Though newspapers have speculated in recent weeks that President Tilghman might be a candidate to replace Larry Summers as the president of Harvard, Tilghman said she has no interest in the job in an interview Wednesday.
"Why would I leave the best job in higher education?" Tilghman said, adding, "I have spoken to no one, and I have no interest in the job."
The Guardian, a British newspaper, reported Tuesday that religion professor Cornel West GS '80, who left Harvard in 2002 after a much-publicized spat with Summers, had suggested Tilghman as a possible replacement for Summers.
West had previously said he believes his former employer could learn from the examples of "strong-willed" women, such as Tilghman and Brown president Ruth Simmons.
West specifically praised Tilghman's leadership in an interview Tuesday.
"She would be a great university president across the board," West said. "I think that her vision would be one that Harvard could build on."
In its story, The Guardian said that the three leading candidates to lead Harvard are all women: Elena Kagan '81, the dean of the Harvard Law School; Drew Faust, who chairs Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; and former Princeton Provost Amy Gutmann, a Harvard-Radcliffe alumna who left Princeton two years ago to become president of the University of Pennsylvania.
The article also mentions Tilghman and Simmons, who was once a vice provost at Princeton, as possible candidates, as well as Wilson School Professor Nan Keohane, the former president of Duke University and a member of Harvard's governing board.
Keohane, however, said she had no interest in the job.
"I'm very happy to be on the faculty at Princeton, and I'm not a candidate for any other job at the moment," she said.
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