CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Drew Gilpin Faust started as Harvard’s president when the university’s prosperity seemed limitless. With its ballooning wealth, Harvard planned almost frenzied growth.

Billions of lost endowment dollars later, though, Faust faces a much different reality.

“We can’t have chocolate and vanilla and strawberry. We have to decide which one,” she said.

It’s a question few at Harvard expected Faust to be forced to answer in the infancy of her presidency.

Her appointment in 2007 was hailed as a historic turning point for the 373-year-old university. Faust, then the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, would be the first woman to step into the country’s most high-profile presidency and appeared perfectly suited to cool tensions within the faculty after the controversial five-year tenure of Lawrence

H. Summers. She would have the nation’s

richest endowment to work with — $34.9 billion in 2007.

But by last fall, the crashing economy began to exert downward pressure on even the country’s most famous university. Its endowment fell to $28.7 billion, and the university estimated that it would drop by 30 percent for the fiscal year that ended Tuesday. The steep decline is particularly difficult for Harvard, which gets roughly one-third of its budget from endowment earnings.

Much of Faust’s time now is spent figuring out how Harvard can weather the downturn, through layoffs, early retirement packages, cuts in services, even changes to breakfast menus. She said further reductions in endowment funds next year will mean more cuts.

“People say to me often now, ‘This must not be what you expected,’ and my response is that it would be foolish not to expect surprises,” Faust said recently.

“I’ve used the metaphor of marriage about this, saying I signed on for sickness or health or richer or poorer. And it’s turned out to be quite a ride,” she said, laughing.

Most faculty and students still strongly support Faust, despite an unease on campus about the finances. For many, Faust’s warm and inclusive demeanor remains a welcome change from her predecessor.

Faust cited listening as a key component of her leadership, not an easy task at a university notorious for its segmented colleges, schools and institutes, all with their own management.

“I learn what people are telling me,” she said, “but I also learn where they are politically, where they need to be moved towards in order to get done what we need to get done.”