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
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 think that the firepower of the Civil War, the numbers of bodies that were left to rot, the numbers of amputations in the Civil War, all of this created threats to the understanding of the human being as an integral soul, as a body and soul that could be united.
Of all living things, only humans consciously anticipate death; the consequent need to choose how to behave in its face - to worry about how to die - distinguishes us from other animals. The need to manage death is the particular lot of humanity.
For all its ubiquity and its universality, war offers the attraction of the extraordinary - the escape from the gray everyday, from the humdrum into higher things.
I think the most important leadership lessons I've learned have to do with understanding the context in which you are leading. Universities are places with enormously distributed authority and many different sorts of constituencies, all of whom have a stake in that institution.