Like anyone walking through Annenberg Hall’s heavy doors, Harvard’s next president probably felt freshman jitters. It was a snowy day in mid-March and Drew G. Faust was facing a crowd of the University’s most prominent donors. To make things worse, she was late, delayed by sleet and snow.

While Faust made her way along frosty highways between New York City and Boston, the financial heavyweights, members of the Committee on University Resources (COUR), waited anxiously for their first encounter with Harvard’s president-elect.

She arrived just in time for a post-dinner speech. She left having earned a standing ovation.

“She’s an extraordinarily charming person, and perhaps that’s what Harvard needs,” said Environmental Financial Consulting Group President Paul J. Zofnass ’69, who met Faust at the dinner.

Faust, currently the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, has not yet officially launched a fundraising campaign. But in the weeks since her appointment she has traveled across the country and into Canada to forge crucial connections with the community outside of Harvard’s gates.

As the University prepares to launch its long-delayed capital campaign, some say Faust’s number-one priority when she enters Mass. Hall on July 1 will be building relationships with key alumni and wooing back graduates left disaffected by the tumult of the Lawrence H. Summers era.

And by all indications, the University appears confident in Faust’s ability to fill Harvard’s coffers.

Nannerl O. Keohane, a member of the Harvard Corporation, said on the day of Faust’s appointment that she was impressed by her enthusiasm for fundraising.

“She’s someone who wants to use the scope of Harvard to reach out into the community,” Keohane said on Feb. 11. “She was unusual among serious candidate at saying from the outset that, ‘you know, I really look forward to fundraising.’”

SMOOTH TOUCH

In addition to the COUR dinner, Faust spent spring break at an international Harvard Alumni Association conference in Toronto and back-to-back meetings with alumni and donors on the West Coast, including in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Many present as those events said she left a positive impression, even with those who strongly supported Summers.

“Now you’ve got a woman president of Harvard. What an appropriate culmination of the question Larry Summers asked,” said Zofnass, referring to Summers’ January 2005 remarks suggesting that innate differences between men and women could partially account for unequal representation of the sexes in the top tiers of science and engineering.

“Sometimes, women do have a slightly better touch than the male’s ego for smoothing things over and gaining consensus,” he added, noting that he is a “very strong supporter” of the former president.

President and CEO of Paxton Properties and COUR member Kenneth G. Bartels ’73, another Summers supporter, said he had only praise and admiration for the incoming president after meeting her at the March dinner.

“First of all, she is a leader. She is not a follower,” he said. “She took the legacy that Radcliffe College represented and turned it into a very viable, quite dynamic, almost electric institution in a very exciting way.”

Real estate mogul and COUR member Peter L. Malkin ’55, however, cautioned that Faust should heed the strong support for Summers’ agenda as an indication of which way to direct her own presidential term.

“I feel confident that when she annunciates her version of the program that if it is consistent with the program that had been espoused by President Summers it will be strongly supported,” said Malkin, who has yet to meet the president-elect. “I think really the ball is in her court.”

Bartels echoed those sentiments, saying that Faust should devote attention to Harvard’s expansion into Allston, increased funding for the sciences, an emphasis on the undergraduate experience, and increased financial aid—initiatives that Summers championed.

“All of those things that people associate with Larry Summers to one degree or another are things that have wide backing among all of Harvard’s constituencies,” Bartels said.

He added that he expects Faust to continue those projects, while bringing her own perspective to the initiatives.

SMALL TUB

Radcliffe has fewer than 15 faculty members, 81 staff members, and an endowment of $473 million, but the school raked in nearly $11 million in gifts under Faust’s leadership last year, more than the totals raised by the Graduate School of Education and Harvard Divinity School. The University as a whole raised more than $500 million last year.

Since taking over as its first dean in 2001, Faust has transformed the Institute from its original role as a college for women to an institute for advanced study. This required fundraising for new purposes, such as the establishment of fellowships.

Diana M. Nelson ’84, a COUR member who has known Faust since her time at Radcliffe and served on the dean’s advisory council there, said that the “key to being a good fundraiser is to be a good relationship builder.”

“She really invests herself in knowing people more deeply,” Nelson, a former chair of the Harvard College Fund, said. “If you know them you can match opportunities that they would be excited about.”

Nelson says that before Faust led Radcliffe there were “very few men” supporting the Institute. But as dean she has drawn in some “major male donors within the Harvard universe” to create fellowships.

“What she did at Radcliffe was surprising,” Nelson said, adding that men “ended up being big fans of Drew’s.”

FUNDRAISING MACHINE

In the wake of Summers’ resignation last summer, at least four major donations to Harvard totaling $390 million were reportedly withdrawn. In the most high-profile case, Oracle CEO Lawrence J. Ellison publicly withdrew a pledge to donate $115 million to the school, saying he had lost confidence in University’s ability to spend the money wisely. Other donors declined requests for gifts or called for donations of as little as $1 in response to the resignation.

Come June 30, Harvard will lose its Vice President for Alumni Affairs and Development Donella M. Rapier. Faust has yet to name a replacement, though her associate dean for advancement and planning Tamara E. Rogers, who accompanied Faust on her spring break travels, is said to be a candidate.

While several alumni praised Rapier’s work, many said that her departure would not hurt the fundraising efforts.

“It is a loss for the University that she is leaving,” Bartels said, adding that “Harvard has by a substantial margin the strongest and most professional fundraising effort.”

Though Faust may still have to prove herself in the eyes of some contributors, several donors said they did not believe that Harvard would suffer significantly from the change in leadership.

“Harvard is a fundraising machine and at this point there is nothing that can stop it,” said Michael B. Alexander ’73, a prominent donor who founded an independent film distribution company.

Though he said that last spring many alumni were protesting Summers’ leadership and “question[ing] why we should be supporting at the same level,” he said that the “numbers are still enormous.”

—Staff writer Claire M. Guehenno can be reached at guehenno@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Nathan C. Strauss can be reached at strauss@fas.harvard.edu.