enormous beneficiary of a time of great change."

Her resistance to administrative work began to waver in the fall of 1999, when then-Harvard President Neil Rudenstine started calling her about the transition the university's separate-but-not-very-equal college for undergraduate women was going through.

As part of the deal by which Radcliffe College would finally, completely, merge with Harvard College, its name and some significant resources were to go to the new Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a scholarly haven that would emphasize the study of women, gender and society. Rudenstine started by asking Faust's advice, then began recruiting her for the deanship of the institute.

"I seem to be talking to Neil about going to Harvard," Faust told her husband.

"Does Neil understand that you'll never go?" she remembers him asking.

But she did.

The timing was good, Rosenberg says: Their daughter was just out of high school. Faust says she was attracted to the prospect of building an institution with "a strong emphasis on two things that mattered to me a lot: the free play of intellect and ideas, and the issues concerning women and gender that I thought it was important for Harvard to get right."

She wasn't looking beyond Radcliffe. How could she?

Yes, there were already women presidents at Ivy League universities. But there was no way Faust could have anticipated that Rudenstine's successor, Larry Summers, would go down in flames, his leadership style condemned as arrogant and non-consultative by a significant portion of the faculty.

And there was certainly no way to predict the irony that Summers would fan those flames with ill-advised remarks on the possibility that high-level science and engineering might be -- just as Faust's mother had tried to warn her, all those years ago -- a man's world.

Last February, on the day her selection was announced, Faust made a point of drawing a distinction for a Boston Globe reporter. "I am the president of Harvard," she said, "not the woman president of Harvard."

"What I meant by that was: I don't have an asterisk," she says now. Nothing about being a woman makes her less powerful or legitimate than her male predecessors.

And yet . . .

After she was chosen, Faust was inundated with mail, much of it from young girls. "Young girls in China, young girls in India, Brownie Scout troops who sat together and all wrote out little letters for me and then put them in envelopes," she says. "What this appointment meant to women and friends of women all over the world was overwhelming to me."

She's been trying to decide what she owes them, how she can best respond. She'll be doing a fair amount of international traveling, she says, and "I've asked to go to girls schools. I don't know if I'll see the actual young women who wrote to me -- probably not -- but I'll see young women like them."

Meanwhile, those letters are being carefully preserved.

Drew Gilpin Faust is far too good an archive rat to miss the fact that she's become a part of history herself.