Maybe Drew Faust ought to run for president. She’s the head of Harvard University and just delivered at West Point a speech praising the military that once would have been unthinkable from Ivy League leadership.

And just when we need it most — facing a gathering war while locked in a presidential campaign in which our candidates are slinging insults at each other (and their wives) or hawking socialism and military retreat.

The press didn’t give her speech much coverage. But if you’re seeking grounds for optimism that America will eventually find the leadership it needs, Drew Faust’s remarks at West Point aren’t to be missed.

Mrs. Faust offers a paean to the importance of history and literature and to the value of a liberal-arts education. And she pays a formal tribute to America’s military that is surprisingly personal and moving.

Which is no small thing, given that Mrs. Faust comes from a campus that not so long ago was seething with rage against the Vietnam War. It got so bad back then that Harvard ended its ROTC program, refusing to train our officers.

What a blot on Harvard’s name — all the more so because the university has a long, patriotic history. More of its alumni have been awarded the Medal of Honor than any school save West Point and Annapolis.

Not that Harvard was alone in banning ROTC. Several top universities shrank from the war against the Communist conquest that cast Indochina’s millions into a dark night of reeducation camps, dictatorship and genocide.

Instead they left the fighting to draftees without Ivy League pedigrees and college deferments. When America won the Cold War anyhow, our elite universities were shorn of a portion of glory.

In 2011, Mrs. Faust made Harvard the first Ivy League school to lift its ban on ROTC. Others quickly followed, citing the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which had kept many gays out of the military.

It’s no coincidence that Mrs. Faust seized the lead. It turns out that she’s the great-granddaughter of a West Point graduate, Lawrence Davis Tyson, who, during the Apache Wars, appeared in arms against Geronimo.

Mrs. Faust clearly nurses a profound admiration for her famous forebear, whose brigade in World War I, she reminded the cadets, took terrible casualties in breaching the Hindenburg Line. Tyson ended up in the United States Senate.

“A supreme honor” is the phrase Mrs. Faust used last week to describe what it meant to her to stand on West Point’s hallowed ground.

She talked about the “importance of language to leadership.” She didn’t attack candidates by name, nor even refer to the primary campaign that has shocked so many with its raucous tone. She did praise Ulysses S. Grant, who, she said, devoured novels at West Point.

Mrs. Faust also picked up on Senator Rubio’s suggestion that we need “more welders and fewer philosophers.” In recent years, Mrs. Faust said, students in the United States have been taking the hint, with the proportion of bachelor’s degrees in humanities plummeting.

What caught Mrs. Faust’s attention is that West Point has been moving in the opposite direction. It has, she said, “transformed its curriculum into a general liberal-arts education.”

That means, she said, that West Point is “graduating leaders with broad-based knowledge.” History, literature, philosophy, she suggested, “enable leaders to compel and to connect with others.”

Mrs. Faust quoted General of the Army Omar Bradley on the importance of imagination and General George Patton on the importance of history. She talked about Winston Churchill’s fantastic appetite for reading history, philosophy, economics and religion.

Then Mrs. Faust spoke of how, in 2008, she met with five Harvard seniors who had worked around the absence of ROTC and were about to be commissioned as officers. “I wish that there were more of you,” she told them.

The Gallup poll, Mrs. Faust said, discovered that “the military is the last institution in which Americans have high confidence. Not organized religion, not government, not newspapers, not banks — you. You and all you represent.”

“We need you,” she said, “now more than ever.”

What a courageous coda at a time of global jihad. And from a generation in which the so-called best and the brightest turned against a war they had tried to lead — a generation now passing from power. What a gracious bow by Harvard to the institution that stood with the fight.

This column first appeared in the New York Post.