Harvard’s President on Leading During a Time of Change

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.

For 371 years, men held the highest office at Harvard University. In 2007, that changed. Drew Gilpin Faust became the first female president of Harvard. But to her, her leadership was not about gender equity.

“I’m not the woman president of Harvard,” she said at the news conference announcing her promotion. “I’m the president of Harvard.”

Over the past 11 years, Faust has guided the university through a lot of change, from leading through the financial crisis to increasing student diversity to expanding financial aid and advocating for undocumented students.

And, with time, she also came to view her role as a female leader a little differently.

I sat down with her in her office to talk about that and more.

Drew, thank you so much for sitting down with us.

DREW GILPIN FAUST: It’s a pleasure. Thank you for asking me.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah, in 2007, when you became president, a lot of media attention focused on you being the first female president of Harvard. What was it like to break that glass ceiling?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: What was it like to break that glass ceiling? I grew up in higher education and entered the academic world at a time when doors were opening for women. And I often had been the first to do this or that. So, it didn’t seem entirely surprising in the sense that I recognized that I was part of a wave of change. It was very gratifying and meaningful when I heard after my appointment, and the announcement of my appointment, from young women and the parents of young women all around the world about how much this meant. And that, in a sense, gave me pause, because I thought, wow, this is a big responsibility that I should act on, that if it is so meaningful to these young women, what can I give them? What can I represent to them that will fulfill their expectations of the significance of having a woman as president of Harvard? So, I’ve tried to reach out to young women around the world when I’ve traveled. I’ve tried to represent issues that are significant to women, to push opportunities for women here at Harvard, and to be a role model that says to other women, you can do it, too. This is a natural occurrence.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I like that way of putting it, a natural occurrence. Is there any advice you would give to other women who might be the first woman to hold a particular role or the only women in their department?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: What advice would I give? I’d say watch and listen carefully and try to understand the culture into which you are moving, and what the most effective elements to change that culture can be. How to bring people along with you. How to, as soon as you can, bring more women into your orbit so that you’re not the only woman in a department for very long. And don’t be afraid to speak out about women’s issues. I fear that often women have felt they have to be imitation men and not acknowledge the fact of their gender and the fact that we need to do more for and about women. So, hiding it doesn’t solve the problem. Speaking out about it, I think, makes other people more comfortable with addressing it.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I did notice the female executives I talk to never wanted to talk about gender stuff. They were really like, please don’t ask me about it. I just don’t want to go there. You know? I’m not, the female CEO of this company. I’m CEO of this company. You know?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: Yes, that’s what I said when I was appointed.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah. But that has changed. And now it does seem that women are happy to talk about in – and in some cases even want to talk about it.

DREW GILPIN FAUST: Well, I would emphasize that it is important to say I’m not the female CEO of this company. I’m the CEO of this company. Or I’m not the woman president of Harvard. I’m the president of Harvard. Insofar as it means, don’t dismiss me because of this, or don’t think I was selected only because of this. Or don’t think that you can assume I’m a certain kind of person because of this. One thing that got said about me a lot when I was appointed is, she’s so nice. Is she going to be able to be president of Harvard? Well, I think everyone should be nice. But that doesn’t mean you’re not tough. And I felt that, all that conversation about niceness was a very gendered conversation. So, I can be really nice to someone when I’m firing them. It’s not antithetical to doing difficult things. So, the tendency to stereotype is something we should resist. On the other hand, we do have to say that is a scandal if there are not enough women in positions of authority. It is something we must act on. We shouldn’t just pretend it’s not a reality. So, it’s a kind of tension of upholding both those elements of being a woman at once.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Since you’ve taken office, there are more women and people of color in faculty positions. The composition of the admitted class has become more diverse. Is that something that you really set out to change in a sort of leading from the front way? Or were you just kind of like, this is important to me. We’ll change, but I’m not going to sort of bang a loud drum about it. I’m just going to kind of quietly make it happen?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: It’s extraordinarily important for us to make sure we have the most talented people. And that means you need to recruit them from the widest possible pool and not have people’s access to Harvard limited by a circumstance of birth, such as gender or ethnicity or race or religion. That meant that we really needed to emphasize that openness, to create search committees that understood how to reach out broadly to change financial aid policy so that cost would not be an impediment to that kind of diversity. This community is so important in the way it educates itself, and the interactions and synergistic connections that emerge from being here together, and that’s another aspect of diversity. We don’t want to have everybody with the same ideas, the same experiences, because then what is there to learn? And so, another part of our commitment to diversity emerges from the way members of this community educate one another, whether it be in the undergraduate houses, or in classes, or in faculty meetings. Those are extraordinarily important dimensions of discovery that are central to Harvard.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Is it sort of cultural changes? Are there policy changes? Are there any changes that you think would really help with that?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: Diversity is a beginning. It brings people into a community. But something we’ve been focusing a lot on lately is to make sure that those who come into the community have the fullest opportunity to participate in that community. And so, we’ve been focusing on inclusion and belonging so that individuals who come from lower income families or different backgrounds or from minorities don’t feel that they’re here on the margins, not truly part of Harvard. And that means a variety of things. It means attending to the needs of first-generation students who may not have parents who can explain to them everything about college. So, we need to have better advising systems. It means making sure that students who come on financial aid have enough money to occasionally go out to dinner with their friends and not feel that they can’t spend money on anything, because their financial circumstances are so constrained. It means welcoming and listening to voices that may be different from the voices that have traditionally prevailed in this community. It means paying attention to the symbols around campus. When you see everybody on the wall in the painting is a white male, it makes you wonder, is there a place for me here? So how do we address that variety of issues that ensure that individuals don’t just arrive at Harvard, but really become part of Harvard.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Was there a time that was particularly challenging in your tenure here? And what did you learn from that?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: One of the most challenging times during my presidency was the financial crisis in 2008. And I was just a year into my presidency. And something totally unimaginable happened, which was, our endowment lost 27% of its value. And since about a third of our operating budget comes from the endowment, it marked a real transformation in people’s expectations and possibilities. Harvard had always thought of itself as having ample resources. And suddenly we had to address questions of limits and constraints and reductions that seemed very challenging to the people who had never expected anything of the kind. And it required a mobilization of the community, education of the community. I went around to most of the schools doing financial presentations about the impact of this and how we needed to address it and how we needed to work with people in all the schools to come to new budgetary levels, and try to sustain the most important elements of our commitment and figure out which were the ones we could do without. So, it was a very rapid movement of change that we had to respond to in a kind of immediate framework. In that sense, it was a little bit like a war experience. I thought a lot about the Civil War then, just the kind of explosion of the unexpected and unanticipated and how you mobilize a community to respond.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Did you, was there something you took away from that, that sort of shaped how you think about leading this institution after that?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: Communication is so important, especially in an organization like a university where there’s so many empowered constituencies. Communication is also really hard, because no one, we don’t gather together all tens of thousands of us. And so, how do you reach out to people who may or may not open their emails, may or may not pay attention, may be so involved in pursuing their next discovery that the last thing they’re going to do is look for a communication from the president. So, what are the ways that we bring this community together around shared understandings? And one of the things I found so different from my life as a scholar, because when you’re a scholar, and you say something, or you publish something, you’re not supposed to keep saying it. You’re supposed to say something new the next time you speak, or the next time you publish. So, you’re a university president. You need to say the same thing again and again and again and again and again. And that was something I had to learn.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: How do you pick the issues to speak up on? Because you probably can’t speak up on everything that you have opinions about. So how are you sort of strategic on deciding what to weigh in on?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: Your question about the president’s voice and when to use the president’s voice is really an important one, and one that we grapple with as we see changes in the expectations of constituents and the public at large about when leaders are going to speak out. Our president of the United States speaks out multiple times a day, often, on every issue that enters his head, and so that has been part, I believe, of a much greater sense of needing to communicate frequently on the part of leadership, and an expectation for communication from constituents. So, for the new president of Harvard, it is a different world from when I became president of Harvard in terms of what a community expects in regard to communication. But I do worry that if you speak about everything all the time, people just zone it out, and they, you don’t have the impact. They aren’t going to listen as carefully, as if you choose the moments in which you communicate. So, we think through very carefully when is the right moment for the president’s voice, when someone else’s voice, the dean of the college, the dean of one of the schools, the provost, when a different voice would be the appropriate one, what to save the president’s voice for, and how to use it. On another dimension of this question, the issue of what national issues or issues that extend beyond the university should a president speak on? And on that, I have a kind of rule of thumb that’s not always easily followed, because sometimes it’s not so clear where the boundaries lie. But I feel that the president’s voice should be about things that have to do with higher education. I should not be making random statements about foreign policy or other issues that are well beyond the purview of the university. But, for example, I’ve spoken out a lot about immigration and the Dreamers, which may be seen as beyond the university’s immediate concern, or perhaps in the realm of the more generally political. My sense of that has been, these are our students. It matters to us that they be able to pursue their education. That’s the Dreamers. And with immigration, we’re so dependent on the flow of talented people around the world that that’s a very significant issue for us as an institution.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One of the changes you’ve led that has probably not made a lot of hay outside of Harvard is that attempt to break down organizational and school silos. We used to have a saying at Harvard, when every tub on its own bottom, sort of to recognize that every school was very independent. And instead, you have really pushed the One Harvard policy to be more integrated. How have you done that, and why do you think that really matters for the future of the school?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: Bringing Harvard together matters for the very same reasons that having a broadly diverse population of students, faculty and staff matters, because we can learn so much from one another. And if we put up boundaries between different groups of people, whether it be based on the fields they’re studying, or on some aspect of their identity, we limit their ability to benefit from one another. This became very clear to me when I first arrived at Harvard as the dean of the Radcliffe Institute. The Radcliffe Institute doesn’t have a faculty, so it is dependent on bringing faculty from across the university into its programs and activities. So, I found myself two weeks into my job here introducing faculty members from different parts of Harvard with similar interests, who may have been here for decades, and had never met each other. And I thought, this is such a waste. And so, I relished having the opportunity to bring people together and bring different parts of together at Radcliffe. And when I became president, the opportunity for this expanded exponentially. The way knowledge works now, the kind of questions that students and faculty want to ask also make this imperative, in that many individuals are looking to solve problems. They’re not just trying to explore a discipline that might be located within a single school. Instead, they might come and say, I want to deal with global health. I want to improve the health of the world. Now, perhaps they’re located in the School of Public Health, which would be a logical place. But if they are, they might well learn from the people in the medical school. They’d learn from people in the business school about how organizations work. They’d learn from people in the law school about regulatory frameworks. They’d learn from people in arts and sciences about economics and anthropology. And so, they are going to be much better and more effective at solving the problem they seek to address if they can draw on the whole university. And Harvard has such distributed strength that here more than ever the benefits of learning from one another are intense. So, I wanted to break down those intellectual barriers and promote crossing of disciplinary lines, but also as I saw how the university worked, I realized that administratively, these separations led to duplication, inefficiencies, lack of effectiveness. So, the kinds of One Harvard changes that we’ve undertaken in the last decade range across administrative issues such as more integrated capital planning, more integrated libraries, more integrated budgeting, to more integrated IT, to more MAs and degrees that cross schools. A brand new one is a master’s degree that is jointly offered by the Business School and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The Design School also introduced a new degree last year in conjunction with the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. There are just many more of these kinds of cross-boundary intellectual activities, as well as much more administrative integration.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Was there anything you tried to do that you really wish you’d been able to achieve more on?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: One Harvard is that. I believe we have accomplished a significant culture change. People use those words back to me all the time now. And that means that they’re, it’s in the kind of bloodstream of the place in a way it wasn’t a decade ago. People see the advantage of it. They want to make it happen. But we still have a lot of administrative structures that reinforce the separation of the schools, the way we raise money. Schools think they own their donors. The way we budget. The finances are based on school founded analyses and resources. So, there are a lot of ways in which the structures of the university still need to catch up with the culture change that I think is well underway.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Are there lessons from your scholarship that have been helpful in running this institution?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: I feel that being a historian is a marvelous preparation for running an organization, because being a historian is studying change, how people change, why people change, why they resist change. And leading an organization is about bringing people through change and understanding how to make them comfortable with addressing new realities, how to make them envision and imagine beyond the present, and how to create a culture in which people are eager to follow and to move to new places. So much of history is really about that. A lot of history is about leadership. A lot of history is about followership. And that is an essential element of organizations.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: You especially focused on the American South and the Civil War era. Are there lessons specifically from that time that you have found helpful, or that you would hope that other leaders might pay more attention to as they lead us through this time?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: Being a historian of the American South has made me very aware of the issues of race and difference in American life. And those have been big issues in the last decade on college campuses, with Black Lives Matter, with the attention to the history of slavery at a number of institutions like Harvard. So, I felt that having the long perspective about how race has played a role in American culture has been very valuable. In terms of Civil War history, I guess you could say you deal with crisis and disruption and understand crisis and disruption. But a way that Civil War history has served me that was completely unexpected is that it’s a matter of interest to so many people, and I’ve been able to make connections with individuals in the general public, members of Congress, alums, who just are fascinated with elements of the Civil War. So, I can start by having a conversation with someone about the retreat from Gettysburg and move right into issues of higher education in a seamless sort of way. So, it’s been a wonderful tool for connecting with people, as well as a source of insight for me as a leader.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: You have said that education is not just about sort of what happens to the student after they graduate, but it really shapes the course of their life. It is meaning making over the course of lifetimes, and then for cultural meaning making that extends over an even longer period than that. Was there an educational institution or a lesson you took from your own education that has shaped your lifetime?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: I went to a school called Concord Academy. I arrived there three days before my 13th birthday as a boarding student. And I had grown up in a small southern community where there were very rigid notions about what girls should and shouldn’t do. So, I arrived in what was then a girls’ school, and it was a total immersion experience, because I was a boarding student. And it changed my life. The expectations for girls were so different in New England than they were in rural Virginia. It was a very rigorous intellectual environment, and I loved that and thrived in it. And it was also a place where values were front and center. We were always talking about how to live a life that was meaningful, what one owed to a community, what one owed to the community in which one was located and the broader world. And all of those things made an enormous impression on me in the four years that I would think are often the crucial ones for a young person coming into an understanding of her life and her trajectory.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It’s funny to hear you talk about that, because I graduated from the same high school. By the time I went there, it was coed. I was a day student. There are many ways in which I’m sure our experiences were very different. But everything you just said completely resonates with me. And it makes me wonder, when you think about an organizational culture, or the culture of an institution of learning, how is it that so much changes, but those kinds of values stay the same over time?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: Well, one of the things I have to mention about Concord Academy when I was there is the extraordinary headmistress, Elizabeth Hall, who –

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: A legend.

DREW GILPIN FAUST: A legend, a force of nature, and she’d sweep around the campus. She always had three little dogs following after her, maybe five little dogs, many dogs following after her. And she’s give these speeches to us about what we should aspire to in life. And she was so strong that you could not doubt that women could do amazing things. And I’d come from a family in which my mother never worked, my grandmother never worked, my aunts never worked, or almost never worked, many of them. So, everybody was in the home. And I knew that’s not what I wanted to in my life, but I didn’t have a pathway to imagining something different. And boy was Mrs. Hall ever that. The faculty was populated with a lot of strong women then, but she was the most impressive of them all. Interestingly, though, if you go back and look at what she was saying to us in those years, which were between 1960 and 1964, she was sending such mixed messages by what she was and what she said. Much of what she said was preparing us to be good helpmates to our husbands. And it was almost shocking to me to go back and look at some of this, because it was so unlike the message that actually made it into my brain from her. How does that culture get handed down to other generations? I suppose through long-serving faculty members. There’s a faculty member who influenced me enormously, who I think was probably still there when you were there. What year did you graduate?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: 2000.

DREW GILPIN FAUST: So much later. Sylvia Mendenhall? Did you ever know who she was?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Oh, yes!

DREW GILPIN FAUST: She taught me to write. She enabled me to express myself in ways I’d never been able to before. She supported me when I was rebelling against everything I could find to rebel against. And she remained there until, really until, teaching part time into her 90s, died last year. So that’s a force for transmission through the generations, I would think.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: We’re in a world now where there’s so much focus on science and technology and engineering. What do you think is the role of the humanities in this sort of technological age?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: In this technological age, the humanities are more important than ever, because our capacity to change the world around us through technology is moving so rapidly that we almost aren’t finding time to think about the impact of this. What does artificial intelligence mean? What is a human being, if a robot can do everything? If you have a self-driving car, what are its moral instructions if it sees two groups of humans in its path, and it has to verge away from one or the other? How does it choose which one? There are so many questions about how we use technology. Privacy on the internet. The whole fake news issue that we’ve been seeing discussed so much in the press. What are the ethics? What are the historical precedents? What are the realities that surround us that extend beyond our ability to do something? And our questioning why do we want to do it? And what is our goal? And who are we anyway as we enhance our lives through the extensions of technology, and really change conceptions of what human capacity really is.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, what do you want to do next?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: I want to go and try to be a historian again. [LAUGHTER] See how that works out.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Do you have a sort of idea or a topic you want to focus on?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: I have several ideas that I’d like to explore. And I have recognized that this is not unlike times earlier in my career when I hadn’t had a tenure interruption, and I was thinking about a next research project. And you always kind of have to venture forth and see, is this wild idea one that you can carry out? So, I’ll try out some of my wild ideas and see if they turn into actual projects.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, what do you hope that your legacy will be?

DREW GILPIN FAUST: I hope that my legacy will be bringing this institution together, both as a diverse community in which people feel an enhanced sense of belonging, but also as an intellectual powerhouse that can so benefit from the possibility to learn from one another and to unite our intellectual insights and resources in a way that can have a huge impact on the world. So, I believe that Harvard’s force and influence on the world as a whole will derive most powerfully from its ability to take advantage of itself, and to break down the boundaries that separate us both in the intellectual realm and in the realm of its community and community interaction.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Drew, thank you so much for talking with us today.

DREW GILPIN FAUST: My great pleasure.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust. She steps down in June.

Thanks to Curt Nickisch for producing this episode. To learn more about leading organizations, subscribe to HBR’s leadership e-mail newsletter. You can sign up at HBR.org/email-newsletters.

Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.