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From the Executive Dean
A Memorable Year
This February, I had the humbling experience of chairing the selection
process for the 2006–2007 class of Radcliffe Institute fellows. With an
acceptance rate of only 5 percent for the 2005–2006 class, the Radcliffe Institute
Fellowship Program has rapidly become one of the most competitive
programs of its kind in the world, drawing 19 percent of its applicants from
outside the United States and 34 percent from non-American citizens.
Thanks to the generosity of our alumnae/i and the hard work of our staff, the
Radcliffe Institute is on a firm financial footing, enabling us to support the
work of our fellows and the growth of the Schlesinger Library while bringing
us closer to our goal of fully endowing our activities.
This has been an extraordinarily exciting year at Radcliffe but an
unusual one. In January, five years after coming to Cambridge as dean of the
Radcliffe Institute, Drew Gilpin Faust took a one-semester sabbatical to work
on her book on the role of death in the Civil War. It is a testament to the success
of her leadership in firmly establishing both the programs of the Institute
and the infrastructure to support them that we have not missed a beat in
her absence.
With an acceptance rate of only five percent for the 2005–2006 class, the Radcliffe Institute
Fellowship Program has rapidly become one of the most competitive programs of its kind in
the world.
fellowship program
This year, Radcliffe welcomed fifty-one fellows to Cambridge, representing a
wide range of disciplines and the creative arts. We had two research clusters
of fellows: one cluster, composed of three economists and an American historian,
worked on a multiyear project examining the career trajectory of
women and men graduates from elite universities; the other cluster, composed
of a linguist, a philosopher, and a computer scientist, examined the
question of syntax. Each of these groups was accepted as a cluster to the fellowship
program, and a third formed while in residence. Three fellows—
one working on African American marriage in the nineteenth century, one
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