The inside story on how the Corporation's second choice became the next president of Harvard.
Jamie Houghton was feeling the pressure. During search committee meetings, he could be frustratingly opaque. “He is a man of few words,” says someone who knows him. “He believes that the job of the board is to back the CEO, and he gets very irritable if someone makes trouble—he doesn’t like disagreements.” At the same time, three sources who know everyone involved use words such as “intimidated” to describe Houghton’s relationship with Hanna Gray, Bob Rubin, and Jeremy Knowles. “You see it all the time,” says one. Adds another, “Jamie is not dumb by any stretch, but he is intimidated by all these towering intellects.” If Gray and Rubin felt so strongly about Cech, who was Houghton to argue?
By late January, the search committee was ready to offer the presidency to Cech. According to Harvard’s charter, the Board of Overseers, the larger of its two governing boards, must approve the Corporation’s pick, and it had scheduled a meeting on Saturday, February 3. University bylaws stipulate that the Corporation must forward the name of its choice to the Overseers for consideration four days in advance of that group’s meeting. And so the fellows reached out to Cech to finalize the deal. “They were negotiating with him and putting Faust on ice,” says one source. The Corporation wanted to know if Cech would give up his lab and commit to fundraising.
While no official offer was made, “it was a case of, ‘Look, you’re our guy, let’s talk about these issues,’” says this source. “There’s no question he was the man. The list of donors to call had been drawn up. They’d even started approaching certain overseers, saying, ‘It’s Cech.’” Other sources close to the Corporation agreed that Cech was the board’s choice. To the Corporation’s surprise, Cech wouldn’t play ball: He wasn’t crazy about fundraising, and he had no intention of giving up his research. “They just couldn’t come to terms,” says one person familiar with the negotiations and puzzled by why the Corporation had not foreseen these stumbling blocks. “How do you get so far down the line where you’re going to announce it to the Overseers in four days and you don’t know that you’ve got a big problem?”
Frustrated with these demands coming so late in the process, Cech informed Jamie Houghton that he would no longer be a candidate. Because his candidacy was publicly known, he would make a public announcement of his withdrawal so that, when the presidential choice was announced, it would not look as if he had been passed over. Houghton, displeased, asked him to keep secret the deliberations of the search process. Once the news was out, the Harvard rumor mill quickly circulated the spin that, in fact, Cech was passed over—he wasn’t getting the job, and the Corporation had “allowed” him to make a statement as a face-saving measure. Both suggestions were true only in the most literal sense.
Cech’s withdrawal put the Corporation in a delicate position. Drew Faust was now the only candidate, and everyone following the search knew it; if she was not quickly picked, the delay would suggest that the Corporation lacked confidence, perhaps wanted to consider other names. And if the Corporation did choose Faust, but after weeks rather than days, she would be perceived as a pick about whom the governing board was less than enthusiastic.
At the same time, there were limits to how rapidly the Corporation could progress. After Cech withdrew on Wednesday, the Corporation could not move Faust’s name to the Board of Overseers for its Saturday meeting because of the mandated four-day waiting period. Instead, there was a clumsy attempt to find new agendas for the Overseers’ meeting, a ham-handed maneuver that irritated some members of that group.
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Feeling the Heat from Capitol HillShots in the Dark
Summers Gets a Boost, Faust Takes a HitShots in the Dark
Drew Faust On the Hot Seat
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