The policy context. The nation's political environment has become more threatening to private higher education and universities, with wide public doubt about their cost and value. Faust and peers have fought hard, with success, to sustain the flow of federal research dollars. But the new excise tax on endowments was a major defeat—a sign of partisan hostility to elite schools. That, and politicking about undocumented students, immigration, foreign students' access to U.S. institutions, financial aid, and affirmative action and admissions (the subject of continuing litigation), have made the president a frequent flier to Washington, D.C., added plenty to the general counsel's workload, and pushed legislative briefings to the top of Faust's remarks at many recent faculty meetings. So serious are these concerns that they featured prominently in the announcement last February of Bacow's selection to succeed Faust and in the president-elect's own speech (see "Continuity and Change,"  May-June, page 14).
Perhaps more impressive has been the changing composition of parts of the faculty—particularly difficult to effect in an era of limited growth, given low turnover and no mandated retirement age. Within FAS, as more senior professors (historically, more white males) have responded to retirement incentives, and as searches are more carefully conducted to draw on larger candidate pools and to guard against implicit biases, the faculty ranks are clearly changing (see "Faculty Diversity"  for the latest data). That has been a focus of Smith's deanship, for which Faust saluted him this spring when discussing the news of his plan to step down.
Her appointments have broadened the possibilities Harvard might imagine, as well. Katie Lapp succeeded Forst as executive vice president. Jane Mendillo was HMC's first woman president and CEO. Diverse deans include Nohria (a native of India) and Mostafavi (an Iranian American). Faust's recent appointees led to a woman dean of public health (Michelle Williams) and, in her last semester, upheld the tradition of a woman at Radcliffe's helm (Tomiko Brown-Nagin) and another at HGSE (Bridget Terry Long ); all three are African American. The Corporation's senior fellow is a Chinese American, and members apart from Faust have included four women and two African-American men . Within FAS, Smith had an African-American woman dean of the College (Hammonds), succeeded by an Indian American (Rakesh Khurana), and a woman leader for SEAS (Cherry Murray).
Reflecting the work still to be done, Faust chartered a University task force on inclusion and belonging  (co-led by Danielle Allen, the first African-American woman to hold a University Professorship). It recommended in March that Harvard undertake initiatives ranging from creating new research centers and investing an additional $10 million in faculty diversity to adopting a new last line for "Fair Harvard," as sung at this year's Commencement (farewell, "Puritans": see The College Pump , July-August 2017, 68, and this issue ).