On First School Day, Faust Throws a Bash in the Yard

Diana Ross's "I'm Coming Out" blared over speakers as University President Drew G. Faust emerged from Mass. Hall on Monday evening in her first public appearance since taking office. Faust paused in the doorway, briefly dancing along to the music, before continuing on to greet a small audience of Harvard affiliates who had gathered in Harvard Yard to chat with the president over ice cream.

"The arrival of the sun this morning is a good omen of the year to come," Faust told the crowd, which at one point numbered around 200.

On Monday morning, Harvard affiliates awoke to a surprise e-mail invitation to the ice cream social. The event drew a diverse crowd including students from the Summer School and Extension School, several undergraduates, Cambridge residents, and tourists, lured by both the buckets of Klondike bars and Italian ices and the chance to snap a picture with the new president.

Just a few hours before the festivities, in her first interview as Harvard's president, Faust said that she decided to hold the event because "it seemed that I ought to do something to mark the day today."

"It matters in my life and it matters in the life of the institution, and I wanted a ritual to underline that," Faust said via phone.

Faust has spent recent days working to replace the flood of congratulatory bouquets from friends and other university presidents in her office with books and modern art from the Fogg Museum to "perk the place up a bit," she said. She was set to enjoy a home-cooked meal by Tufts President Lawrence S. Bacow at his home on Monday night.

But Faust will not have much time to relax before students and faculty pour back into the Yard in September. In addition to the traditional retreat later this summer with the Harvard Corporation, the University's executive governing board, the president will attend a dean's retreat next week to discuss her plans with the group of administrators she considers her "cabinet."

"We'll be talking about planning and strategy and how to both develop these within schools but also to integrate them across schools," Faust said, naming Allston expansion, science planning, and the University's long-delayed capital campaign as priorities that would be discussed at the retreat.

At the moment, though, Faust's cabinet includes several temporary members, including interim deans at Harvard Medical School and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and two deans—at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Design—who agreed to delay their resignation until permanent replacements are found.

Faust said that she has not been able to make more permanent appointments because this year has seen "a lot of searches in a very truncated amount of time."

"I am eager to get permanent deans in place," Faust said, explaining that the presence of so many interim leaders "will make it still a transitional moment and some of those deans will be cautious about making decisions."

Faust said that she is "very involved" in the searches for permanent deans at the Medical School and the Design School and that the searches "are moving quite effectively towards selections of individuals."

Faust announced another interim appointment on Monday—Robert B. Cashion ’81, who will serve as acting vice president for alumni affairs and development. Faust acknowledged that planning for the multi-billion-dollar capital campaign can only go so far before she selects a permanent head of fundraising.

"I dont want to get too far down the road" without input from a permanent vice president, Faust said, though she added that she believes the plans for the capital campaign have "plenty of momentum."

Faust said some of that momentum has come from donors, who have the campaign "very much on their minds." Faust has been steadily reaching out to prominent alumni since her appointment in February, and she said that it has not been hard to woo them back after several years of turmoil and transition at the University.

"I feel like [donors] are deeply dedicated to Harvard, and that is what they are most concerned about," Faust said.

Faust contented herself with mostly behind-the-scenes work this spring. Monday's bash was the first in the obligatory series of public appearances that will culminate with her installation on Oct. 12 in Tercentenary Theatre.

Faust said she has been "thinking a lot" about her installation speech, and in a fashion typical of the Civil War historian, she has been "trying to get a sense of what the genre is" by reading past Harvard presidents' inaugural addresses, all the way back to Charles W. Eliot, Harvard's president from 1869 to 1909.

"I have some big themes in mind," Faust said. "I think I would like to use the address less to present a laundry list...than to frame in a broad way the relationship between higher education, the world, and Harvard."

—Kristina M. Moore contributed to the reporting of this story.
—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.