As dean of the faculty, Princeton's third-highest academic administrator, she oversaw "cradle-to-grave" faculty and professional staff decisions, says Rohrer, including authorizations of faculty searches and the selection of department chairs, hiring, setting of salaries, tenure and promotion decisions, sabbaticals and faculty discipline.

Gutmann was highly regarded as dean, especially for her "balanced and broad view of issues facing higher education," Rohrer says.

"She was always in control. In two years, she accomplished what would normally take someone five years," Rohrer adds.

Gutmann stepped down in 1997, saying, "What I did not foresee is how much I would miss scholarship and teaching. I now know more vividly than before what it means to have a calling and what happens when one turns aside from it."

Princeton colleagues say her tenure as dean helped energize the campus with her ideas about higher education. During her time, she tried to diversify the faculty, recruited more women in the faculty and helped reform the tenure process.

Shapiro cited her for her "exceptional leadership." Since 1997, she has served as special assistant to Shapiro for academic issues.

Colleagues say the past three years have been the "peak" of Gutmann's professional achievement, and that despite her earlier decision to leave administration, she's ready for another try.

In addition to the Harvard possibility, she is also considered a likely contender at Princeton.

She is currently working on a new book at Stanford University.

Gutmann has kept close ties to her alma mater. She served as a visiting professor at the Kennedy School in the late 1980s, and currently sits on the KSG's advisory board.

She also joins her classmates of 1971 for bi-monthly dinners in New York, and has watched the evolution of Radcliffe closely over the past decade, her friends say.

"She'd bring a deep understanding of the tradition and history of Harvard," Wilkins says.

Harvard Alford Professor of Philosophy Thomas M. Scanlon Jr.--who used to teach at Princeton--says she's a proven fund-raiser, and says he thinks it would be a "big sacrifice" for her to take either presidency because she loves teaching so much.

Friends describe her as a very genuine person who connects well with people, who loves to laugh and be outdoors and enjoys fine food and wine.

"Amy isn't a person who does things because of issues of prestige," says Felice J. Perlman '71, a college roommate. "She doesn't do things for ambition or fame. She does things because she's interested in what she does."