Harvard is said to make pick

Harvard University's main governing board has settled on its choice for the next president, two sources close to the search process said yesterday.

The Corporation, as the board is known, will present its recommendation Sunday to an elected group of about 30 alumni, the Overseers, who must approve it, according to one of the people.

Drew Gilpin Faust, the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, has been the front-runner over the past week, and several people close to the search said they were unaware of any other candidates being considered in the final stages of deliberation. Longtime Harvard insiders said yesterday that all the chatter on campus was that the 59-year-old Faust was the Corporation's choice.

Board members expect to make the decision public Sunday, according to one of the two sources familiar with the search process. The Overseers, who wield far less power than the Corporation, are considered all but certain to approve the recommendation, as they have done in the past.

The candidate will be present at the meeting, according to one of the sources, although it was unclear whether the nominee would field questions or just greet the group after the vote.

The two people spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is intended to be confidential.

Some Harvard professors and alumni have pointed out that the university has a propensity for choosing presidents with characteristics that sharply contrast with those of their immediate predecessor.

Faust has been the apparent front-runner since the other top candidate, Nobel laureate Thomas R. Cech, announced Jan. 31 that he no longer wanted to be considered.

Many people on campus believe that Faust would be a very different presence than former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers. She is known as a calm consensus-builder and a devoted scholar, while Summers was famous for a confrontational style and had left academia for government before taking the helm of Harvard.

The Corporation members who chose Summers were looking for someone who would shake things up, in contrast to the genial, low-key Neil L. Rudenstine.

"The conventional wisdom . . . is that the Corporation nearly always elects someone who is the polar opposite of the most recent occupant of the office," the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, a professor and the head minister of Harvard's Memorial Church, wrote last week in The Crimson, Harvard's student newspaper.

Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute since 2001, has never run a major institution, and she did not attend Harvard, something the university usually prefers.

She is widely admired for her solid judgment and people skills, as well as her scholarly work on the Civil War and the American South. But some people on campus believe that she lacks the vision and experience for the job.

Born and raised in Virginia, she earned a bachelor's degree in history from Bryn Mawr College and a master's and doctorate in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. She taught history at Penn for 25 years and is the author of several history books.

Radcliffe, the smallest of Harvard's 10 academic units, has been her biggest management challenge. The former women's college has no students or full-time faculty.

But Faust won praise for transforming the college into a thriving think tank and eradicating an annual deficit of more than $3 million. She also laid off a quarter of the staff and transferred programs to other institutions without uproar. Today, Radcliffe houses a women's history library and hosts 50 research fellows a year.

She is married to medical historian Charles Rosenberg, a Harvard professor, and has two daughters.

A final approval Sunday would end nearly a year of work to find a replacement for Summers, who announced Feb. 21, 2006, that he would step down because of his repeated battles with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Former president Derek Bok has served as the interim leader since July 1.

Summers's comments two years ago suggesting that women have less "intrinsic aptitude" for science than men have made some alumni eager for a female president.

However, choosing a woman was not considered a major priority for the search, several sources have said.

Some members of the search committee preferred to name a scientist, because the university is undertaking a historic expansion of its campus in Allston, with a heavy emphasis on science, and because science is seen by many as the most important frontier of human knowledge today.

Cech said last week that he couldn't give up a job he loved, the presidency of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, or the biochemistry laboratory he still keeps at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He said running a lab while being a university president would be nearly impossible.

Two other insiders, Elena Kagan, the law school dean, and Steven E. Hyman, the provost, were on the short list last month.

A spokesman for Harvard declined to comment yesterday. Faust also declined to comment through a spokeswoman.