Lady in Waiting

by Richard Bradley
May/June 2007

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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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Lady in Waiting

It’s not a shock that Faust isn’t well known beyond the worlds of Radcliffe and historians. What surprises is how little known she is within Harvard, especially among the professional schools. “She starts with a blank slate as far as we’re concerned,” says Jay Lorsch, a professor at the business school and a student of corporate boards. “We’ll judge her by what she does.”

Even within FAS, Faust’s ostensible power base, many professors simply don’t know her. Radcliffe is a small and isolated part of the university, and Faust has only been at Harvard since 2001, a very short time in Harvard years. Moreover, many of those who do know Faust don’t know her well. “She plays her cards close to the vest,” people say. Her colleagues speak of a polite but firm reserve. “It’s hard to get to know Drew,” says one professor who has worked closely with her. “She’s just not that revealing a person. You can sit with her in a committee meeting for hours and hours, and still not get much sense of her personality.” Faust asks incisive questions and listens carefully, but she rarely reveals her own inclinations, preferences, and opinions. She has also turned down almost all requests for interviews, including one for this story. Faust granted her only substantial audience to Jim Lehrer of PBS’s NewsHour. During the interview, Faust displayed the ability to dodge a question, but not the talent for answering one in a way that might inspire, challenge, or thrill an audience. Asked, for example, if her job as president was “to change things,” Faust responded, “Well, I think higher education in general and Harvard in particular are facing particular opportunities, challenges right now. And so the way we address those will involve certain kinds of important changes.” Et cetera.

With the women-in-science crisis, she was put in a position where she could become fundamentally more central to the institution and a much stronger candidate for president."

Faust’s intimates say that she is honest, warm, candid, and unexpectedly funny, particularly once she gets to know you. “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Drew Faust,” says historian Nancy Cott, the director of the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute. But the circle of Faust’s close friends is small and protective. (Meanwhile, many professors interviewed for this article asked to be anonymous, fearing the consequences of offending the incoming president.) Her closest advisers are her husband, historian of science Charles Rosenberg, and a group of senior female faculty said to include Nancy Cott, historian Laurel Ulrich, Radcliffe Dean of Science Barbara Grosz, Harvard Vice President for Policy A. Clayton Spencer, historian of education Patricia Graham, and political scientist Jane Mansbridge. Even they can’t always read Faust. “I’ve talked to her several times [since she was chosen] about how she’s feeling,” Cott says, “but I feel like she’s saying only a very small minority of the things that she’s experiencing and feeling.” Faust has admitted, Cott adds, to being surprised and moved by how many letters of support she has received from girls and women across the nation.

Faust’s reticence helps explain why she was so quickly categorized by her gender and her status as the un-Summers. Both labels fill a vacuum of knowledge about just who Drew Faust is and why she wants to be Harvard’s president.

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“I grew up in a privileged family,” Faust once wrote. Indeed she did. Her father, McGhee Tyson Gilpin, was a Princeton alum and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune who devoted himself to breeding horses; her mother, Catharine Mellick, was a socialite from New Jersey. As the Globe has reported, Gilpin and Mellick met on a fox hunt.

Along with her three brothers, Catharine Drew Gilpin, who was born on September 18, 1947, grew up on the family’s Lakeville Farm, a substantial house on hundreds of acres of land in western Virginia. (“Faust” comes from an early marriage to Stephen Faust, now a Maryland orthopedist, which ended in divorce in 1976.) Nearby was her grandmother’s mansion, Scaleby, a massive home built in the first decade of the 20th century by Faust’s great-grandfather, Henry Brooke Gilpin, a Baltimore pharmaceutical dealer. Festooned with Tuscan columns, Scaleby had a six-car garage, a ballroom, and over a dozen farm-related buildings scattered about the 200-acre property. Its construction was an expression of social ambition. As the unnamed writer of Scaleby’s application to the National Register of Historic Places put it, “The design of Scaleby appears to be an attempt by the Gilpins to join the longstanding tradition in Clarke County of upper-class Virginia families who build large country houses.”

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Lady in Waiting

But there is also some suggestion that not long after Scaleby was finished, the Gilpin family entered a period of financial stasis, if not erosion. When Faust’s grandfather, Kenneth N. Gilpin, inherited the property in 1924, its value was esti­mated at $105,000—about 1.2 million in today’s dollars. According to the National Register application, however, “in that year, the value of buildings on the property began a precipitous decline from their value of $105,165 to $40,000 in 1928. The only explanation for the pre-Dep­ression drop seems to be neglect. Kenneth N. Gilpin, Jr., voiced the opinion [to the writer] that his father moved to the estate in the 1920s to go broke in style, which could also be a contributing reason for the estate’s decline in value.”

Kenneth Gilpin Sr. died in 1947, leaving a $2 million trust whose returns would go to his wife and three children, including Drew Faust’s father. Those returns do not appear to have been sufficient to maintain the family’s to-the-manor-born lifestyle. In 1986, Scaleby was sold to a buyer who restored the estate to its erstwhile grandeur.

Still, it was a lofty childhood. Newspaper accounts of Faust’s parents chronicle their social goings-on in a Gatsby-like world, a whirlwind of horse races, society weddings, and formal balls, with all the attendant, bittersweet elements of imm­inently fading glamour. Much like the Civil War-era southern women Faust wrote about in her book Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, Faust was born into the upper crust of Virginia society just as that society was on the verge of profound change.

Even as a girl, Faust seems to have been well aware of the changes swirling around her elite world. In a now much-cited 2003 Harvard Magazine essay, “Living History,” Faust describes how in 1957 she wrote a letter to Dwight Eisenhower protesting segregation. “So what if [African-Americans’] skin is black?” the nine-year-old implored the president. “They still have feelings but most of all are God’s people!  …  Please Mr. Eisenhower please try and have schools and other things accept colored people.”

Faust’s mini-biography was an effective narrative; the letter-to-Eisenhower story permeated subsequent media portrayals of the president-elect. But while that essay has shaped the perception of Faust as a “rebel,” it also contains clues to a more nuanced identity and hints that Faust knows the selectivity of the self-portrait she is painting. “We create ourselves out of the stories we tell about our lives,” she admits. “Fashioned out of memories, our stories become our identities.” What then does the essay tell us about Faust—or at least, about the identity that she fashioned for herself?

Faust projected an image with which she was comfortable: the young, precocious girl, protesting injustice from an early age, a sort of proactive Scout Finch, transcending the limitations of her fortunate upbringing. “The fact that Drew the mature historian gives voice to the letter of the young girl shows that she believes that truth can come from many different places, from the sophisticated to the educated to the child,” says Homi Bhabha, a Harvard professor of literature. “The desire to listen to the child is the desire, in my view, to have very few preconceptions as to where the truth might come from.”

“I grew up in a man’s world and a white world,” Faust writes. She also grew up in a moneyed world. Her childhood more closely resembles that of Derek Bok, who comes from an enormously wealthy publishing family, than that of Neil Rudenstine, whose father was a prison guard and mother a waitress. Faust may be a woman, with the social and professional challenges that can follow from her gender, but she possesses the social ease and confidence of a woman who came of age amidst wealth and high society.

To understand Drew Faust, you must consider these aspects of her composition, understand that the only details of her inner life that are widely known are those she herself has chosen to disseminate. As a girl, Faust wanted to improve the system, but she always worked within it—she wrote letters. If, as a woman, she challenged the status quo in any way that might jeopardize her professional advancement, there is no record of it. Whatever rebellions she might once have contained seemed to diminish as she grew older and more professionally successful.

Leaving Virginia, Faust prepped at Concord Academy, then an all-girls’ school in Massachusetts, and continued her education at Bryn Mawr. After graduating in 1968, she earned her doctorate in American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania, where she eventually became a tenured professor specializing in women’s and Civil War history.

Faust was a popular teacher. “There wasn’t a dull moment in her lectures, and you’d marvel at her ability to hold her class’s attention,” says Mark Drozdowski, a former student who is now the director of a college foundation. But for all her expertise, Drozdowski says, Faust was still approachable. “She didn’t seem to have a big ego,” he recalls. “She didn’t have the descending-from-Mount-Olympus kind of attitude.”

In 1989, Harvard tried to hire Faust away from Penn; the university’s history department was in dire need of rebuilding and Faust was a two-fer, a gifted historian and a woman. (The department needed both.) Faust said no: Harvard would not offer her second husband, Charles Rosenberg, a suitable position. Moreover, according to one professor who knows Faust, “she wasn’t particularly fond of Harvard” at the time, preferring the more collegial atmosphere at Penn. In 1994, Yale too tried to woo Faust and her husband, acc­ording to Nancy Cott, then a professor in the Yale history department. “They didn’t accept that position like they didn’t accept a lot of offers,” Cott says. “I think they were just happy where they were.”

But another colleague of Faust’s has a different interpretation of her thinking at the time. After a number of years teaching at Penn, says this professor, Faust came to the realization that “she wanted to do more than just be a historian, that she really  wanted to be a college president.” Those ambitions were still relatively modest. “I don’t know if she was aiming for Harvard’s presidency—probably more along the lines of Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, something like that.” Moving to another history department was, perhaps, less interesting to Faust than a move upward into academic administration.

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Lady in Waiting

In 1999, Harvard called again; the occasion was the Harvard-Radcliffe merger. For decades, women at Radcliffe had essentially been attending Harvard. Now, as Harvard took possession of Radcliffe’s properties and endowment, the women’s college would be transformed into a scholarly institute with resident fellows but no faculty or students. Harvard president Neil Rudenstine would head a committee to pick the new dean.

Faust was not that group’s first choice, and probably not even its second. Those were Princeton political scientist Amy Gutmann and Harvard law professor Martha Minow. But Gutmann wasn’t sure she wanted the job, and Minow was sure she didn’t want it. “There were some members of the search committee who wanted me to take the post, but I did not want to leave teaching and writing at the law school,” Minow says via e-mail. (Gutmann did not respond to an interview request.)

Faust did have one passionate backer. “There was no doubt in my mind that she was the right person,” Neil Rudenstine says. “You had to have someone who could not just run something, but had the qualities to bridge and heal what had been a long, complicated, difficult, and sometimes acrimonious relationship between Harvard and Radcliffe.”

A position was found for Rosenberg in the history of science department, and this time Faust was ready to leave Penn. The Radcliffe deanship, she exp­lained, was “the most exciting job” in higher education. “Her thinking was, ‘Okay, this will be a stepping stone for the next thing,’” says one professor who has known her since that period. “She did see that it would put her in a position to enhance her probability of becoming a college president someplace.”

In April 2000, Drew Faust became the “founding dean” of the Radcliffe Institute. As Rudenstine suggests, the situation was fraught with potential pitfalls. Many alumnae didn’t much care for this new Radcliffe. Plus, the institute required a far smaller staff than the college had employed; Faust would have to fire people. Most of all, there was a broad gap between conceiving of the institute and making that conception a tangible reality. Within just a few years, Faust defused the problems, transforming Radcliffe into a small but credible Harvard institution.

“She succeeded beyond what anyone expected,” says one Harvard professor present at the creation. “It was a very difficult, volatile political situation. It could have exploded. But each step of the way, she handled it very well.”

“At the time of the institute’s creation,” says Paul Buttenwieser, vice chair of the executive committee of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, “there were people who thought this was just a sop to women. She proved it wasn’t, that it was an important addition to Harvard.”

Some skeptical professors point out that once the initial changes were made, the Radcliffe deanship was, as one puts it, “a minor job, like being chairman of a moderate-sized department.” Its annual budget was a relatively meager $16 million or so. It had no students, no permanent faculty, “just a bunch of visiting fellows, and mostly they want to be left alone to do their work.” As a result, the Radcliffe dean had considerably fewer responsibilities than most Harvard deans.

Still, Faust was good at the job, and she discovered that she liked leadership. “She enjoyed it,” says one former Harvard dean. “Even the cutting and hacking, removing this or that piece.” Faust took satisfaction in making things work and felt comfortable wielding power. “She’s not idea-driven, but she likes to be in a position of some power,” says one senior professor. Faust had evolved from someone who petitioned authority figures to someone who was herself an authority figure, and with that evolution came added confidence, a greater sense of the expanse of her own talents, and an increased personal ambition.

While the Radcliffe Institute is small—it has 86 employees—it proved a power base of sorts for Faust, whose main job was to give away money to the fellows. She wielded that patronage deftly, creating allies but not enemies. And though she had some power, she didn’t have a lot of responsibility; Radcliffe is so small, says the former dean, “that the dean of Radcliffe can keep her head down in bad times.” When Larry Summers arrived at Harvard in 2001 with a mandate to shake up the university, Faust could operate under the radar because she had done what all managers want their employees to do: She had taken a nagging problem and made it go away.

Her success attracted attention beyond Cambridge. In 2006, she was a cand­idate to become the director of the Mellon Foundation but didn’t want the job. In the fall of 2003, she was in the running for the University of Pennsylvania presidency, but Amy Gutmann landed the post. And in late 2005, she was a top candidate for the presidency of the University of Chicago, but bowed out of consideration. Her recusal, some professors say, didn’t mean that Faust didn’t want to be a university president, but that she saw possibilities closer to home. “About three years into Summers’ presidency, she realized that Summers wasn’t going to last,” says one professor familiar with her thinking. If so, Faust was unusually prescient; that sentiment was not widespread until the fourth year of Summers’ presidency, when the president ignited his most damaging controversy.

In January 2005, Summers made his now-notorious remarks about the mental capabilities of women, and Faust agreed to serve on two resulting committees addressing the status of women at Harvard. To many FAS professors, most of whom are supportive of Faust, this was the moment where Faust’s road map to the Harvard presidency first became visible and viable. “With the women-in-science crisis, she was put in a position where she could become fundamentally more central to the institution and a much stronger candidate for president,” says one professor invo­lved in high-level deliberations about Summers’ comments. In her new role, Faust could better the lot of women at Harvard while helping steer the university through a painful time—even as she forged relationships with members of the Harvard Corporation, the secretive body that chooses Harvard’s presidents.

Faust feared that being seen as too critical of Summers might damage her chances of becoming president. “Some of the women on the task forces were upset that more wasn’t going to be done. They were upset with Drew."

At the recommendation of those task forces, Summers announced in May 2005 that Harvard would spend $50 million over 10 years to promote the hiring of women and facilitate their career paths at Harvard. Some Harvard professors hailed the plan as a watershed. Yet skeptics worried that Faust had shied away from aggressive reform. Much of that $50 million was already allotted, they argued, and in any case, $5 million a year for 10 years was hardly a substantial investment for Harvard. According to this school of thought, Faust feared that being seen as too critical of Summers might damage her chances of becoming president, and stopped short of recommending specific recruitment procedures or reviewing the tenure nomination process, as a stronger advocate for women academics would have done. “Some of the women on the task forces were upset that more wasn’t going to be done,” says one female professor. “They were upset with Drew.”

Now that she is president, will Faust become an outspoken advocate for women at Harvard? Most professors doubt it; whatever the symbolic import of Faust’s presidency, no one expects it to usher in an era of gynocentrism at Harvard, for Faust clearly believes that for her to be defined by gender could be polarizing. A period of quiet, behind-the-scenes progress for women seems more likely.

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Lady in Waiting

In ascending to the top of Harvard’s hierarchy, Drew Faust showed herself to be a skillful practitioner of academic politics, a valuable thing in a university president. But in practicing those skills, has Faust sacrificed another part of her identity? “I am a historian,” Faust declared at her initial press conference as president-elect. Yet as Summers learned each time he sparked contro­versy, when the president of Harvard speaks, he—she—can only be the president of Harvard. Past identities no longer define her.

“It’s something I wonder about her,” says Nancy Cott. “How can she take this job and not lose the self that she was? In terms of her characteristics and personality, she won’t lose those. But I find  it hard to see how she can retain her scholarly research self.”

Judging from her relationship with Larry Summers, Faust has been blending her historian side with that of the politician for some time. In 2001, Faust’s name arose when Summers was looking to appoint an FAS dean, but it was too soon—Faust had barely arrived at Radcliffe. Three years later, relations between the two cooled when Summers rejected a tenure application for Marcyliena Morgan, an associate professor of African and African American studies. He had done so, Summers told several people, on Faust’s advice. Faust did not believe she had said any such thing, and when word of Summers’ rationale got back to her she wasn’t pleased. That was one reason why, when Summers ousted FAS dean Bill Kirby in early 2006, she refused his offer to replace Kirby. Another was that she had come to believe that no FAS dean could operate with any measure of autonomy while Summers remained president.

That Faust had said no to a job offer only seemed to make her more attractive to the powers-that-be. After Summers resigned in March 2006 and Derek Bok returned as interim president, Bok asked Faust to serve as FAS dean indefinitely, according to two sources told of the offer. Faust declined, arguing that the next president should have the right to name his or her own dean. Somewhat irritated, Bok then asked her to serve as dean for a year, until the next president took office. Again Faust said no—she didn’t think a temporary dean could get much done. Others had a different interpretation: Faust didn’t want to serve as dean for fear that if she did the job well, the Corporation might want her to remain as dean.

Bok was further irritated. After all, he had emerged from a productive and pleasant retirement because Harvard needed him. When your university asked you to serve, you served. The frustrated president finally persuaded former FAS dean Jeremy Knowles to accept the yearlong position, and the work the two did together on curricular reform, science planning, and numerous other issues suggested that an interim dean could indeed be productive.

As the Corporation launched the search for the next president, Drew Faust was a candidate both in her mind and in the minds of most campus observers. She started with some advantages. Though Bok would not be an enthusiastic supporter of her candidacy, he had already made it clear that his role in the search would be minimal. Faust was on good terms with the other Corporation fellows from their interaction during the Summers crises. Moreover, the other internal candidates, provost Steven Hyman and law school dean Elena Kagan, were considered by many FAS professors to be too close to Summers—whereas Faust, for all her interaction with the president, was nonetheless seen to have kept an appropriate distance.

As the months passed and several external candidates announced that they did not want the job, the Corporation’s first choice became Thomas R. Cech, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. But negotiations between the fellows and Cech broke down in late January, when the scientist would not agree to give up his laboratory research and fully commit to fundraising. That left Faust, whom the Corporation fellows had always seen as a serious and plausible candidate.

Once again, Drew Faust was not Harvard’s first pick, but through a combination of skillful positioning, political savvy, and simple good luck, she was the last person standing.

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Of course, how university presidents are chosen matters less than what they do in office. Faust inherits Summers’ agenda of developing the Allston campus, revamping undergraduate education, boosting the sciences, and promoting Harvard’s status as a global university. “Drew comes in [to continue] what Larry Summers started,” says Paul Buttenwieser. “She doesn’t have to come up with a vision of her own. She has to come up with how she’s going to administer and change what is ongoing with Harvard.”

Truth is, the Corporation would not have chosen Faust had she expressed any deviation from its agenda. If she has any personal vision, any specific goal that she prioritizes, she has kept it well hidden. “When the search committee and others at Harvard talked to you about the possibility of becoming the president,” Jim Lehrer asked Faust, “were there things that went through your mind … ‘Hey, I would love to do this, I would love to do that?’”

Faust replied, “Almost everything we talked about, I thought, ‘This will be exciting, and that will be exciting.’”

Nancy Cott says that Faust will push to promote greater cooperation bet­ween Harvard’s schools and may try to integrate the performance arts more tightly into Harvard’s undergraduate curriculum. The former is a longtime concern for the university, the latter a minor one. Does it matter if Faust has no bold priorities? Neil Rudenstine thinks not. “There is this clichéd feeling in media circles that institutions have to be ‘shaken up,’” he says, an obvious reference to the rhetoric surrounding Summers’ early days. “There are times when that needs to be done, but there are times to refresh this part or that part—it doesn’t mean that the institution is broken.”

She was the right person,” says Neil Rudenstine. “You had to have someone who could bridge and heal what had been a long, complicated, difficult and sometimes acrimonious relationship between Harvard and Radcliffe.”

Those who think that Harvard still needs the shaking up that Summers wished to effect should not expect it from Faust. To the extent that she has articulated any vision, Faust has spoken of reaffirming the core values of the university: teaching, learning, scholarship, community. “She gives a sense that her values are going to be what guides her,” says Paul Buttenwieser. To some, that would suggest a return to campus harmony absent during the Summers years; to others, a reaffirmation of stasis.

Whatever private agendas Faust may be harboring, one looming challenge will limit her ability to realize them: a multi-billion dollar capital campaign. Harvard had hoped to start such a fund drive when Summers was president, but his recurring controversies kept it tethered to the planning stage. Now the pressure will be on Faust, who is said to be slightly stunned about the amounts she is expected to raise. Fundraising is time intensive; the last capital campaign came during Neil Rudenstine’s decade, and it defined his presidency. It’s very possible, says one professor involved in that campaign, that this one “will consume Faust’s presidency for the first few years and leave her little time for anything else.”

Will she be good at it? This, says another professor, “has to be the billion dollar question on everyone’s minds.” Faust is said to have done well with Radcliffe alumnae, but that fundraising was on a smaller scale and with a qualitatively different constituency. She apparently made positive impressions at a March meeting of the powerful Committee on University Resources, a group of wealthy alumni donors. Yet for all her interpersonal skills, Faust lacks Larry Summers’ charisma, Neil Rudenstine’s eloquence, and Derek Bok’s gravitas, not to mention a Harvard degree. How well Faust will bond with major alumni donors seems a legitimate concern.

In the meantime, Faust’s early moves have been more or less scripted by the Corporation. With the board’s support, she ousted Summers’ vice president for development, Donella Rapier, to indicate a fresh start in fundraising. And she asked provost Steven Hyman to stay on, a move the Corporation advocated to promote continuity in science planning. Her next major task—possibly accomplished by the time this article is published—will be naming an FAS dean. The Corporation wants Faust to name a scientist. Faust’s choice may give some indication of the extent of her autonomy—or her willingness to expend her political capital by exerting her power: Sources say that Hyman has been attending every meeting of Faust’s decanal advisory committee, playing a forceful role. That’s unprecedented for a Harvard provost, who has no official authority over the traditionally powerful FAS dean.

In the meantime, Drew Faust asks questions and says little. She has sought advice from Neil Rudenstine, Amy Gutmann, Princeton president Shirley Tilghman, FAS dean Jeremy Knowles, and Corporation member Nan Keohane. As long as she listens, Drew Faust is something of a Rorschach test, a canvas with more blank space than clarity, onto which the members of the Harvard faculty—and the students, the Corporation, and alumni—project their conceptions of what they wish her to be.

But that approach only postpones a reckoning. Soon, the erstwhile historian—the interpreter of other people’s words, the writer of her own narrative—will have to speak as president. Only then will the multitude of questions surrounding Drew Faust begin to be answered.

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