Faust!

So, the new President of Harvard has been selected, and it's not Elena Kagan.  Judging from her successful career as a historian and the Harvard press release, the selection of Drew Gilpin Faust at least warrants the benefit of the doubt.  As a devoted alum and former employee of the school, I wish her lots of luck and courage in taming an occasionally difficult beast of a school.  But I harbor some reasons to be cautious about her appointment and I hope readers will gently disabuse me of these hesitations.

For one thing, the amount of administrative and development experience she brings as Dean of the Radcliffe Institute is not overwhelming.  During my time at Harvard, when the Radcliffe Institute was known as the Bunting Institute, my sense was that it had been a relatively insignificant part of campus life as a whole, and could hardly be considered comparable to running the Law School or even the Divinity School for that matter.  No doubt the Institute and its Fellows have contributed mightily to the mission of advancing the study of gender and society.  But as I understand it, the Institute seems to have become an even "smaller" place during Faust's tenure there, in part because of budget cuts and the continued absorption of the rest of what was Radcliffe into the Harvard infrastructure.  Compared to the prospects of taking someone who has successfully run another university (e.g. Amy Guttman at Penn) or a substantial school (e.g., Elena Kagan at HLS), it just seems a bit odd. 

Additionally, Faust brings no connection to Harvard except for her last six years as a member of its faculty and her administrative role at the Radcliffe Institute.   A lack of substantial connection in itself is not and should not be dispositive, but Faust will be -- I believe -- the first President of the University without a degree from Harvard.  (She went to Bryn Mawr and Penn and comes from a family of long Princeton lineage.)  This "unusual" background is good for the cause of heterogeneity, but I wonder how good it is for development as well as understanding the school's known and unknown quirks.  Time will tell.  (Here's a question: does anyone know of any studies showing a relation between success at fundraising among university presidents and whether they went to the school they are leading?) 

Last, I wonder about Faust's training as a historian and whether that should weigh at all in the determination of who should be president of a university.  There's no question that lawyers, policy wonks, and economists are often presumed (perhaps mistakenly) to have the training and frame of mind that is helpful for running large (academic) institutions.  I am curious: are there advantages that historians bring? Or that this particular historian brings? 

Again, I have no special reason to doubt that Faust will be a distinguished President and I join Al Brophy and others in wishing her all the success in the world.  She seems to be, as Neil Rudenstine is, a fundamentally decent human being, as well as an accomplished scholar.  But I am not the only one who seems a bit concerned about missing possible audacity in leadership.  Mike Dorf has weighed in with cautious optimism too.  Meanwhile, back at HLS, the students are celebrating Elena Kagan's continued reign. I'm not surprised, but I'm not sure I'm heartened by that either.  What do you think?