Harvard Crimson reports that the next president will be Drew Gilpin Faust
Faust Expected To Be Named Harvard President This WeekendInteresting. If this is true, her selection ends remarkably leaky process. The Crimson seemed to know most of the key names, and a number of them made more or less public shows of removing themselves from consideration. Consequently, there may be an impression that Faust is not the first choice, and I think there may be some truth to that. It's too bad they could not maintain a secret process so that the new president would enter the challenging job with an unquestioned mandate. But that shouldn't matter for long if she has what it takes.
Radcliffe Institute Dean, if approved, will be Harvard's first female leader
Drew Gilpin Faust is expected to be named Harvard's 28th president this weekend, according to three sources familiar with the situation.
The Board of Overseers, the governing body that must approve the appointment, has scheduled a special meeting Sunday, two sources said.
The Overseers meeting had not been on the board's regular schedule, and it is unlikely that any candidate other than Faust, the dean of the Radcliffe Institute [formerly Radcliffe College - MWR], will be presented for approval, the three sources said. - Harvard Crimson, February 8, 2007
She will be there first president since the first two (and since 1672) not to have a degree from Harvard. The first two had various Cambridge degrees, all granted before Harvard existed.
Labels: Harvard
posted at 12:31 AM
2 Comments:
Omygod...a typo!
Dear folks:
While it's nice that Harvard has located a female scholar to head up the university, I am somewhat troubled by the fact that her scholarship of the confederacy is somewhat racist in character.
She seems overly empathetic to the white slaveowning south in all of her scholarship, and is in fact the author of a book called:
The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Library of Southern Civilization) by Drew Gilpin Faust (1981)
and was the editor of another books entitled
The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Library of Southern Civilization) by Drew Gilpin Faust (Paperback - December 1981)
Even her best work, Mothers of Invention (1996) is criticized as being a study of 500 white, upper class elite female slaveholders married to southern plantation owning aristocrats. It is a study of the rich, idle and leisure female ruling class of the old southern confederacy. More pertinently, Faust seems to deal matter of factly with slavery, without condemnation or moral negativity. It even seems to condone these women beating their slaves with abandon.
Sen. Charles Sumner, the author of the Civil Rights bill of 1875, a leading abolitionist and Radical Republican, and stalwart Harvard grad, whose statue still stands in Harvard Square, would be aghast that a Virginian apologist for the confederacy has become president of Harvard.
To expel President Summers for his remarks regarding women, and then to replace him with someone whose entire academic career is an apology for the racist actions of the antebellum Southern United States is an insult to all African Americans who have ever lived in this country or attended Harvard University, and to all of us who have ever worked on a civil rights case, as I have in the past and published law review articles on the subject. No knowledgeable person in the field of civil rights would ever waste time to pick up a pen to write a single word about the history of the white slave-holding South, even if they were white women, when so much remains to be written about the history of african americans in the 19th century and their struggles for freedom.
These are my feelings, and I must express them. We cannot champion feminism at the expense of racism and Civil War historical revisionism. Harvard, more than any other institution, stands for the proposition that the Civil War was fought to destroy the old south and to liberate African Americans from their chains. Apologists for the old south have no business leading our noble institution.
--art kyriazis AB 80/81 north of the mason/dixon line and an ardent northerner
Post a Comment
<< Home