Breaking Barriers: 1st Woman President of Harvard University
Soledad O’Brien, a special correspondent for CNN: Special Investigations Unit, wrote about Drew Gilpin Faust on the annual list of TIME magazine on ‘The 100 People Who Shape Our World’ (2007). Read on to hear what she has to say about how Faust’s presence is redefining the face of the Ivy League academe.
“I come from a Harvard family—no, there’s no O’Brien Library, but every kid in my family (there are six of us) got a degree from Harvard College or Harvard Law School or Harvard Medical School.
As first-generation Americans, we were firmly middle class: good students who aced our SATs and took out loans to pay for the privilege of a first-rate education.
But when I was a freshman, my sister, who was in her junior year, told me she was being encouraged to drop her major, physics. The pressure was subtle, the message was clear: minority females were a rarity in the physics department, so she probably wouldn’t succeed and might as well quit now.
My sister stayed, went on to get her master’s in physics, then her M.D./Ph.D. after that. Her experience has always made me wonder what happens to the students who aren’t as stubborn.
It’s why I cheered Drew Gilpin Faust’s appointment as Harvard’s 28th president—the first woman to hold the job in the university’s 371-year history.
Faust, 59, has a lot on her plate—placating an often unwieldy and ego-driven faculty, making a Harvard education relevant in today’s world, underwriting lower- and middle-class students who can’t afford to pay—but already, by her sheer presence, she sends a message to every 19- or 20-year-old who dreams of going up against the odds: you can do it too.”
