Cambridge, Mass.
The leaks that trickled out over the last year about Harvard University’s search for a new president often centered on its reported interest in landing a prominent scientist and a woman. Harvard got its first female president, but not a scientist, with Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the university’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, who was appointed on Sunday. Harvard also picked a defender of the role of higher education in society, said Ms. Faust.
University officials are clearly aware that it is important that the new president have credibility with scientists, and they have repeatedly said Ms. Faust is up to the task of overseeing the university’s ambitious agenda in the sciences.
They also have denied as a “misimpression” that Ms. Faust won the job by being the last candidate standing, after a number of leading figures in higher education either said they were not interested or took themselves out of the running.
The reception on the campus to Ms. Faust has been warm. She benefits from being a faculty member in the university’s School of Arts and Sciences, the powerful faculty group with which Lawrence H. Summers, the former Harvard president, often clashed. If Mr. Summers’s supporters in Harvard’s professional schools were disappointed with Ms. Faust’s selection, they have kept mum.
But the role of Harvard president extends well beyond Cambridge, and Ms. Faust has already started coming under fire from conservative critics. A blog on the National Review’s Web site on Friday reported that she had donated $2,000 to Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign, in 2004. Also on Friday, Heather Mac Donald, writing in a column for a publication of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, called the direction Harvard seems to have taken with its choice of Ms. Faust a “tragedy,” and said she represented an imminent “feminist takeover” at Harvard.
Ms. Faust, speaking at a news conference on Sunday, said she hoped to use the “bully pulpit” of the Harvard presidency. The issue she said she hopes to tackle, however, is not one of gender, but the role of higher education.
“I’ve been told by many people that I should get ready” to articulate issues of concern on the national stage, Ms. Faust said. “Higher education is being buffeted by criticisms, by expectations that it needs to address. And I hope that together with other leaders in higher education, I can help to talk about some of those questions.”
To dispel expressed doubts about her experience as an administrator, Ms. Faust described the advantages she brings to the job. She said she knows faculty members and administrators across the university and has worked with all of Harvard’s 11 schools as dean of the Radcliffe Institute. In addition, she said she had a “granular engagement” with all aspects of running the institute, given its small size, such as her hands-on experience in overseeing facilities challenges.
“Nobody’s been president of Harvard until he or she has been president of Harvard,” she said.
Asked by a reporter how she planned to approach the transition from running a small research center to tackling the $3-billion annual budget and strong personalities at Harvard, she said, “thoughtfully,” adding that the search committee had asked her that question “in every possible guise.”
Other Names, Other Places
Among the more than 20 names that were floated as possible candidates during Harvard’s presidential search were female scientists, including Shirley M. Tilghman, president of Princeton University, and Shirley A. Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A reported top finalist near the end of the search was Thomas R. Cech, a Nobel laureate in chemistry and president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Mr. Cech withdrew from consideration last month, publicly saying he was content in his current position.
Harvard observers say how Ms. Faust manages the university’s scientific interests is particularly important as Harvard works to build a huge new campus with a focus on science in Boston’s Allston neighborhood. Efforts to align scientific pursuits across disciplines and schools at the university are also likely to tax the new president.
Susan L. Graham, president of Harvard’s Board of Overseers and a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, told reporters on Sunday that Ms. Faust had “built up” the sciences at the Radcliffe Institute.
“Radcliffe had some science before, but Radcliffe has lots more science now,” Ms. Graham said, crediting Ms. Faust’s tenure at the institute over the past six years. “As a scientist, it makes me very happy to see that,” Ms. Graham said.
Nannerl O. Keohane, a member of both the search committee that recommended Ms. Faust and the Harvard Corporation, which appointed the new president, said on Monday that it was a “misimpression” that many candidates had turned down the Harvard post. “There were quite a few good people who were very interested in this job,” said Ms. Keohane, a former president of Duke University who is now a professor of public affairs at Princeton. But Ms. Faust, “someone we’d seen from the beginning,” just “kept emerging” from what Ms. Keohane called “a really strong pool.”
Ms. Keohane also denied that Ms. Faust had been picked because she is a woman, saying that “it would be unfair to her and to us and to Harvard to say that.” Ms. Faust was the “right person” and just happened to be a woman, she said.
It would also be unfair, Ms. Keohane said, to conclude that Ms. Faust had won out because she represented the antithesis of Mr. Summers. “We were certainly not just looking for someone who was totally different from Larry,” she said. “The last thing we want,” she said, was just “a peacekeeper or a healer.” Ms. Faust has many of the same strengths and toughness as Mr. Summers possesses, and she “very much shares his priorities” and his agenda, Ms. Keohane said.
Fans on the Campus
Some Harvard students and faculty members said they were glad to have a president with a background in the humanities. Claudio Sobrande, a Ph.D. candidate in social anthropology, said Mr. Summers appeared to be uninterested in the humanities.
“At least we have a historian,” Mr. Sobrande said. “Let’s see how it works.”
Although Mr. Sobrande said that he had been following the presidential search in the news media and had been reading up on Ms. Faust, he echoed a common sentiment among students by saying that he did not think Ms. Faust’s new role would have much of an effect on him. “I don’t think really much is going to be changing with a new president,” he said.
While apathy about the presidential choice may have set in among some students here on the campus, the news coverage has remained pervasive over the last week. Among the angles pursued by newspapers is that the job of Harvard president has become so unwieldy and, perhaps, so thankless that the university had struggled to attract the best candidates, including those among the finalists.
However, Derek C. Bok, who has been Harvard’s interim president after leading the university in the 1970s and 1980s, tried to dispel that argument.
“Drew, you have a wonderful job,” Mr. Bok said at the podium on Sunday. “Don’t let anybody tell you that this is the most difficult job, the most onerous job, or all of those things. And they will tell you that. It’s a terrific job, and you will enjoy it.”
Ms. Faust’s supporters were clearly thrilled with her appointment, as were many at Harvard and beyond who celebrated the scheduled July 1 arrival of a female president for the first time in the university’s 371-year history.
On Monday, on the steps leading up to two buildings in Radcliffe Yard, where Ms. Faust’s current office is located, were bunches of crimson balloons, on which had been written messages such as “371 years -- about time,” “It’s a woman,” and “Go Drew!”
Robin Wilson contributed to this article.
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