The appointment of Harvard University’s first female president was a historic moment for the nation’s oldest university. But some critics call it the result of political correctness gone too far.

By David Pluviose

The appointment of Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, the first woman named president of Harvard University, marks a diversity high point in the storied history of the nation’s oldest college. At age 9, she famously wrote to U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower calling for an end to segregation. And in her current status as a noted historian of the Civil War and Black culture, Faust has shown a profound understanding of the dynamics of race in America. Currently dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Faust earned a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and worked her way through the faculty ranks before moving on to Harvard.

Faust’s appointment means that half of the presidents of Ivy League universities are women. Nevertheless, Dr. Amy Gutmann, Penn’s president and an ardent supporter of Faust, says the Ivy League has a long way to go when it comes to promoting diversity across the board.

“None of us imagined that, in our lifetimes, four out of eight Ivy League presidents would be women, let alone considered that those presidents would be us,” she says. “Now it is all the more important that this expansion of opportunity be demonstrable for members of other groups who have been discriminated against throughout history.”

Faust’s appointment comes as a relief to many critics of her predecessor, Dr. Lawrence Summers. His detractors point to several incidents during his five-year reign at Harvard that they say demonstrated his disdain for diverse scholarship. Early on, Summers permanently marred his relationship with much of the arts and science faculty after a verbal confrontation with Dr. Cornel West, then a noted professor of Black studies at the university. During the heated exchange, Summers questioned the quality of West’s academic work, criticizing him for recording a spoken-word CD. Summers also raised the ire of a number of faculty members by rejecting two separate proposals to launch a Hispanic studies institute in the mold of the university’s renowned W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African-American Research.