On the morning of Wednesday, January 31, Thomas R. Cech, the Nobel Prize–winning head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, picked up the phone and called the Harvard Crimson. In December, the newspaper had reported that Cech was a candidate for the presidency of Harvard. Now, Cech told the paper, “I have withdrawn my name from consideration.” Quickly posted online, those words shocked the Harvard campus. Cech wasn’t the first candidate to say no, but his exit was different. It came late in the search process, and the campus buzz had it that he wasn’t just a candidate, he was a leading candidate. With Cech gone, who was left?
Former Harvard president Neil Rudenstine, who preceded Summers and worked closely with Faust on the creation of the Radcliffe Institute, was also supporting the historian. “Neil was really pushing her,” says someone privy to Rudenstine’s efforts. “He made phone calls—lots of ’em. Neil was the man that moved the bodies. Drew owes him.” During the Summers search, Rudenstine’s calls might have hurt a candidate rather than helped, as the Corporation searched for s0meone unlike Rudenstine. Now, the pendulum had swung the other way.
Asked if he had lobbied for Faust, Rudenstine told me, “Throughout the search process, several people were called from time to time to talk about possible candidates, and the search committee quite properly wanted whatever advice and knowledge they could have. Yes, I was asked from time to time about her, and there were other excellent people that I was able to comment on favorably, but I certainly let my own strong admiration for Drew be registered. I thought she was, right from the beginning, one of the clear outstanding candidates.”
But another bloc of support was forming around Cech. “There was a sense of ‘We always have Drew, let’s look at this other person,’” says one source. The scientist’s achievements are not only impressive, they are renowned. And he is as personally charming as he is professionally famous. “He is well liked in the research world and has a magnetic personality,” says someone who knows him. “He just lights up a room.” Plus, his experience felt deeply relevant to Harvard’s future: Cech oversaw the creation of Janelia Farm, a 7oo-acre science campus in northern Virginia, which certainly would have prepared him for Allston planning.
The search committee did have one concern. It asked people who knew him if they thought Cech could cope with being disliked. Explains one colleague of Cech’s, “In his present position as donor, everyone is somewhere between grateful and sycophantic. Being president of Harvard is very different.”
The fellows were lining up in support of Cech. Bob Rubin, who’d been Larry Summers’ most loyal advocate, felt that Harvard needed a strong outsider and liked the idea of a scientist as president. (Cech would have been the first since chemist James Bryant Conant, who took office in 1933.) Robert Reischauer “liked Drew, but thought we needed a scientist,” says a source close to the search. Another person familiar with the Corporation’s sentiments puts it more strongly: “Reischauer was not a fan.” The newest fellow, Patricia King, was not considered an influential voice, while Derek Bok did not feel that he could run the university and play a significant part in the search process. Bok too leaned toward Cech, but for the most part, he stayed on the sidelines.
Cech’s most ardent backers may not have even been on the Corporation. Former Princeton president William Bowen and former Corporation fellow Hanna Gray, who had helped orchestrate the choice of Summers, were both strongly supporting Cech. So too, to a lesser degree, was FAS dean and chemist Jeremy Knowles. Both Knowles and Gray serve on the HHMI board, while Bowen, former head of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, knows Cech from the philanthropic community. All three knew many of the Corporation fellows well, and in their conversations with the search committee all three praised Cech, while Gray and Bowen aggressively pushed for him.
A final Cech supporter was something of a surprise: Nan Keohane. Many on campus believed that Keohane, who was instrumental in Summers’ ouster, wanted a woman president. “The word is that Nan really maneuvered through this—that she sees in Drew a younger version of herself,” says one source, even though Faust, 59, is only seven years younger than Keohane. “She played a very dominant role.”
That perception seems widespread, but a source close to the Corporation insists it’s flat-out wrong. “Nan is very politically astute,” explains this source. “She might have wanted a woman president, but she didn’t want this one. She wanted Cech.” Another source close to the Corporation confirms that assessment.
Keohane declined to answer questions about the search, but she wrote in an e-mail, “We are very enthusiastic about this decision; it’s a great day for Harvard, and for higher education.”
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