(Source: Harvard University)

Well, it seems news sources were right: Drew Gilpin Faust, founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute, has been named president of Harvard University. Faust is the first female president in the university's history.

Here's a snippet from a university press release:

Drew Gilpin Faust, an eminent historian and outstanding academic leader who has served since 2001 as the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, will become the twenty-eighth president of Harvard University, effective July 1.

An expert on the Civil War and the American South, and the leading figure in Radcliffe's transformation from a college into one of the country's foremost scholarly institutes, Faust was elected to the Harvard presidency today by the members of the Harvard Corporation, with the consent of the University's Board of Overseers.

The appointment concludes a search launched in the spring of 2006, involving far-reaching consultation with faculty, students, staff, alumni, and others nationwide.

"This is a great day, and a historic day, for Harvard," said James R. Houghton, the senior member of the Harvard Corporation and chair of the presidential search committee. "Drew Faust is an inspiring and accomplished leader, a superb scholar, a dedicated teacher, and a wonderful human being. She combines a powerful, broad-ranging intellect with a demonstrated capacity for strong leadership and a talent for stimulating people to do their best work, both individually and together. She knows Harvard and higher education, and her interests extend to the whole of the University, across the arts and sciences and the professional domains.

"Through her service as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute, she has shown uncommon skill in designing and fulfilling a forward-looking agenda of institutional change," said Houghton. "Through her decades as a leading faculty member at Penn and at Harvard, she has invested herself in both education and research with passion, imagination, and a devotion to the highest ideals of academic life."

Best of luck to Faust. May her tenure be more positive and productive than her predecessor's (that's not saying much, I know).