Both Harvard and Radcliffe's power players--the two committees of governing board members and Faculty--agreed that she would have to be a woman.

She would have to be a preeminent academic, distinguished enough for tenure at Harvard and able to hone the Institute's intellectual agenda.

She would have to have a demonstrated commitment to women and gender issues.

"We're not going to appoint someone who is not vitally interested and committed to those types of issues," Rudenstine said in February. "They'll one way or another do work in that field."

And some administrative experience wouldn't hurt either.

Faust seems to fit the bill. She is first-rate historian who will also be a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). She's headed up the University of Pennsylvania's Women Studies Program and written extensively about women's history, most recently in her 1997 book, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War.

And she can even handle the unexpected--like when the Harvard Gazette's reporter asked the statuesque Faust how tall she was at yesterday's press conference.

"Five feet, 11 inches, and don't ask me about my weight," she laughed.