No, we aren’t making an early endorsement in the 2008 Republican primary. We speak of another presidency that was referenced when a telephone caller reached the switchboard at Massachusetts Hall, in Cambridge, only to be told: “President Conant is not available. He’s in Washington meeting with Mr. Roosevelt.” The famed wisecrack aside, it’s a wonderful job, and Secretary of State Rice would be wonderful in it. While the world knows Ms. Rice as a diplomat and an aide to President Bush, she’s actually an academic leader.

Ms. Rice knows the university world as a professor, an administrator, and a board member. She’s been a professor of political science at Stanford University since 1981 and has won two of the university’s top teaching awards. She was provost of Stanford for six years ending in 1999, responsible, according to her State Department biography, “for a $1.5 billion annual budget and the academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students.” And she served from 1994 to 2001 on the board of directors of Notre Dame University.

What’s more, many of Ms. Rice’s skills as a diplomat are translatable to those needed by a Harvard president. As Secretary of State and national security adviser, she has been constantly asking other countries for money for things like Iraq reconstruction and aid to the developing world, in much the same way that a university president is constantly fundraising. As secretary, she had to get the mostly left-wing professional Foreign Service – civil servants with lifetime job security – to implement the essentially conservative agenda of President Bush and the American electorate, in the same way that a Harvard president has to get his mostly left-wing faculty – who also have lifetime job security under the tenure system – to implement the essentially conservative agenda of Harvard’s large donors and tuition-payers.

Ms. Rice has also had to negotiate compromises between feuding factions led by strong personalities – mediating between Secretaries Powell and Rumsfeld or between Prime Minister Sharon and President Mahmoud Abbas. These are the same sorts of compromises that a university president has to craft between clashing factions on the faculty. Ms. Rice has unparalleled experience in international relations, perfect for Harvard at a time when it is trying to expand its international presence and increase study abroad experiences for students.

Skeptics will raise several concerns, aside from the fact that Ms. Rice lacks a Harvard degree. She could be seen as likely to repeat Mr. Summers’s error of, as author Richard Bradley described it in the Times of Los Angeles recently, having spent “too much time positioning Harvard to suit prevailing political winds rather than advocating for the university’s traditional separation from the corrupting worlds of politics and commerce.” But that’s a misunderstanding of Harvard tradition. From the American Revolution to the Civil War to World War II and the Cold War through Vietnam, Harvard hasn’t been separated from politics but has put itself, in wartime, in the nation’s service.

Appointing Ms. Rice as president would signal that Harvard’s governing board is putting the university on the right side of the war on Islamic extremist terrorism. It is true that Ms. Rice would be unlikely to leave the war cabinet with the war still underway. But there’s plenty of precedent for secretaries of state ducking out a year or two before the end of an administration. President George H. W. Bush’s state secretary, James A. Baker III, left in August of 1992, and Cyrus Vance left the Carter administration in April 1980. Ms. Rice has served President Bush tirelessly now since his first presidential campaign, and Mr. Bush, as a Harvard Business School graduate himself, can probably appreciate how useful it’d be to the country to have an ally in the Harvard presidency.

And what an opportunity. The one thing that stands out from the Summers presidency is that the undergraduates – i.e., the future of the university – were on his side, on the side of Israel, on the side of ROTC, on the side of taking an honest look at things. It was an aging faculty, one that included its share of bigots, that was the problem. As for Ms. Rice’s grander ambitions, well, she’s only 51 years old. General Eisenhower used the Columbia presidency as a launching pad for a run for the White House. And if she doesn’t make it back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, she can always console herself with the anecdote about President Conant in Washington meeting with Mr. Roosevelt.