The Yale Daily News profiles Cambridge vice-chancellor Alison Richard, formerly Yale provost and professor. (Prince Phillip is technically the chancellor.)

Richard is, according to the Crimson, on the short list for Harvard’s top job.

Several Yale provosts have left New Haven to run other leading universities in recent years. Richard’s predecessor, Judith Rodin, served as president of the University of Pennsylvania from 1994 until 2004. Susan Hockfield, Richard’s successor, now heads the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition, Richard Brodhead ’68 became president of Duke University in 2004 after 11 years as dean of Yale College.

But here’s more suggestion that many top candidates don’t want the Harvard job.

Friends say she is having more fun at Cambridge than she ever would at Harvard. Anthropology professor Richard Burger said he thinks Richard is enjoying leading her alma mater and the near-celebrity status that goes with the job. After a minor collision with a cow while biking to work one day, Richard was surprised to see an article about the incident in The Times of London, Burger said.

Richard might just be too good for Harvard, Burger said.

“They don’t really deserve Alison,” he said.

More fun at Cambridge than she ever would at Harvard…that’s a hard thing to quantify, of course, but I think there’s something to that idea. People still want to have fun in their jobs, at least some of the time, and Harvard’s been a pretty joyless place lately. Moreover, its campus culture is resistant to fun, from top to bottom.

Whoever Harvard’s next president is, she or he should try to change that.

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P.S. By the way, I have no idea if Elena Kagan’s decision to sign a letter of protest against the Bush administration will help or hurt her presidential chances, or neither, but good for her for signing it. (Though to be sure, it’s something of a no-brainer, and would have been more news if she hadn’t signed it than if she did.)