Spring 2007
The Search for Harvard's Next Leader
The inside story on how the Corporation's second choice became the next president of Harvard.
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 Now, Cech told the paper, “I have withdrawn my name from consideration.”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?
Eleven days later, at a news conference filled with flashbulbs and fanfare, the Harvard Corporation, the more powerful of the university’s two governing boards, announced that historian Drew Gilpin Faust would be Harvard’s 28th president. Only a handful of the people present knew that behind its wall of unanimity, the Corporation was keeping a secret: Faust was not its first choice. Had he wanted the job enough, Thomas Cech would have been the star of that press conference. Instead, his exit sparked a hasty sequence of events that led to Faust’s coronation as Harvard’s first female president, hailed as a symbol of progress for women everywhere and widely seen as a rebuke to prior president Lawrence H. Summers.
Faust’s ascension marked the beginning of a new chapter in Harvard history, but the story was almost very different.
Harvard’s presidential search began unexpectedly when the beleaguered Summers resigned on February 21, 2006. Former president Derek Bok agreed to serve as the university’s interim leader for one year—a rescue mission. Hoping to find a new president before Commencement 2007, the Corporation wanted to make a decision by February or early March of this year. For the Corporation fellows, the stakes were high. The internecine feuding of the five-year Summers era had almost paralyzed Harvard’s progress on curricular reform, a capital campaign, science planning, and the development of a new campus in Allston. The Corporation—James (“Jamie”) Richardson Houghton, Derek Bok ex officio, former Duke president Nannerl Keohane, Georgetown legal scholar Patricia King, economist Robert Reischauer, financier James Rothenberg, and former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin—could not afford another failed presidency.
Three internal candidates were immediately discussed: Steven Hyman, the university provost; Elena Kagan, the dean of Harvard Law School; and Drew Faust, a Civil War scholar and dean of the Radcliffe Institute. Each had strengths. A neurobiologist—that would help with Allston—Hyman had done a solid job as provost under challenging conditions. Kagan had shepherded a curricular reform into passage at the notoriously cranky law school, and made it look easy. Faust had transformed Radcliffe from a little-sister school into a credible scholarly center.
But each one also had his or her drawbacks. Hyman and Kagan were appointed by Summers. Once he left, that was like working in the White House the day after Richard Nixon’s helicopter took off. And while Faust was respected within the genteel confines of Radcliffe, she was virtually unknown—and untested—beyond the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).
The Corporation wanted a president who would advance Summers’ agenda without Summers’ knack for provocation. “The Corporation was very clear with the candidates,” says one source involved in the search process. “You could add to the agenda, sand off the rough edges, but essentially it was set.” (In virtually every conversation about the Corporation, sources insisted upon anonymity to preserve their relationships with the governing body.) A willingness to fundraise was also vital. Harvard had delayed the launch of a multi-billion-dollar capital campaign for years; with Summers regularly embroiled in controversy, the time never felt right.
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