Drew Gilpin Faust
Drew Gilpin Faust
Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust is an American historian, college administrator and the President of Harvard University. Faust is the first woman to serve as Harvard's president and the university's 28th president overall. Faust is the fifth woman to serve as president of an Ivy League university and is the former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Faust is Harvard's first president since 1672 without an undergraduate or graduate degree from Harvard, and the first to have been brought...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth18 September 1947
CountryUnited States of America
I always seem to be reading several books at once.
One of the major jobs of the Harvard president is to choose the deans. I've had the opportunity to choose a considerable number of deans already, so I've learned a lot in the process in doing it.
I'd say Harvard graduates leave here with a sense of the possible and the limit - and a sense that there are no limits to what humans can do and that you can always be pushing, whatever limit you think might be there.
Probably half the cases of Civil War dead were not identified. And so there was no way to let loved ones know, and there were no regularized processes in either Northern or Southern Army for notifying next of kin.
I've always done more than I ever thought I would. Becoming a professor - I never would have imagined that. Writing books - I never would have imagined that. Getting a Ph.D. - I'm not sure I would even have imagined that. I've lived my life a step at a time. Things sort of happened.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.
I've had dialogues with my dead mother over the 40 years since she died.
I’m not the woman president of Harvard, I’m the president of Harvard.
A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future
The ability to recognize opportunities and move in new - and sometimes unexpected - directions will benefit you no matter your interests or aspirations.
Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.
Leadership is about moving people from where they are to where you hope they'll go.
If you don't pursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There is always time for Plan B. But don't begin with it.
I often read nonfiction with a pencil in hand. I love the feel, the smell, the design, the weight of a book, but I also enjoy the convenience of my Kindle - for travel and for procuring a book in seconds.