Lawrence Bacow to Become Harvard's New President

Harvard University turned to one of its own for their 29th president. Lawrence Bacow, a former president of Tufts University who has three degrees from Harvard, has been announced as Harvard’s next president. He succeeds Drew Faust, the university’s first female president. “Larry Bacow is one of the most accomplished, admired, insightful, and effective leaders in American higher education,” said William Lee, chairman of the university’s Presidential Search Committee and a senior fellow for the Harvard Corp., the school’s governing body, according to CNN. Faust has been Harvard’s president since 2007. She announced last June that she would step down.

Lawrence S. Bacow, one of the most experienced and respected leaders in American higher education, will become the 29th president of Harvard University https://t.co/j1B49l4fQv

— Harvard University (@Harvard) February 11, 2018

At a news conference Sunday, Bacow acknowledged the challenges facing institutions of higher education today, and called some of the criticism “fair.”

“We need to do a better job of controlling our costs,” he said, according to CNN. “We need to do a better job of operating more efficiently, we need to collaborate with others, with our peer institutions, with industry and the broader world. And, we need to be vigilant to ensure that our campuses are always open to new ideas. That they are places where our members feel free to express themselves and also where every member of this community feels that he or she belongs.”

Bacow is 66. He earned a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard and was president of Tufts for a decade. Prior to that, he held multiple leadership positions at MIT, where he earned his undergraduate degree before attending Harvard Law School He has spent the past six years at Harvard, serving as president-in-residence of the university’s Graduate School of Education. He then took on his current role as the Hauser Leader-in-Residence at the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership.