"Noticing your life, reflecting upon it, is perhaps the most valuable thing that a liberal-arts education equips you to do."
"A liberal education demands that you live self-consciously. It requires you to seek and define the meaning inherent in all you do. It makes you an analyst and critic of yourself, a person in this way supremely equipped to take charge of your life and its passage. It is in this sense that the liberal arts are liberal—as in liberare—to free. They empower you with the possibility for agency, for imposing meaning, for making choice."
Drew Gilpin Faust '68
President, Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.
Major: history
Note: Drew Gilpin Faust shattered one of America's oldest glass ceilings when she became the first woman to lead Harvard in October 2007. Earlier, as the dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute and the leader of a task force charged with finding ways to reduce impediments to women's achievement at Harvard, Faust had won praise throughout the university for her collaborative approach to leadership.
At Bryn Mawr, Faust was a student activist who skipped her spring midterms in 1965 to travel to Selma, Ala., and join a march led by Martin Luther King Jr. after she saw television broadcasts of Alabama state troopers attacking marchers with tear gas and billy clubs. She participated in several demonstrations opposing the Vietnam War. She was also active in Bryn Mawr's student government and, she told Bryn Mawr seniors in her 2001 Commencement Convocation address, participated in a successful campaign to abolish campus rules that required students to return to their dorm rooms by 2 a.m. and restricted visits from men.
Faust recently spoke to The New York Times about the importance of openness and communication to leadership in "Corner Office: Leadership Without a Secret Code."
photo by Martha Stewart