The Globe today seems all but certain that Drew Gilpin Faust, currently the head of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, will be named the next president of Harvard. Based on her reactions to reporters’ questions yesterday, she seems pretty certain she’ll be getting the new job as well.

This article goes into a little more detail about Faust’s background: a historian steeped in women’s issues. For example, she worked on led a study looking at career advancement of women faculty after Larry Summers’s comments about women in science. She couldn’t be much more different than Summers!

I suspect some people will speculate that one of the big reasons she was chosen is that she is so different from Summers and that the hope is she’ll “make up” for all of his mistakes: being a woman, being a Harvard insider (ie knowing the way Harvard likes to work), having a reputation for being a consensus builder, etc. It’s going to be tough for her to step out of Summers’s shadow.

The Globe also said today that if Faust gets the job, the presidents of half of the Ivy League universities will be women.

The next question is: will the next president of the United States be a woman???