Universities Weblog

(Source: Harvard University)

Was Drew Faust Harvard's first choice for president? Evidently not, though this revelation is hardly surprising. Harvard always culls presidents from its alumni; Faust is the first non-alum since the original president (who of course couldn't have been an alum). So it's safe to say Faust was down the list. But how far?

For an inside look at the selection process, see Richard Bradley's piece in the new issue of 02138 magazine. As you can surmise from the title (Cambridge's zip code), the publication focuses on everything Harvard. Here's a bit:

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 Now, Cech told the paper, "I have withdrawn my name from consideration."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.

Read the rest here.

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