Stepping into her new role, Faust quickly charmed the faculty with her mild-mannered presence, her gentle quips, and her thoughtful demeanor.

Her first year on the job was everything the end of the Summers’ presidency was not—a lack of discord and uncontroversial priorities.

In her three-year tenure, Faust’s most direct exercise of presidential power may have been the appointment of seven deans across the University.

According to Herman “Dutch” B. Leonard ’74, who holds a dual appointment at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School and served on the search committee that recently selected the new Business School Dean, Faust made a deliberate effort to choose candidates committed to collaboration across schools and departments.

The question on her mind, he says, was “How will this potential candidate operate in a university environment?”

Martha L. Minow’s appointment as dean of Harvard Law School last year is emblematic of Faust’s desire to integrate the different parts of the University. Minow—whose own scholarly output has garnered praise for pulling from a variety of fields of study—oversaw the reform of the Law School curriculum towards a more interdisciplinary model.

“I think the key thing for the president is that they end up spending a lot of time recruiting staff and deans, and she has done a lot in that score by picking the academic leadership that has the spirit and style that she has,” says Michael F. Cronin ’75, a former member of the Board of Overseers.

A DREAM DEFERRED

The Allston Science Complex would have been a mecca of interdisciplinary work, giving Faust a chance to bring together her new team to embark on the largest cross-faculty initiative under her direction.

Now, instead of continuing construction on the massive building that would have brought scientists from different fields to work under the same roof, the University has been forced to pause construction indefinitely and instead plant shrubbery to appease residents who complained that the unfinished Science Complex was an eyesore.

With University resources strained, planners have had to return to the drawing board, and the timeline for the expansion’s future has been extended.

At this point, University officials say they are no longer wedded to the Allston plans drawn up before the financial crisis—all options are back on the table.

“By anybody’s estimation the endowment is not going to recover in terms of buying power for a number of years, so for that reason alone we have had to rethink at least the pace if not the scope of Allston,” University Provost Steven E. Hyman says. “We really have a lot of rethinking to do.”

Yet the topic of cross-faculty collaboration continues to intrigue Faust, who becomes noticeably excited when discussing the possibilities for breakthroughs when researchers work together.

Faust recently opened an imaging center where scientists working next to each other use state-of-the-art microscopes to examine samples.