The Times on Faust Drew Faust's pick lands on page one of the Times today, mostly below the fold.

(Note to Harvard's PR team; it's time to get a new picture of Faust out there. This one looks like a perfectly fine shot for a professor...somehow underwhelming for a president-elect.)



Times reporter Alan Finder quotes me a bit in the story, to this effect:

“The real import of this choice is that it is a cautious pick, which seems targeted at healing the wounds of the Summers years and restoring Harvard’s momentum as quickly as possible,” said Richard Bradley, who wrote “Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World’s Most Powerful University” (HarperCollins, 2005).

Mr. Bradley said there were legitimate questions about Dr. Faust’s qualifications, like her lack of experience running a large university. “The fact that Harvard could not find someone who filled all their bases suggests to me the difficulty that Harvard had to fill the position,” he said.

Some explication—because he and I talked for about half an hour, and so there was slightly more context here than the article can easily suggest.

I do think Faust was a conservative pick; given the context of this presidential search, choosing a man and a scientist, perhaps even one with no Harvard connection, would have been a bolder pick. Not necessarily a better one, but bolder.

Finder asked me if I thought the various questions raised about Faust's move from Radcliffe to Harvard president were fair, and that's why I said that I thought the questions were legitimate. It is a big step; we have no idea how well she'll do. A fair question.

But the last part of that quote suggests something I didn't really mean. (I'm not blaming Finder, I'm sure I said it, but it comes across a little differently than I remember in context.) What I was trying to say is that Harvard couldn't find anyone who covered all the appropriate bases because it's such a hard job to fill—slightly different than saying "the difficulty Harvard had to fill the position."

I meant that there were so many things this new president was expected to do—heal wounds; unite the university; continue science expansion; fundraise; plan Allston; etc.—that it would be virtually impossible to find someone with experience in every relevant field.

Again, I don't blame Finder, just my own inarticulateness. Because I genuinely did not mean to suggest that Faust was a second-tier candidate. Legitimate questions about her? Sure. But clearly she was a leading candidate from word one.....  ¶ 12:30 PM