Harvard University appointed historian Drew Gilpin Faust as its first female president, ending a lengthy and secretive search to find a successor to Lawrence Summers and his tumultuous five-year tenure.

The seven-member Harvard Corporation elected Faust, a noted scholar of the American South and dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, as the university’s 28th president. The 30-member board of overseers ratified the selection. Faust, 59, recognized the significance of her appointment.”I hope that my own appointment can be one symbol of an opening of opportunities that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago,” Faust said at a news conference on campus. But she also added, “I’m not the woman president of Harvard, I’m the president of Harvard.”

With Faust’s appointment, half of the eight Ivy League schools will have a woman as president. Her selection is noteworthy given the uproar over Summers’ comments that genetic differences between the sexes might help explain the dearth of women in top science jobs, comments which sparked debates about equality at Harvard and nationwide.

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