A female president at Harvard

From the New York Times: First Woman Takes Reins at Harvard:

Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University’s first female president, was inaugurated Friday and offered a spirited defense of American higher education against demands that it quantify what it is teaching and focus primarily on training a global work force. ¶ … “A university is not about results in the next quarter,” Dr. Faust said. “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.” ¶ In clear opposition to pressure from the federal government for universities to prove they are accountable by quantifying how well they teach, she called on higher education institutions themselves “to seize the initiative in defining what we are accountable for.” ¶ In an interview before the inauguration ceremony, Dr. Faust faulted a federal Commission on the future of Higher Education empanelled by the Bush administration for its focus on training a competitive work force for the global economy. While higher education makes “a fundamental contribution to training a work force,” she said, it should strive to be far more than that. ¶ She paraphrased W. E. B. DuBois: “Education is not to make men carpenters so much as to make carpenters men.” ¶ …Dr. Faust’s speech offered a ringing defense of the traditional role of universities as “stewards of living tradition,” as places for “philosophers as well as scientists,” where learning and knowledge are pursued in part “because they define what has over centuries made us human, not because they can enhance our global competitiveness.”….