Two weeks ago The Boston Globe published rumors and speculation about a replacement for Elena Kagan, the Harvard Law School dean who has been nominated to serve as solicitor general in the Obama administration. One name mentioned by the Globe was Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Ms. Slaughter’s name can now be pulled from the Harvard rumor mill — because she, too, is going to Washington.

In an e-mail message that was reprinted yesterday on the Web site of Foreign Policy magazine, Ms. Slaughter announced that she would step down as dean in order to take a post at the State Department. She did not name the position, but another report yesterday at Foreign Policy said that she would direct the department’s office of policy planning.

Ms. Slaughter, who has been dean of the Wilson School since 2002, is perhaps best known for A New World Order (Princeton University Press, 2004), in which she argued that informal international networks of government officials now play a powerful role in global affairs — a role that she says has been too little noticed by scholars and theorists of international law. In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, she makes an optimistic argument (subscription required) about the power of the United States in a “networked world.”

In 2007 the Princeton Alumni Weekly mentioned that Ms. Kagan and Ms. Slaughter were members of the same rowing crew at the University of Oxford in the early 1980s. That skill may or may not do them good in the basketball-centric Obama administration, but it at least suggests that they can pull together. —David Glenn