The University of Michigan has an identity problem. As a large public university, it serves the state of Michigan and its residents. It relies on hundreds of millions of dollars from the state each year and cannot raise its tuition rates as high as its private peers. Unlike the private schools, the University has a broader and more complex mission than just grooming a few thousand of the nation's most elite students.

But it is also quite possibly the world's largest reservoir of Ivy League rejects. How many of the students here referred to Michigan as their "safety" school as high school seniors? Those same students spend much of their college careers trying to convince themselves that Michigan is second to none when it comes to academic quality. They want the University to accumulate more Nobel Prizes than any other school; they want The New York Times to mention University of Michigan professors as often as Harvard professors; and they want the next United States president and five U.S. Supreme Court justices to be Michigan alums. They are the students who wear the t-shirts that read, "Harvard: The Michigan of the East."

In the driver's seat of this University - an institution filled with people who don't understand its identity - sits Mary Sue Coleman, a woman with no Ivy League pedigree but who has spent plenty of time in the Midwest.

In the spring of 2002, when the University Board of Regents announced that Coleman would be the 13th president of the University, among the University community and its alumni there was a collective, "Who?"

"When Mary Sue came in, I didn't know who she was," said political science and public policy Prof. John Chamberlin.

She was the first president since Robben Fleming took the position in 1968 who had not previously worked at the University - and she was from Iowa. Wasn't there an administrator somewhere on the East Coast we could have picked off?

Although Coleman has since won him over, when University alum and "60 Minutes" star journalist Mike Wallace heard of the regents' choice, he was skeptical. He didn't have any idea who she was, he told me over the phone.

It's not difficult to understand why the regents chose Coleman. After former President Lee Bollinger left to become president of Columbia University shortly after finishing second to Lawrence Summers in the race to become Harvard's president, the regents were looking for someone who would stick around for a while. Ann Arbor is full of people who will say they felt used by Bollinger, that he used Michigan as a stepping stone to the East Coast.

One of Bollinger's most ambitious - and most controversial - ideas was to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the life sciences. The centerpiece of that project was the Life Sciences Institute, which four years ago was not taking off quickly - to say the least. Regent Olivia Maynard said that four years ago LSI was getting started "but had no direction yet." As a former scientist herself, Coleman seemed to stand a chance of saving the project.

Coleman says the regents were blunt about which issues they wanted her to tackle. The men's basketball program was mired in the aftermath of a booster scandal, the affirmative action cases still had not been resolved at the Supreme Court, many of the University's top administrative positions were empty and its large medical system was facing financial challenges.

It also didn't hurt her candidacy that she is a woman, the first to serve as University president.

Coleman was the last candidate to be interviewed. "She was spectacular," Regent Andrea Fischer Newman told me.

And so the regents made their surprise selection, despite the popularity of interim President B. Joseph White, a former Business School dean whom even members of the leftist Students Organized for Labor and Economic Equality liked. When The Michigan Daily was listing its endorsements for the November 2002 elections, the editors slipped in B. Joseph White for University president, months after Coleman had already taken over as president.

Coleman, now 62, started the job just weeks before this year's seniors started moving into their dorm rooms to begin their freshman year.

As they were just starting to jump into college life, Coleman was jumping into her new job. She had the tough dual assignment of addressing the issues the regents wanted her to tackle and getting to know the University - all without a full team of vice presidents in place. She decided to keep Paul Courant, then the interim provost, on board for three more years; she did not know the University well enough to pick her own provost - the University's second-highest ranking official. Since becoming president, Coleman has appointed four other vice presidents in addition to a new provost, Teresa Sullivan, who will likely assume the position in June.