After Thomas Čech withdrew from the presidential search, it was widely known that Drew Gilpin Faust became the #1 candidate for the president of Harvard University. We informed you about this fact here.
The prediction was correct. As Harvard Crimson informs, Drew Gilpin Faust was chosen and will be nominated by the powerful Harvard Corporation and will be confirmed by the obedient overseers as the permanent president of Harvard University on Sunday.
Faust is currently the president of the Radcliffe Institute, the former female counterpart of Harvard that was merged with Harvard a few decades ago. As a leader, she was able to get rid of the budget deficit and fire 1/4 of the staff - a kind of Chapter 11 management. ;-)
Nowadays, there are about 50 mostly female scholars who are temporarily employed by the institute every year. A positive fact about this list of scholars is that includes a disproportionately high number of theoretical physicists. A less positive fact is that the feminist pseudoscience has been given even more space, see e.g. these lecture series.
As a scholar, she has studied wives of Southern slaveholders during the Civil War and "Mothers of Invention" is her most well-known book. At this moment, you should be told that Faust is not a classical radical feminist: in fact, she has had good relationships with Summers, much like most female physicists who also admire him, and she has non-positive but nostalgic feelings about slavery. For example, she has complained that the 19th century writers who liked slavery are being phased out.
However, I am afraid that the description "female career hunter" would be rather appropriate for her, especially because of the task force discussed at the end of this article: she has always seen the intense reaction to Summers' candid remarks as "a moment of great opportunity for Harvard" and especially herself.
Faust will become the first female president of Harvard. One half of the Ivy League presidents will be female. If you want to compare universities with the commercial world, recall that the last female CEO of a company listed in the Dow Jones industrial average (30 companies) was fired in 2005.
Faust was unfortunately the main person associated with the "Task Force on Women Faculty" - a body that has produced a scary Leninist document that I simply can't digest: it's 58 pages of whining, proposed new bureaucracies and regulations, and policies meant to bring even more advantages to a selected and already way-over-the-edge privileged group of people and to intimidate those who think that it's wrong.
The official goal of that document was "just" the misguided, irrational, and counterproductive dream to social-engineer a different composition of the scientific community; the main de facto outcome was to poison the atmosphere at Harvard and scare everyone who disagrees with these political plans. For a thoughtful analysis of this task force and the ideology and facts behind it, see some articles of Heather Mac Donald:
- Pity Harvard's oppressed women profs
- Don't fund college follies
- Harvard's diversity grovel
- Feminists get hysterical
Despite some positive things you can read above, the sequence of events that made this happen is indeed a pact with the Devil.
And that's the memo.
