Female Ivy League presidents convene in Cambridge

While half the schools in the Ivy League will soon be helmed by women, there is no single "female leadership style" for them to model their presidencies after, President Tilghman and four other future, current or former female Ivy presidents agreed during a panel discussion in Boston last Thursday.

Convened to discuss the changing role of women in higher education, the panel brought together Tilghman, Harvard president-elect Drew Gilpin Faust, Brown president and former Princeton associate provost Ruth Simmons, Penn president and former Princeton provost Amy Gutmann and former Penn president Judith Rodin.

During the discussion, the women recalled challenges they faced before rising to become Ivy League presidents, noting incidents of gender bias that they experienced.

Simmons not only had to endure gender discrimination, she said, but also racial inequality. As a Harvard graduate student, Simmons recalled that she wrote the best essay in a literature class only to have the professor shun her, presumably because she was black or a woman or both, the Associated Press reported.

Tilghman said the leadership styles that she, Simmons and Gutmann developed were all molded in part by their time at Princeton, noting that the three of them were all mentored by former University president Harold Shapiro GS '64. "We each credit him with creating opportunities for women leaders at Princeton, and for being encouraging at all times," she said in an email. "We all agreed we owed him a great deal."

During the panel, Gutmann expressed similar gratitude toward Shapiro. "He would deny credit," she said at the conference. "But, he should get credit."

When Faust becomes president of Harvard on July 1, women will lead four of the eight Ivy League universities — a distinct change from 13 years ago, when Rodin became the first female president in the Ivy League.

Despite this ostensible progress, women are still not proportionately represented in the ranks of tenured faculty at the world's major research universities, the panelists agreed during Thursday's discussion, as reported by the AP.

To remedy this problem, though, it is not necessary for women to adopt a distinctly feminine approach to leadership, the panelists also said. "We rejected the notion that there is a 'female leadership style,' " Tilghman said in an email, "but we did acknowledge that universities work best when there is respect within the community, and consensus-building."

Tilghman added that none of the women had anticipated filling the leadership roles they ended up attaining. "None of us started our careers thinking we wanted to be university presidents," she said in an email. "We had other ambitions, and the opportunity to go into university administration happened unexpectedly for each of us."

But during Thursday's panel discussion, the women agreed that they value their positions as past, present and future university presidents. "There is nothing more compelling than the opportunity to lead a great university," Rodin said.

Besides Tilghman, three of the other four women who participated in the panel have strong connections to Princeton.

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Simmons held numerous positions at the University before she took her current position. She was first a professor of African-American studies before becoming associate dean of the faculty and then associate provost.

Gutmann worked and taught at the University for nearly 30 years, from 1976 to 2004. She was a professor of political theory before she became provost.

Faust's connections to Old Nassau come in her bloodline rather than her administrative experience: She counts among her ancestors the University's second and third presidents, Aaron Burr and Jonathan Edwards. Moreover, the paternal side of her family — the Gilpins — has five Princeton graduates, while her mother's side, the Slacks, has even more.