This is how the Harvard machine rolls on, paving the road towards the future.

It is late March and a Crimson contingent has jetted to Toronto, Canada, for one of the university’s periodic alumni schmoozefests. While guests mingle at the old-world Fairmont Royal York Hotel, the Harvard Alumni Association weekend features panels of celebrity academics, cocktails at the nearby Hockey Hall of Fame, and a farewell address by the beloved Derek Bok.

Saturday morning will bring the moment that has the 400 alums present buzzing in anticipation: an address by Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s president-elect, one of her first such talks to alumni. Like a Broadway show opening in New Haven, Faust will try out her lines in front of a friendly crowd. These alums are loyal Harvardians. They’re curious about Faust; they want to like her.

But if the Canadians are expecting Harvard’s incoming president to present a bold vision for the university, or wow them with charisma, they are about to be disappointed.

In a long banquet hall dominated by massive chandeliers and a ceiling mural of galloping white bulls pulling a chariot, Faust is introduced by Paul Finnegan, the head of the Harvard Alumni Association. “I am confident,” Finnegan declares, “that as you get to know her, you will be as excited as I am about her appointment.” Finnegan is right: Many alums don’t know Faust, who didn’t attend any Harvard school—she is the first Harvard president since 1672 without some degree from the university—and she’s only worked there since 2001.

The crowd greets the new president with a standing ovation.

Faust leans into the microphone. At 5’11”, she occasionally manifests the solicitous posture of a teenage girl who grew before her male peers. She wears a conservative black suit and small, serious glasses, a change from the playful round frames she used to sport. Her hair, cut boyishly short, is a swirl of brown, blonde, and gray.

The audience sits. The president-elect speaks. Her comments include the following tidbits, refrigerator magnets of presidential rhetoric: Harvard has no boundaries … we must break down barriers … the intricate interdependence of our world today … significant challenges … 21st century …build our knowledge base … Harvard’s future …

Reading from sheets of paper, Faust talks for fewer than 10 minutes. Not a long time. And yet, when she wraps up, the end comes as both a disappointment—that’s it?—and a relief; the rhetoric is less than compelling. Faust offends no one and commits no gaffes, and after the debacle of her predecessor—whose name will go rigorously unmentioned this weekend, like a deleted entry in a Soviet textbook—that is apparently enough.

Vice Provost for International Affairs Jorge Domínguez speaks next for half an hour, during which Faust listens intently and scribbles notes. When Domínguez wraps up, several alumni pepper him with questions. None are directed at the new president.

And then, suddenly, the room is dismissed. Lunch will follow. Salmon.

Drew Faust’s international debut has ended with a whisper. Will her presidency begin the same way? And if it does, will that be good or bad for Harvard?

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Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust, who will be Harvard’s 28th president—29th, if you count Bok’s second stint in Mass Hall—is a historian, so let us consider the preceding scene as a historian might. It suggests multiple interpretations. Possibly Faust is avoiding the mistakes of her predecessor, the high-profile Lawrence Summers, by charting a low-key course in the months before her installation. Possibly she is so self-assured that she does not require center stage. Maybe she is in a Hillary Clinton-esque “listening” mode. Or perhaps she has been a behind-the-scenes player for so long that she has not yet made the transition into her new role as the public face of the world’s most powerful university.

Then again, maybe she just doesn’t have much to say.

In Canada, Faust’s understated performance didn’t really matter; it’s early days. But soon, Drew Faust—who has in her  life spoken  as a daughter,  a  teacher, a scholar, and an administrator—will have to project the more emphatic voice of a Harvard president. When she speaks in New York, in California, in Boston, when she asks alumni for tens of millions of dollars, the audiences will demand more than the mere avoidance of faux pas. Faust will officially bec­ome president on July 1. Is she ready?

The answer to that question has enormous import for Harvard, which has now endured more than 20 years of inconsistent leadership. By most accounts, the last five years (1986 to 1991) of Derek Bok’s 20-year presidency were a time of stasis. The decade of Neil Rudenstine, ending in 2001, brought imm­ense financial gain, but Rudenstine’s sotto voce persona left many Harvard professors and alums longing for a more forceful president. And then came the Lawrence Summers half-decade, an ill-fated conflict that nobody really won. Meanwhile, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford have benefited immensely from steady and successful presidencies.

Harvard has so many talented people, so much money, and such a Teflon reputation that it would take a lot to topple the university from its perch at the top of the American educational ladder. The very fact that such a fall has never actually happened demonstrates the thesis. So do the record numbers of students who anxiously apply every year. But Harvard’s supremacy in higher education is not inevitable, and the competition for that exalted position is fierce. Another unsuccessful presidency could mark the moment at which Harvard stops being number one by default—the years in which Harvard stops being, well, Harvard.

This is Faust’s test. If she can develop a leader’s public persona, she is poised to enjoy a successful and significant presidency, for after the bitterness of the Summers era, Harvard wants her to succeed. This is especially true of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which pushed for Summers’ ouster but was surprised by the hostility it subsequently encountered from some media commentators and Harvard alumni, who liked Summers’ style and approved of his goals.

Yet if Faust cannot rise to the occasion, Harvard faces a decade of tepid leadership, of corrosive discontent and insistent whispering that this president, who skillfully positioned herself to succeed Summers, possessed the ability to seize a moment but lacked the skills to match her ambition. A presidency that begins with such questions could, of course, bring relief and ultimately great gratification. But if things go the other way, it could get very, very ugly.

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When the Harvard Corporation announced on February 11 that it had chosen Faust, the press framed the pick from several true but reductive angles. Harvard’s first woman president! The anti-Summers! Consensus builder! Mostly, the coverage was positive. “Colleagues say Faust is driven to confront the truth,” the Boston Globe headlined. Somewhere, Larry Summers was rolling his eyes.

Because she was a well-liked member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Faust was said to be the FAS’s favored presidential pick, and that was probably true. She was not, however, well-known beyond the Yard. Though the author of five books—a sixth, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, will be published in the spring of 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf—she is not a public intellectual. One searches in vain for op-eds she has written, television appearances she has made. Her prose is efficient but not particularly accessible. She has written book reviews, almost all of which appeared in scholarly journals; the reviews are supportive, not provocative. If this cautious monotone is to be Faust’s presidential voice, she will never instigate controversy or needlessly offend. Yet it’s unlikely that such a voice could establish Faust as a great president or a national advocate for higher education.

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