Faust says women should press ahead
It’s hard to imagine today, but as a woman, Harvard President Drew Faust would have been unable to attend Princeton University, Yale University, or the University of Virginia in 1964. The reality was little better in Cambridge, Faust told a crowd today gathered under a tent during the annual celebration of Radcliffe Day. Had she been a student then at Radcliffe, Harvard’s sister college, said Faust, Lamont Library would have been off limits. In 1967, the Harvard Undergraduate Council voted to ban women from the stacks because they would “make it impossible to study.” At her own college, Bryn Mawr, Faust couldn’t wear pants to class or dinner. On a day that celebrated the 120th anniversary of the founding of Radcliffe College, an institution founded to promote the education of women, and the 15th anniversary of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, created to support the exchange of ideas across disparate fields of...