Category: News and Statements by President Drew Gilpin Faust

Dear Members of the Harvard Community, Harvard’s commitment to excellence is deeply connected to our efforts to attract students, faculty, and staff from diverse backgrounds, life experiences, and perspectives. Exposure to difference fosters creativity, challenges settled assumptions, and helps make possible the advancement of knowledge central to our educational mission. Equally important is our responsibility…

The Harvard Crimson Op Ed On my desk sits a copy of a photograph published last May in the Boston Globe. Outside Mass. Hall, a young woman stands amid a crowd of students protesting the newly announced College policy on single-gender social organizations. The sign she carries proclaims: I SHOULD’VE GONE TO BRYN MAWR. The…

Effective June 29, 2020 The policy on Unrecognized Single-Gender Social Organizations is no longer being enforced. Read the announcement from Harvard University President Lawrence S. Bacow. Dear Dean Khurana: Thank you for your recommendations concerning unrecognized single-gender social organizations, including the final clubs (male and female), fraternities, and sororities. I very much appreciate your thoughtful work,…

As delivered. Thank you, Dean Khurana. Secretary James; distinguished guests; Harvard students, colleagues, friends: It is a true honor and a privilege to be here with you today. Five years ago last month, Secretary Ray Mabus and I signed an agreement to restore the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps at Harvard, and the University’s relationship…

As delivered. Good morning. Bill Lee, my friend. Thank you, Madam President, for that warm and kind introduction. My beloved brothers and sisters. I’m honored to join you and the Harvard University community on this important occasion. I want to thank the students and the professors of the Harvard and Slavery research seminar for revealing…

Dear Members of the Harvard Community, In April 2014, I convened a University-wide task force to develop recommendations to combat the serious problem of sexual assault affecting our students. Today, Harvard’s Task Force on the Prevention of Sexual Assault, led by Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and our former provost Steven E. Hyman,…

We join together as a university in deploring the defacing of portraits of African American faculty at the law school. Such acts of hatred are inimical to our most fundamental values and represent an assault on the mutual respect essential to our purposes as a community of learning and inquiry. Cambridge, Mass….

September 1, 2022 Dear Members of the Harvard Community, Yesterday, a number of Harvard students gathered in support and solidarity with those at Yale, the University of Missouri, and elsewhere who have been calling for racial justice and full inclusion on their campuses. Across this University, from Longwood to Cambridge, members of our community have…

Dear Colleagues, Harvard University has been inherently global since its founding. Today, knowledge is increasingly shared across national boundaries, and challenges must be understood in their broadest geographic context.  In order to fully participate in an ever more connected world, Harvard must leverage its extraordinary intellectual and programmatic strengths with a more intentional strategy of…

Dear Members of the Harvard Community, I write today about an issue that touches the lives of every one of us.  The prevalence of sexual assault represents a deeply troubling problem for Harvard, for colleges and universities more broadly, and for our society at large.  Sexual assault can devastate individuals as well as their families…