Drew Gilpin Faust started as Harvard’s president when the university’s prosperity seemed limitless. With its ballooning wealth, Harvard planned almost frenzied growth, from a building boom into Boston to vast increases in student financial aid.
Billions of lost endowment dollars later, though, Faust faces a much different reality.
“We can’t have chocolate and vanilla and strawberry. We have to decide which one,” she said.
It’s a question few at Harvard expected Faust to be forced to answer in the infancy of her presidency.