In the fall of 2001, shortly after she arrived at Harvard as Dean of the newly created Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Drew Gilpin Faust gave a speech to the entering class. She told the story of a young woman named Sarah Pellet who in 1850 had the audacity to ask for admission to Harvard University. In his rejection letter, President Jared Sparks, Class of 1815, assured her that the College was only acting in her best interest: “I should doubt whether a solitary female, mingling as she must do promiscuously with so large a number of the other sex, would find her situation either agreeable or advantageous.”

As the only female on Harvard’s ten-person Council of Deans, Faust knew what it meant to be a solitary female in a crowd of men. In her case, however, the situation proved both agreeable and advantageous. Within seven years, she was elected President of the University.

We like to think that in most things that matter, Harvard has been a leader. But on gender issues it has been astonishingly—even comically—backward. Although there have always been women at Harvard—sweeping floors, washing shirts, typing letters, caring for books in the library, serving tea in the President’s house, or donating large buildings in honor of their husbands or sons—the University has been slow to acknowledge their presence and even slower to admit them to the company of scholars.

In the 1870s, when Faust’s alma mater Bryn Mawr was pioneering in higher education for women, Harvard’s President Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1853, doubted whether women’s “natural mental capacities” were up to the challenge. Co-education was, of course, unthinkable, even when bright young Bostonian women were pounding on the doors. Eliot could barely imagine the consequences of trying “…to teach together sets of persons, who like young men and young women, differ widely in regard to sensibility, quickness, docility, and conscientiousness.” Lesser institutions, like Boston University, might try “social experiments,” but Harvard knew better.

As Faust explained in that speech, the founding of Radcliffe College in 1894 represented “a compromise between what women wanted and what Harvard would give them.” Even when classrooms were integrated, Harvard imposed a rigid quota on Radcliffe admissions.

Linda J. Greenhouse ’68 now the Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times, recalls that when she was a student at Radcliffe, the overpowering fact was numbers: “…there were four Harvard men to every one of us. So we were told that we really were quite special, that it was much harder to get into Radcliffe than into Harvard, and that consequently, we were smarter and better prepared and so on. Yet, on the other hand, not one of the postgraduate fellowships was open to us: the Rhodes, the Marshall, the Sheldon. It wasn’t even a question of competing; they just simply would not have accepted an application from a woman.” She continues, “I think the basic fact of our existence was that Radcliffe students were not the norm. We were the deviation from the norm.”

As a scholar who works in a discipline (history) and a sub-field (Civil War history) largely dominated by men, Faust knows what it is like to deviate from the norm. Perhaps that accounts for her capacity to take Harvard’s peculiar folkways in stride. In that 2001 speech, she cautioned the entering class not to be afraid to question what they saw. “When you hear—in this most wonderfully tradition-bound institution—that something is because it has always been that way, take a moment to ask which of the past’s assumptions are embedded in that particular tradition.” That is a lesson that extends far beyond gender.

Drew Faust is the first Harvard president since 1672 who does not have a degree from this University. In the end, that deviation from the norm may be as noteworthy as her sex. Like other dynamic institutions, Harvard thrives by embracing achievements made elsewhere. We have a lot to learn from other colleges and universities, other approaches to education, and even other schools within our own university. We also have a great deal to learn from history, even when it makes our past presidents appear merely human.

Laurel T. Ulrich, author of ‘Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History,’ is the 300th Anniversary University Professor.