Clayton Spencer, perhaps the most powerful woman at Harvard, is leaving the university to become president of Bates College.

Harvard magazine reports:

In her current role as vice president for policy, Spencer is responsible for developing strategic priorities for Harvard on behalf of the president, directs policy analysis, oversees the office of institutional research, oversees the management of the offices of the president and provost, manages numerous searches for deans and senior administrators, and serves as presidential liaison to the Council of Deans. (She is also a presidentially nominated member of the Harvard Magazine Inc. board of directors.)

Quite a portfolio.

Spencer was hugely influential but extremely secretive, the paradigm of the modern university bureaucrat, who shaped policy behind the scenes, whose influence was present in everything but fingerprints found on nothing. Spencer, who was trained in Washington, was a master of internal politics, smoothly making the transition from Larry Summers to Drew Faust by making herself indispensable.

She is credited with work on any number of issues, but I think the real Clayton Spencer story is the issues and events for which she’ll never get credited…