CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (AP):

Harvard University has searched nearly a year for a new president, while the disciplined secrecy of the search committee fuelled a months-long guessing game among academics over who would succeed the tumultuous five-year tenure of Lawrence Summers.

Yesterday, the world's wealthiest university prepared to turn to a respected insider and name Civil War historian Drew Gilpin Faust as its 28th and first woman president.

The board of overseers was scheduled to elect Faust, a noted scholar of the American South and dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, yesterday afternoon. She was chosen after a search in which a number of potential candidates said they were not interested in the job.

Noteworthy selection

With Faust's appointment, half of the eight Ivy League schools will have woman presidents. Her selection is noteworthy given the uproar over Summers' comments that genetic differences between the sexes might help explain the dearth of women in top science jobs, which sparked debates about equality at Harvard and nationwide.

Faust oversaw the creation of two faculty task forces, formed during the Summers controversy, to examine gender diversity at Harvard. She has been dean of Radcliffe since 2001, two years after the former women's college was merged into the university as a research centre with a mission to study gender issues.

Some professors have quietly groused that - despite the growing centrality of scientific research to Harvard's budget - the 371-year-old university is appointing a fifth consecutive president who is not a scientist. No scientist has had the top job since James Bryant Conant retired in 1953; its last four have come from the fields of the classics, law, literature and economics.

Faust's appointment may be viewed as a statement of Harvard's commitment to the humanities. Or it could simply mean a non-scientist is best qualified to rise above scientific turf battles and make big-picture decisions.