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Steve and Cokie Roberts -National columnists

Harvard headed by a woman - how sweet it is. It's a wonderful stick in the eye of the University's last president Larry Summers, who absurdly questioned whether it was women's “innate” differences, rather than rampant discrimination, that kept their numbers low on the science faculties. The ascension of Drew Gilpin Faust to the top of the nation's oldest and most self-reverential institution also breaks another significant barrier in the long struggle of women to prove that they can be the best “man” for the job.

Sure, she's the fourth female in the current roster of Ivy League presidents, bringing the number now to half of the esteemed eight. But, for better or worse, Harvard is Harvard and a woman heading the school that's produced seven presidents of the United States marks a milestone.

Maybe more shocking than her sex to the Old Boys who have always run Harvard is the fact that Dr. Faust is the first president since 1672 not to have graduated from their august institution. That's hardly surprising. Drew Faust, like so many female leaders around her age - think Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton - graduated from a woman's college. Her alma mater, Bryn Mawr, along with others of the so-called Seven Sisters and countless Catholic schools in the 1950s and ‘60s, served as the training grounds for many of the women who would become the leaders of the ‘80s, ‘90s and now.

Keep in mind, the Ivy League schools that have since gone co-ed - Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth and Brown - were at that point all-male preserves. So were Catholic colleges like Georgetown and Notre Dame. Harvard and Radcliffe had a kind of bifurcated system where male and female students went to classes together but lived at opposite ends of campus and received separate diplomas. And despite the presence of “girls” in the classroom, they were considered a dangerous distraction in a “Harvard man's” life.

We remember. Steve was at Harvard in those years, Cokie at nearby Wellesley. We lived with and tried to fight against the sexism that pervaded “The Yard.” It was, as Drew Faust's mother cautioned her, “a man's world.” But women's colleges were subversively and systematically working to topple that world by turning out highly educated women who would insist on legal and economic equality.

There's still a long way to go, baby. When Dr. Faust attends a faculty meeting at Harvard, she will encounter men holding three quarters of the tenured and tenured-track positions. Only nine women sit at the top of Fortune 500 companies; only 90 of 535 members of the House and Senate are women. We've never had a woman President of the United States. So women can't rest, equality is still elusive.

Still, the trend lines when you look at education give more cause for concern about the future of boys than girls. The Census Bureau tells us that back in 1950 more than seventy five percent of all college degrees went to men. By 2004 the percentage of male graduates dropped to not quite forty-two. And this comes at a time when a college degree is more valuable than ever.

The Educational Testing Service recently published startling survey results: In 1979 a man with a college degree could, over his lifetime, expect to earn 51 percent more than a man with a high school education. By 2004 that number had skyrocketed to 96 percent.

No high school degree? Forget it. A dropout's prospects of making a decent living are bleak indeed. Who are those dropouts? Boys. Especially Hispanic and black boys. Now some public school systems want to experiment with single sex education, to teach boys separately in the hopes that they might be more inclined to stay in school and go on to college if they have special programs geared to their needs.

So much of the success of women's education has to do with instilling confidence in a girl's sense of her intellectual abilities; maybe that can work for boys too. The Department of Education thinks the schools should be allowed to try these voluntary programs without facing sex discrimination lawsuits. But several women's rights organizations disagree, fearing that separate will once again mean unequal and girls will get the short stick.

We don't think they're right. We think women will continue to succeed, despite the Larry Summers of the world. And if boys get the extra help they need, who knows? Maybe they can grow up to be like Drew Gilpin Faust.

Steve Roberts' latest book is “My Fathers' Houses: Memoir of a Family” (William Morrow, 2005). Steve and Cokie Roberts can be contacted by e-mail at stevecokie@gmail.com.

Copyright 2007, Newspaper Enterprise Assn.

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