Curtain Rises for Faust’s First Act

Stagehands scurried around the Barker Center in mid-February with potted plants and a flashy red banner in hand. Inside the first-floor Thompson Room, the stage was being set for the afternoon’s main act: President-elect Drew G. Faust. Flanked by members of Harvard’s governing boards, and with John Harvard and a former Radcliffe president looking down from the wood-paneled walls, Faust took the national spotlight for the first time as Harvard’s next leader.

She has been avoiding it ever since.

Shortly after her appointment, Faust said she would spend the spring in “listening mode.” She has stayed true to her word, shunning public appearances in favor of quiet work behind the scenes. When four female Ivy League presidents gathered at Harvard for a round-table discussion in May, Faust, who is currently dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, was reticent, guiding the conversation but keeping her own thoughts to herself.

But in less than a month, when Faust moves into Mass. Hall, she will be forced back into the public eye and will be expected to crystallize a vision.

“I don’t see how you would keep a low profile as president of Harvard,” says Nannerl O. Keohane, a member of the Harvard Corporation, the University’s most powerful governing board. “I don’t know what that would mean.”

As president, Faust will grapple with the leftover ambitions of her predecessors. She will have to resuscitate the planning of a capital campaign that was shelved during the tenure of Lawrence H. Summers, gain approval of the draft of the Allston master plan filed last winter, and implement the general education report approved this spring.

“I am pleased to have the opportunity to build on what has preceded me,” Faust wrote in an e-mail responding to questions from The Crimson. “This does mean, however, that I have had rather a full plate handed to me at the start.”

Bok said last week that he has worked very hard not to step on Faust’s toes, but noted that it was impossible to create a hermetic seal around his presidency.

Another former Harvard president, Neil L. Rudenstine, said, “There is almost never a time when you are not left, coming in as a new president or as a new dean, implementing something that you have inherited and that you did not create.”

Faust has said that she will rethink the structure of FAS administration and examine the place of the arts at Harvard. She says that she will discuss her plans in more detail when she takes office in July, but would be “careful not to overload our attention and capacities.”

“An overarching commitment which I expect to frame everything I undertake will be to encourage and enable Harvard to think and act more like a university,” Faust wrote, “a place in which we are not inhibited by intellectual or bureaucratic boundaries, a place which seems both intimate in its collegiality and immense in its intellectual scope, both welcoming and endlessly challenging to all of us privileged to be part of it.”

The former acting dean of Radcliffe, Mary Maples Dunn, said that Faust would do more than engage in “studying and listening.”

“She will emerge eventually with some ideas of how she’s going to go forward,” Dunn said, “but she tends not to shoot from the hip.”

ON THE DOCKET

Jeremy R. Knowles was said to work 18 hours a day during his ten years as FAS dean—one of the most demanding positions at Harvard because of the relative lack of high-level officials that share the burden of decision-making.

Faust has identified restructuring FAS administration as a priority. Earlier this week, she named Michael D. Smith, a 45-year-old computer scientist and a relative newcomer to Harvard administration, to lead the University’s flagship school.

“I think that everyone would say that the administrative requirements for organizing FAS really need to be rethought,” Faust said in a phone interview. “This has been a concern to me because I don’t want [Smith] to have a job that is so large that he can’t do it.”

Outside of FAS, Faust will face the task of pushing forward Harvard’s ongoing expansion across the Charles River into Allston.

Provost Steven E. Hyman, who will serve as Faust’s right-hand man for at least the next year, has said that in particular, the momentum of the 20-year-old Allston project is independent of any individual leaders.

“I don’t quite agree with Tolstoy, that leaders are nothing but the playthings of deterministic forces and chance,” Hyman said last year, “but there’s an enormous volume of bottom-up planning effort.”

Faust says she will focus initially on gaining Boston’s approval of the 50-year master plan, filed last December, and breaking ground on the planned 500,000-square-foot science complex.

Complaints from Allston residents have forced Harvard officials to postpone plans for an art museum across the Charles, so that they could focus on the science building.

To further the project, Faust said she will bring academic planning in Allston in line with the “rapid” pace at which the physical plans have developed.

Faust wrote in her e-mail that she is “deeply engaged” with the financial planning of the Allston project, working closely with the art museums, the School of Public Health, and the Graduate School of Education—three institutions that may eventually be housed in Allston.

The financial side of Allston planning will be particularly important. Before bulldozers can clear the way for new buildings, Faust will have to woo donors to invest in the projects.

A planned University-wide capital campaign was put on hold during the turmoil of the Summers presidency. Faust now appears poised to jump-start the fundraising drive, and administrators say that filling the deanship vacancies is a necessary step to begin the academic planning for the campaign.

Rudenstine said that, considering Harvard’s soaring $29 billion endowment, the president must identify specific academic needs and convey those priorities to donors.

“We had to face it in the nineties when people said, ‘What, you need more money? What do you need more money for?’” Rudenstine explains. “There are very good answers, but the answers are only good if you take the time to sift through and say ‘look, here are a number of extremely important things...’.”

ARTS FIRST

Faust’s docket may be filled with unfinished projects, but the president-elect has also tried to save room for her own initiatives, one of which is a project to enhance the arts at Harvard.

“I would like to have a clearer sense of the range and variety of what is already going on, how it could be better integrated, and how we can build upon it to make the arts much more central in university life,” Faust wrote.

She added that with plans to open new museums in Allston, the opening of the New College Theater, and the appointment of a new dean of the Graduate School of Design, “we need to take a much more systematic and University-wide look at how Harvard approaches the arts with an eye to redefining both their place and their meaning within the institution.”

Thomas W. Lentz, the director of Harvard University Art Museums, said that he was surprised that Faust was so vocal about improving the arts. He said he would like to create more opportunities for students to interact with the University’s art holdings.

“We have great collections,” said Lentz. “What we really lack are the physical facilities to open up the collections, to lay out the riches.”

At her installation address on Oct. 12 in Tercentenary Theatre, Faust is expected to lay out more concrete plans. But former university presidents warn that Faust should articulate her initial vision in broad strokes.

“You shouldn’t come in with six points,” says Keohane, who led Duke and Wellesley. “She should reach out broadly, listen carefully to people.”

“The trouble with being too detailed and too specific, is that in time one may discover that one was simply wrong about those matters, or that they turn out to be—for perfectly legitimate reasons—unfeasible,” said Rudenstine. “That is a consummation devoutly to be avoided.”

—Staff writer Claire M. Guehenno can be reached at guehenno@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Laurence H. M. Holland can be reached at lholland@fas.harvard.edu.