The selection of Drew Gilpin Faust as the twenty-eighth president of Harvard University marks the culmination of an intensive and wide-ranging search launched in March 2006, shortly after Lawrence H. Summers announced his plans to step down from the presidency at the end of June 2006 and Derek Bok was named the University's interim president as of July 1, 2006.

In accordance with the University charter of 1650, ratified by the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, a new president is elected by the Harvard Corporation (formally known as the President and Fellows of Harvard College), with the counsel and consent of the University's Board of Overseers. The Board of Overseers consists of thirty members who are elected by holders of Harvard degrees, with the president and treasurer of the University as ex officiis members.

As in Harvard's two most recent presidential searches, the search committee comprised the six members of the Corporation other than the president (who excused himself from the search and election process, consistent with past practice), together with three members of the Board of Overseers.

The committee initiated the search with a letter sent last spring to approximately 245,000 individuals - including all Harvard faculty, students, staff, and alumni and selected leaders in higher education and research, government, and the nonprofit world. The letter sought advice on the challenges and opportunities facing the University as well as the most important qualities to seek in a new president, and invited nominations of individuals warranting serious consideration.

Starting in the spring of 2006, the committee undertook an intensive process of interviews and meetings with individuals and groups throughout the Harvard community and in the broader world of universities and colleges, research institutions, and foundations. Members of the committee consulted individually with more than 350 people within and beyond Harvard, in addition to meeting with many more people in group settings and benefiting from advice solicited by members of the faculty and student advisory groups formed to help with the search.

The two advisory groups - one bringing together faculty members from across the University, the other consisting of students from Harvard's different schools - constituted a new feature of Harvard's presidential search process. The 13-member faculty advisory group (chaired by Sidney Verba, the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library) met nine times over the course of the search, with representatives of the search committee attending each meeting. The 14-member student advisory group (chaired by Matthew Murray, a joint-degree student in the Law School and the Kennedy School of Government) met eight times during the search, with search committee members joining most of the group's sessions. The student group produced a report summarizing its main findings, and student recommendations of possible candidates were separately conveyed in confidence to the search committee. In addition, the chairs of both advisory groups met with the full search committee or its representatives at various points in the search. Besides offering their own perspectives to the search committee, both advisory groups played important roles in gathering and conveying the views of faculty and student colleagues. (See http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/05.18/02-search.html for a listing of the members of the advisory groups.)

Members of the search committee also invited advice on the search through meetings with numerous other campus groups. These included the faculty councils, department chairs, or comparable leadership groups within the various schools, several groups of junior faculty from across Harvard, representatives of both the Undergraduate Council and the Graduate Council, the administrative deans of the schools, a cross-section of managerial and support staff, and others.

In addition, the search committee actively sought input from the alumni community. Besides soliciting the views of all Harvard alumni by mail, committee members hosted search consultation events for groups of alumni in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco, and Zurich (at a gathering of European Harvard Club leaders). Members of the committee also attended segments of previously scheduled on-campus meetings of numerous alumni committees in order to invite advice on the search. The president of the Harvard Alumni Association, Paul J. Finnegan, provided helpful advice to the search committee at various stages of the process.

The search committee received more than 2,300 pieces of correspondence (letters and e-mail) regarding the search, and was presented with approximately 750 nominees for consideration. The committee met nearly 20 times, often for three to four hours at a stretch, before concluding its work. Late in the search, it met at length with several of the most promising nominees, and learned more about them through phone calls and other contacts with numerous people familiar with their work.

The search committee, including its Overseer members, met with the full Board of Overseers at each of the Board's regular meetings during the search to brief the Overseers on the progress of the search and to solicit their continuing counsel. Finally, on February 11, 2007, a special meeting of the governing boards was convened in Cambridge. The Corporation elected Drew Gilpin Faust as the University's next president, effective July 1, 2007, and the Board of Overseers voted its consent.

The members of the presidential search committee included:

• James R. Houghton, AB '58, MBA '62, chair, Senior Fellow of Harvard College, and Chairman of the Board and former Chief Executive Officer of Corning Incorporated;
• Frances D. Fergusson, PhD '73, Harvard Overseer and President Emerita and Professor of Art at Vassar College;
• Susan L. Graham, AB '64, President of the Harvard Board of Overseers and Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Emerita, University of California, Berkeley;
• Nannerl O. Keohane, LLD (hon.) '93, Fellow of Harvard College, Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and President Emerita of Duke University;
• Patricia A. King, JD '69, Fellow of Harvard College and the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Medicine, Ethics, and Public Policy at the Georgetown Law Center;
• William F. Lee, AB '72, Harvard Overseer and Co-Managing Partner of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, LLP;
• Robert D. Reischauer, AB '63, Fellow of Harvard College, President of The Urban Institute, and former Director of the Congressional Budget Office;
• James F. Rothenberg, AB '68, MBA '70, Treasurer of the University and President and Director of the Capital Research and Management Company; and
• Robert E. Rubin, AB '60, Fellow of Harvard College, Director and Chair of the Executive Committee, Citigroup, Inc., and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.