I'm Drew Faust. I'm the president of Harvard University.

That is a nice thing to say, isn't it?

It is.

We spoke with Drew Gilpin Faust on the Monday of the last full week in August.

School's starting up and we have undergraduate freshman arriving tomorrow, so we're going to be back fully in the swing of things very soon.

And tell me, maybe in 60 seconds or less, what you actually do in a given day, that's assuming there is a given day in your life, which you may not be.

There really isn't a given day and things vary a lot depending on whether I'm here on campus,

visiting alums and others, traveling around the country, meeting with alumni and officials across the globe.

A series of meetings with different members of the community, the deans who run Harvard schools,

and with senior administrators, the Office of General Counsel Legal Affairs, or our executive vice president,

meeting with students or faculty, perhaps attending a student performance or a student athletic meeting with the undergraduate student government,

attending a faculty meeting in one or another,

meeting with individual faculty or groups of faculty to hear about their aspirations and their research and teaching.

So those are just some of the things that could fill a day and it often goes from a breakfast like the one I had this morning with a member of our Board of Overseers,

through a day of meetings into an evening of perhaps a dinner with one or another constituent group or a performance or some other evening activity.

I'm exhausted listening to you and part of today you're spending with Freakonomics Radio for which we are very grateful.

From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.

Here's your host, Stephen Duffner.

Drew Guilpin Faust was installed as the president of Harvard University in 2007.

Her immediate predecessor was Derek Bach, a long time Harvard president years earlier,

who came back for one year as acting president after the very short and very stormy tenure of Lawrence Summers.

Faust had spent 25 years as a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and later became dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

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