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VOA慢速英语 2007 0217

时间:2007-07-07 06:10:09

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This is IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English.


Drew Gilpin Faust will be the first president since 1672 without a Harvard degree

On July first, America's oldest university will get its twenty-eighth president but, most notably1, its first female president. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust was named this week to lead Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard is three hundred seventy-one years old.

Professor Faust has written several books on her specialty2, the history of the American South and the Civil War. She is fifty-nine and attended Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pennsylvania. She arrived at Harvard six years ago as the founding dean of its Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

She will replace Lawrence Summers who resigned last June after five years as president. His aggressive leadership style was unpopular with professors.

He was widely denounced for comments he made in a speech in two thousand five. He was discussing possible reasons for the small number of women in top jobs in science and mathematics. He suggested that one area that should be considered was the possibility of biological differences between men and women.

He later apologized for his comments. He also asked Professor Faust to help lead committees that were set up to increase the number of female science professors at Harvard.

She will be the first president of Harvard since sixteen seventy-two who did not earn a degree there.

Professor Faust was born Catherine Drew Gilpin. She says her mother told her this is a man's world and that the sooner she learned it, the better.

She grew up in a wealthy white family in Virginia. But she rebelled against the way blacks were being treated in the South. As a nine-year-old girl she even wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower urging him to end racial discrimination.

With Professor Faust, women now head four of the eight highly competitive private universities in the Northeast known as the Ivy3 League.

More women and members of ethnic4 or racial minority groups hold top positions in American colleges and universities than in the past. In nineteen eight-six, ninety percent of presidents were male and ninety-two percent were white.

But a new report this week says growth in the percentage of women and minority presidents has been slow, especially in the last ten years. The American Council on Education says eighty-six percent of presidents last year were white; seventy-seven percent were male.

The group says women were most likely to head two-year colleges.

But the study also found that on average, presidents have been getting older and staying in their jobs longer. Researchers say the findings suggest that many will soon retire. They say that might, or might not, mean more women and minorities taking their place.

And that's IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English, written by Brianna Blake. To learn more about American higher education, go to www.unsv.com. I'm Steve Ember.


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点击收听单词发音收听单词发音  

1 notably 1HEx9     
adv.值得注意地,显著地,尤其地,特别地
参考例句:
  • Many students were absent,notably the monitor.许多学生缺席,特别是连班长也没来。
  • A notably short,silver-haired man,he plays basketball with his staff several times a week.他个子明显较为矮小,一头银发,每周都会和他的员工一起打几次篮球。
2 specialty SrGy7     
n.(speciality)特性,特质;专业,专长
参考例句:
  • Shell carvings are a specialty of the town.贝雕是该城的特产。
  • His specialty is English literature.他的专业是英国文学。
3 ivy x31ys     
n.常青藤,常春藤
参考例句:
  • Her wedding bouquet consisted of roses and ivy.她的婚礼花篮包括玫瑰和长春藤。
  • The wall is covered all over with ivy.墙上爬满了常春藤。
4 ethnic jiAz3     
adj.人种的,种族的,异教徒的
参考例句:
  • This music would sound more ethnic if you played it in steel drums.如果你用钢鼓演奏,这首乐曲将更具民族特色。
  • The plan is likely only to aggravate ethnic frictions.这一方案很有可能只会加剧种族冲突。

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