Drew Faust was officially installed as Harvard's 28th president last Friday, the first woman in the history of the university to be appointed to its highest office.
In her address to the Harvard community, Faust touched on the major hurdles the university would face over the next decade.
Faust called her speech a "compass" she would use to guide her actions over the term of her presidency rather than a list of planned initiatives. "Lists seem too constraining when I think of what today should mean," Faust said, according to a copy of her remarks on the Harvard Web site. "They seem a way of limiting rather than unleashing our most ambitious imaginings, our profoundest commitments."
Faust spoke of the public's ambivalence toward institutions of higher learning and emphasized Harvard's need to maintain "accountability" in its ability to engage world problems.
Reform was another topic of Faust's speech. "By their nature, universities nurture a culture of restlessness and even unruliness. This lies at the heart of their accountability to the future," Faust said, though she did not go into specifics.
Faust emphasized Harvard's need to create "cross-school programs" that would bolster the flow of information between disciplines, particularly in the sciences. "We live in the midst of scientific developments as dramatic as those of any era since the 17th century," Faust said. "We must organize ourselves in ways that enable us fully to engage in such exploration."
Harvard must also ramp up its internationalization efforts, Faust said - an ongoing initiative for a number of Ivy League schools, including Brown.
A distinguished Civil War historian, Faust spoke of the need to reach to the past to define the direction of the future. She drew upon the words of past thinkers such as John Winthrop, James Conant - Harvard's 23rd president - and W.E.B. Dubois, to assess the university's future course.
The two-day inauguration began last Thursday in Cambridge at Memorial Church with a reading by Toni Morrison. The Nobel laureate read from a work in progress and received a standing ovation from those in attendance, according to an Oct. 11 Harvard Gazette article. Morrison is a friend of Faust's and delivered the keynote address at a ceremony in June, when Faust left her post as dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
In Thursday's opening remarks, Morrison said she has been making a habit of visiting the inaugurations of women presidents at Smith College, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania, according to the Gazette article.
"I actually insinuated myself into the proceedings - and the hint was received with enthusiasm," Morrison said. "There's no question about the deep satisfaction of this moment."
Faust was also welcomed by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, a Harvard alum, on behalf of the commonwealth.
Faust assumed the Harvard presidency on July 1 after having served as head of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study since 2001. Prior to her term at the Radcliffe Institute, Faust served as a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.
