Harvard Chooses New President
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After a yearlong, secretive search with more than 30 candidates, Harvard University chose its 28th president, Radcliffe Institute leader Drew Gilpin Faust, a Civil War historian and Harvard’s first female president. A testament to Harvard’s enduring brand, the presidential search was followed closely by the media and college newspapers. The latter group covered it closely mostly because so many college presidents were being considered for the job, including the current presidents at Columbia, Penn, Brown, Princeton, Tufts and Pomona, and our own John Etchemendy (although he is provost, not president).
Each well-known leader, from Princeton’s Shirley Tilghman to Columbia’s Lee Bollinger, dutifully denied interest in the job personally, and despite their stringent denials, one was reminded of the recent case of Nick Saban, who took the football coach job at Alabama soon after yelling at reporters that he was “not interested” in the job. Speculation on Penn’s campus, for example, reached a fever pitch when their president, Amy Gutmann, was caught in Cambridge not long after declaring she was not interested in the job. Etchemendy, at least publicly, removed himself from consideration with denials issued to the Daily and especially with his defense of Stanford’s Early Action program in an op-ed in the New York Times, published soon after Harvard and Princeton abolished theirs. The Crimson reported, however, that he was one of the four “finalist” candidates, leading one to wonder how much interest Etchemendy really had.
But in the end, Harvard went with a surprise—a quiet woman who oversees the Radcliffe Institute, the last remnant of Harvard’s former women’s-only college. As late as late January, it appeared that the secretive selection committee was going to tap Law School Dean Elena Kagan (who was visibly upset after learning that she would not be chosen). But Harvard went ahead and chose Faust, and it seemed like the school wanted to emphasize faculty relations after Lawrence Summers’s stormy tenure, a reign marked by incredibly testy administration-professorial relations. Summers, in his attempt to reform the curriculum and reduce the faculty’s power, forced out deans, had well-known scholar Cornel West leave for Princeton, and in the end could not survive the charged atmosphere, despite having the support of 75% of students, according to a Harvard Crimson poll.
Despite the media attention, Harvard’s presidency did not appear to be as coveted as one might have thought it to be. With an activist faculty, major obstacles to a proposed expansion across the Charles River, and pressure to have more staying power than Summers, it is understandable why so many university presidents were reluctant to take the job. Perhaps, even, the “Harvard brand” is in decline, as its once-huge advantage in financial and academic resources has been eroded by aggressive fundraising campaigns at Stanford, Yale, Penn and elsewhere. Harvard’s president also operates in a complex network of oversight committees, making it difficult to effectively maneuver such a large institution in one direction or another. Summers tried for years to expand offerings and research in the sciences, at least partially to ape Stanford and MIT’s success, but progress on that front has been middling.
Faust was clearly not Harvard’s first choice, but it is likely that she will perform well at the one aspect that will mark the first couple years at her tenure: improving faculty relations. But she does not, at the moment, have the stature of someone like Stanford’s John Hennessy or Princeton’s Tilghman, although the special spotlight accorded to Harvard’s president, whoever that is, means she will have more than enough media attention to develop a public agenda.
