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 Now, Cech told the paper, “I have withdrawn my name from consideration.”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?
On February 4—Super Bowl Sunday—the search committee ate dinner with Faust in Boston, in the State Street offices of law firm WilmerHale, where overseer and search committee member William F. Lee is co-managing partner. That evening’s lengthy session suggested that Faust was no fait accompli. Rubin questioned her aggressively. According to one source familiar with the meeting, “It was, ‘Are you tough enough? Can you make hard decisions?’” As in the past, Faust came across as articulate and forceful. In the end, Rubin grudgingly agreed to support the choice: The Corporation would send Drew Faust’s name to the Overseers for approval at a special meeting of that board on Sunday, February 11.
Meanwhile, the days after Cech’s withdrawal were showing the danger of even a short delay. On February 2, Harvard minister Peter Gomes had published a Crimson editorial titled, “Don’t Rush, Get It Right.” In a learned but cryptic manner, Gomes, known for his strong bonds with Harvard alumni, wrote, “The temptation will be great to hurry up and get this appointment settled. This is a temptation stoutly to be resisted.” According to one veteran Harvard professor, since there was only one remaining candidate, “that was a clear statement: ‘Don’t appoint Drew Faust.’ There was consternation.”
Cech’s withdrawal had made the process a referendum on Faust, and the arguments were starting to get nasty—and public. On February 4, the Boston Globe ran an article describing Faust as the leading candidate. In its first sentence, the article called Faust a “Harvard dean who has never run a major institution,” subsequently noting that Radcliffe is “the smallest academic unit at Harvard and the only one with no students or full-time faculty.” The article also suggested that Faust had been “a closer adviser [to Summers] than either Kagan or Hyman.” Both characterizations suggested that an anti-Faust constituency was using the newspaper to subvert her candidacy. For their part, Faust supporters were rallying around their champion. The press office at the University of Pennsylvania, where Faust taught before coming to Harvard, was busily lining up interviews with its president, Amy Gutmann, on Faust’s behalf. Such politicking threatened to turn the process into a farce. “If the Corporation had waited much longer, Drew would have been severely damaged,” says one Harvard dean.
On Thursday, February 8, the Crimson broke the story that Faust was the Corporation’s choice; the Boston Globe and the New York Times followed up. The secret was out. On Sunday, the Overseers would unanimously vote to confirm Drew Faust as Harvard’s next president. Harmony reigned—Derek Bok, Neil Rudenstine, and Larry Summers would all issue laudatory quotes to the press—but privately, Summers was seething. “Larry is pissed,” says a friend of Summers. “If you put yourself in his shoes, this wasn’t going to be an easy day for him, whomever they chose. But he sees this as the ultimate repudiation—they picked his complete and total opposite.”
On the afternoon of Sunday, February 11, Faust and the Corporation held a press conference at the Barker Center, home to various humanities offices. While the fellows looked on in approval, Faust declared that she was “deeply honored by the trust the governing boards have placed in me.” She added, “Our shared enterprise is to make Harvard’s future even more remarkable than its past.” As she explained, “I am a historian. I have spent a lot of time thinking about the past, and about how it shapes the future.”
The Harvard Corporation has also considered how the past—what is known, what is unknown, what is obscured—shapes the future. That is why, according to the Corporation’s mandate, the records of Harvard’s recent presidential search will soon lie entombed in the underground archives of Pusey Library. There they will rest for 50 years, sealed, secret, safe from the prying eyes of journalists and scholars, until long after the presidency of Drew Faust is over, long after its histories are written.
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