With his characteristic eloquence and understatement, John Rosenberg profiles Drew Faust in this month's Harvard magazine.

Rosenberg's thesis, which would provide the theme for an interesting book:

Scholarly curiosity has motivated her research and writing, aligning her own career experience closely with that of the professors she will now lead. But her subjects and discoveries, unlike those of most of her former peers, bear an almost uncanny relevance to thinking about the culture of elite research universities. For after a century of intellectual and institutional preeminence, universities have entered an era when their assumptions and performance face questions both from within and from the wider society.

Other nuggets from the article:

—Faust was treated for breast cancer in 1988 and thyroid cancer in 1999. (Has that been reported elsewhere? If so, I missed it.)

—Faust credits Neil Rudenstine as being the driving force in her transition from scholarship to academic administration

—Faust calls "This Republic of Suffering," due from Knopf next spring, her "scholarly denouement."

—Faust wants to restart university-wide academic planning

—Faust wants the arts at Harvard to be comprehensively reconsidered, saying that this is "a world in which the arts are taking on much more importance in undergraduate life in our peer institutions."

(I think this is a nice way of saying that the arts at Harvard are lousy; so far as I can tell, there's no great shift in the importance of the arts at Yale, Princeton and Stanford.)

Faust is circumspect, as always. And as you might expect, so is the article.