The Last Word on Neil Rudenstine

If Neil L. Rudenstine had arrived at Harvard a decade later, his legacy might have been very different.

When he came to Cambridge as the University’s 26th president in 1991, he was charged with two tasks. Both were crucial to Harvard’s future. One: the first-ever University-wide Capital Campaign. Two: pulling together a Harvard that was stretching at the seams, with faculties that were often disconnected, or even at odds.

With Harvard’s wallet now $2.6 billion fatter, Rudenstine was indisputably successful at the first. With the planning that the campaign required, plus other University-wide initiatives, he is widely acknowledged to have been successful at the second. But as important as those two tasks have been to Harvard, they may have cost Rudenstine an even larger legacy than the one he leaves.

Rudenstine’s agenda was not entirely his to define. Six of his 10 years included that gargantuan Capital Campaign. No Harvard president ever faced such a monumental assignment before. The outgoing president maintains that he spent the majority of his time on other things, but it is impossible to deny the length and time-consuming nature of the task.

“I wouldn’t say I was handed [the agenda], in the sense that I was given plenty of opportunity in the search process to talk about it,” he says. “And certainly to voice my opinions, and be engaged with it. And if I didn’t like what was in some sense already mandated as goals and aspirations for the institution, I had plenty of time to pull out. And if I didn’t think that some of those goals matched some of my talents, I had plenty of time to pull out.”

Rudenstine didn’t pull out. And as he prepares to hand over the keys to his Mass. Hall office 10 years later, he leaves a conflicted record in his wake—a fatter wallet, a more diverse University, the potential for a larger campus—but a diminished bully pulpit and a distinct sense of distance between undergraduates and Harvard’s administration.

“I hope President Summers will not have to start planning a University-wide campaign for raising a few hundred million dollars in the first 30 months, and that’s as it should be,” Rudenstine says. “It’s not as if there is anything that was imposed upon me or anything that I didn’t know coming in. But there wasn’t a lot of flexibility about what was on the table.”

As Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes says, “Every president of Harvard is chosen with a kind of implicit shopping list of things to do.”

At the outset of his term as Harvard’s president, Nathan M. Pusey ’28 was charged with bringing the University together after the turmoil of World War II. His successor, Derek C. Bok, had to restore continuity and rebuild infrastructure after the turmoil of the 1960s.

The presidential search committee of a decade ago had defined items on their to-do list, too.

“We picked him originally because we thought the number one thing Harvard needed at the time was someone who could pull the whole University together more,” explains Robert G. Stone Jr. ’45, who sat on the committee that chose Rudenstine.

“Secondly,” Stone adds, “we hoped he’d be a good fundraiser.”

A good fundraiser he certainly was. Rudenstine and his development officers raked in half a billion more than their goal. But there were other costs.

“I didn’t have the freedom and flexibility to take two or three years to get to know the place and gradually think about the needs and, two or three years later, start a campaign. There was a tremendous amount of front-end work that had to be done,” he recalls. “And it had to be done pretty fast.”

“At Princeton I could actually set priorities,” he muses. “I could actually be directly engaged in college affairs, say what I thought and have a chance of moving forward.”

At Harvard, Rudenstine spent the bulk of his time on projects that will position Harvard for success 20 or 30 years from now, and the immediate consequences of his work are not always apparent to students at the College. The main thing Harvard College students today know about Rudenstine? That he raised a colossal amount of money.

And ten years after Rudenstine’s arrival, the presidential search committee made undergraduate education the top priority for the candidates who wanted to lead The World’s Greatest University, even though Rudenstine had promised to do just that when he first arrived a decade ago.

The search committee met with College students and officials, including members of Phi Beta Kappa, Undergraduate Council members and House masters to gauge the state of undergraduate education at Harvard. In October, Stone said the committee had realized that the new president would have to devote considerable energy to the College.

“Most of us have begun to realize that the College needs some attention in terms of student-faculty ratios, which we’ve been working on for some time,” he said.

Rudenstine came to Harvard with an ambitious, joyful stride, energized and prepared to bring his vision of educational and administrative reform to the University. He was inaugurated amidst great fanfare and frippery, with a two-day celebration featuring faculty symposiums, literary readings, special exhibits and an elaborate outdoor ceremony. Fifteen thousand people attended. No president had ever arrived with such a bang.

Among his top goals, Rudenstine cited improving undergraduate education, diversity and student aid. He also intended to “knit the University together” by creating programs between the traditionally separate faculties and introducing the first post-war provost.

The presidential search committee of 1991 was attracted to Rudenstine’s progressive vision of uniting the University, but they also brought him to Harvard for a more pressing cause. Harvard needed money. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences was running an operating deficit, and fundraising was about to become everyone’s favorite pastime—and Rudenstine’s life. Enter the first-ever University-wide Capital Campaign—requiring a planning process that tied the various faculties together as never before.

In the first 30 months, he had to raise $650 million.

“There were specific timelines on it, and there was no way to delay key parts of it, and I probably underestimated the fact that I was rather older than when I had started out,” he says.

“He was staying up all night writing notes to everybody who did anything for Harvard,” Stone remembers.

Rudenstine acknowledges that he should have realized that he was “pressing too hard” at the beginning of his tenure. By 1994, he had run down his own health to the point that he had to take three months off. His then-provost, Al Carnesale, took over as acting president, and Rudenstine became the national poster boy for exhaustion, even making the cover of Newsweek.

“He was never quite the same on the other side of his leave of absence. He decided he was going to have to ration his energies,” Gomes observes.

Looking back, Rudenstine laughs, “I might have felt I was still 35 or even 45 or even 50, and I wasn’t any of those things.”

This year, he turned 66.

The students of today might consider the University’s leader a passing blur, but the Harvard of the future will owe much of its shape to the decisions—and the money—that he made.

Over the years, the English poetry scholar became a savvy businessman. But fundraising, his colleagues say, is a human process—one that requires intense persuasive and personal skills.

Rudenstine doesn’t ask for specific amounts of money. Rudenstine doesn’t beg. Rudenstine explains. Rudenstine muses. Rudenstine charms. And with the aid of Provost Harvey V. Fineberg ’67 and Stone—the other two thirds of the campaign’s core trio—he was damn near irresistible.

The campaign did fall short in one key area: endowed professorships. Over the course of six years, Rudenstine raised $2.6 billion—but fulfilled 28 of 40 promised endowed chairs. He vowed to continue fundraising until the chairs were funded, but he leaves with the promise unfulfilled. Less than two weeks after the search committee announced that Summers would be Harvard’s next president, the Boston Globe reported that Summers planned to increase the size of the faculty by an additional 200 members.

Rudenstine also had successes with undergraduate education: While decisions to boost financial aid rested with Knowles in the end, Rudenstine ensured that they remained on the agenda. His tenure has seen two successive financial aid increases for undergraduates—$2,000 each time.

“Rudenstine has been a key player not just in raising the money needed for undergraduate financial aid, but in pressing the importance of this institutional priority at the same time as other needs are also considered urgent,” says Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68.

Capital Campaign money went toward boosting undergraduate aid and recruiting new faculty—Rudenstine was the architect for projects that affected undergraduates in ways they sometimes didn’t perceive. The University’s increasing national profile enabled Rudenstine to attract some of the nation’s top names to the Faculty—especially to the Afro-American studies department.

During Rudenstine’s tenure, Afro-American studies at Harvard went from a struggling program with one tenured professor and one concentrator to the nation’s top department, boasting a host of respected scholars popularly dubbed the “dream team,” and a comfortable $39 million endowment.

“No one has walked the walk more boldly in terms of diversity and affirmative action and Afro-American studies than Neil Rudenstine,” Gates says.

Additionally, the Capital Campaign gave him the leeway to implement change on a physical level. Under Rudenstine’s leadership, Harvard renovated landmarks such as Memorial Hall and the Harvard Union extensively. Five years and $65 million went into overhauling first-year residence halls and other Yard buildings. The University reconditioned Holyoke Center and William James Hall. The business school, the law school, the medical school and the College began countless new construction projects.

The projects played into Rudenstine’s fundamental goal for the University—to knit the faculties together. The remodeling of the Harvard Union paved the way for a new, centralized humanities complex, The Barker Center for the Humanities. Likewise, restoration of the 140-year-old Boylston Hall brought together five other humanities departments.

Changes to Harvard’s campus ranged from renovation to acquisition.

Before Rudenstine’s arrival, the University bid for 52 acres in Allston under a different name. The actual deal went through under his tenure, and when word leaked out that the buyer was Harvard, town-gown relations, already tenuous, spiraled downward. Rudenstine, in retrospect, readily admits his mistake.

“I think that was not something I did well, and it upset a lot of people, made them wary,” Rudenstine told The Crimson last May.

Despite the damage done to Harvard’s image, Associate Provost Dennis F. Thompson points out that the purchase of the Allston land—which some have dubbed the “Rudenstine campus”—exemplifies Rudenstine’s vision for the future.

“In the long view of Harvard’s history, it will be seen as the single most important accomplishment of this presidency—on the order of creating the House system, and adding professional schools,” he explains.

With achievements like the Afro-American studies department, Radcliffe and Allston under his belt, Rudenstine is bemused to realize that many people still see him as a moneymaker.

“I find it intriguing and somewhat ironic that people should think of me as a fundraiser,” he muses. “That’s not how I think about myself.”

In his mind, at least, Rudenstine is a teacher first.

“I don’t think of [fundraising] as something divorced from either my academic or intellectual life or my life as a teacher,” Rudenstine observes. “The only kind of fundraising that makes sense in a university is that which grows out of understanding as much as you can in terms of the actual academic mission of the institution.”

While much of Rudenstine’s agenda, time and even image have been consumed by the Capital Campaign, he has, in one of the shortest presidential tenures in Harvard’s history, accomplished some of the most significant changes in the University’s history. In addition to purchasing the land in Allston—where one or another of Harvard’s faculties will eventually end up—there was the long-awaited merger with sister school Radcliffe College, vocal support of affirmative action policies, the bolstering of the Afro-American Studies Department to national prominence and the growth of financial aid.

With a decade-long term—exactly what he promised when he arrived—Rudenstine can number some of Harvard’s greatest changes among his accomplishments. His involvement has sometimes been behind the scenes, but often he is the unseen impetus behind major University change—change that doesn’t immediately show.

For example, for years, the role of Radcliffe and its relationship with Harvard remained an unsolved problem—an issue that confounded even the most able administrators.

It was not until 1998 that the many years of distrust and disagreement between Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges were put aside and negotiators from both schools got serious about making an agreement. Harvard officially took responsibility for female undergraduates, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study was born. Though the shift was described in simple business terms, it marked the end of years of difficult negotiations with Harvard officials. And Rudenstine was the man who made it happen—the only one who could have brokered such a far reaching , complex deal, say those involved in the process.

“His obvious concern, his total trustworthiness, his ability to listen to the opinions of others and respond effectively to them all made him an ideal person to work in a situation in which a legacy of suspicion had grown up over many decades,” says Drew Gilpin Faust, now the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

“He had the imagination to pull that off,” Thompson explains.

Historically, some of the nation’s most important education reforms have emerged from Harvard’s own bully pulpit. Soft-spoken Rudenstine, more suited to the shadows than the limelight, leaves Harvard’s podium considerably diminished.

James B. Conant ’14, the 23rd President of Harvard, was both a leader in national education reform and an international figure, serving as the High Commissioner to Germany under U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Class of 1904, during the final year of his Harvard tenure. Bok was also a prominent national figure, frequently writing op-ed pieces in national newspapers and testifying before Congress.

Rudenstine, in contrast, was generally quiet on the national front, shying away from the media and what many believed was his duty as the president of one of the foremost institutions of higher education.

It’s important, he explains, to focus on his job at the University.

“Otherwise,” he says, “you really begin to substitute communications and media relations for the true business of the institution. That would be a disaster.”

“The so-called ‘bully pulpit’ is a chain around the neck of any president. Say too much, and you are excoriated for exploiting the Harvard name for a personal (or even an institutional) agenda. Say too little, and you’re accused of failing to use the opportunities that your position provides,” explains Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles.

According to Princeton President Howard T. Shapiro, Rudenstine’s reserve has not hampered his influence.

“He doesn’t speak loudly, or even often, but he changes people’s minds about things,” he says.

“I’ve found it much more important, much more effective to choose issues carefully on which I felt I was both more knowledgeable, and also interested and cared about really passionately,” Rudenstine explains.

Rudenstine has spoken out on select issues, sometimes traveling to Washington, D.C. to testify before Congress. He views himself as an “outspoken” national spokesperson for issues such as diversity, affirmative action, scientific funding and student aid.

“He’s been the conscience—not just within Harvard, and not just within the higher education community, but in society at large, for recognizing the importance and the value to all of us in ensuring that our universities serve all people, and not just a privileged few,” Carnesale says.

Rudenstine arrived at Harvard fresh off a stint as an executive vice president at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Prior to that, he had served as a dean and provost at Princeton. The adjustment to Harvard wasn’t easy. Whereas Princeton was a small environment, heavily focused on undergraduates and without many graduate students. Harvard, with its nine graduate schools, was more complicated. There were more players. And true to Gomes’ words, the University president was often the one with the least power.

“I think the crucial thing, which is very different just structurally not only from Princeton, where I worked before, but from virtually every other major university that I know of, is that in most universities...the president is actually president of a given faculty and a college, and fundamentally has decision-making power in that role,” Rudenstine says. “If there’s a dean of the faculty it’s a dean who’s working with and directly under the president in the college and the graduate school of arts and sciences.”

At Harvard, Rudenstine says, that’s not the case. The Dean of the Faculty, the Dean of the College, the Dean of Undergraduate Edudcation and the Dean of the Graduate School are responsible for undergraduate and graduate education.

“And that means the president, except in very indirect ways, really has to basically step aside and allow those people to do the job. And, in that sense, they’re like the deans in every school at Harvard.”

Rudenstine’s successor has already vowed to pay attention to the College, expressing interest in significantly enlarging the Faculty, for example. But Rudenstine had the same goal. It remains to be seen whether the president of the University is the man for that job.

With many administrative vacancies to fill—the Deans of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Kennedy School of Government, the Graduate School of Education and the Vice President and General Counsel all stepped down at the end of Bok’s tenure—Rudenstine was overwhelmed with searches at the beginning of his tenure.

“I didn’t know anyone in the institution. I didn’t have a clue who to choose,” he explains.

Just as members of the Harvard Corporation had painstakingly sifted through files and biographies in their search for the 26th Harvard President, Rudenstine embarked on his own methodical hunt.

“Most presidents don’t do their own searches,” Vice President for Finance Elizabeth C. “Beppie” Huidekoper points out.

But the searches gave Rudenstine yet another opportunity to centralize. He reorganized the administration so that the Deans not only worked on behalf of their specific schools, but also on behalf of the University as a whole. They became, in effect, a consultative cabinet.

Perhaps Rudenstine’s most significant change to Harvard’s administration was the recreation of the provost position, which Pusey had eliminated. Rudenstine envisioned the Provost as a “cloned president,” as not only a tool for delegation, but also a means of unifying the University. For example, the provost’s office now oversees interfaculty initiatives, one of Rudenstine’s favorite projects, which unify academic interests—like Mind, Brain and Behavior—across the schools.

But this change hasn’t met with unequivocal approval. Officials on the Board of Overseers, in the central administration and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences have said they fear the strengthened provost’s office created by Rudenstine and Fineberg has diluted the autonomy of the University’s faculties.

Nevertheless, Rudenstine calls centralization “maybe one of the few most critical things a President can try to help happen.”

“If you don’t have direct oversight of authority for any one given faculty, then what you really want to try to do is make sure that the institution as a whole is coordinated as carefully and thoughtfully as possible,” Rudenstine says.

Whether it’s fair or not, the biggest criticism of Rudenstine remains his interaction with students, particularly those in the College. Most students shake his hand at the first-year barbeque and then rarely see him again, and his achievements for the University—broad changes that will position the University for success thirty years from now—have yet to touch undergraduates in a way they can understand. They don’t understand his connection to the College’s strengthened financial aid, to the disappearance of Radcliffe College from their diplomas, to the potential campus across the river or the more diverse atmosphere.

And his personal interactions with undergraduates remain a drop in the bucket of nine faculties’ students. Office hours, Memorial Hall lunches, House dinners, study breaks—none make a dent in the image problem he has with College students.

“They’re all great experiences as it were one on one and two on two, but they don’t necessarily touch a lot of individuals so directly,” he says. “I came with the expectation that it would be very hard. I mean, just look at the scale. Princeton’s total number of students all tolled, graduate and undergraduate, is about 5,900. Ours is over 18,000. Princeton has no free-standing professional schools. Harvard has nine,” he says. “You hope that the students you do meet with have a feeling that you genuinely tried to engage with them. But beyond that it’s very difficult.”

Rudenstine’s centralizing mission may have been largely successful. He has been the University’s president—not the College’s. While much of what he has done has strengthened the College, Harvard’s undergraduate education continues to have—at the very least—an image problem: large classes, distant Faculty and poor advising. It is a problem that caused the presidential search committee this year to hunt for someone who would do the same thing Rudenstine did at the beginning of his term: trumpet the College and undergraduate education.

But in the post-Capital Campaign era, the Harvard presidency may no longer be a position suited to this task. On some level, at a University whose reach is so vast and whose population so large, connecting with students—once Rudenstine’s forté—became an impossibility. The president who once had large pizza-box signs in the Yard proclaiming students’ love for him departs a College in which he is seen as remote, in which student protesters launch their anger at him, Harvard’s most visible leader.

“I think what we need is a president of Harvard College,” Gomes says.

Despite his accomplishments for undergraduate education and the College, Rudenstine was unable to completely overcome the institutional inertia of the University.

It remains to be seen if Summers can finish what Rudenstine has begun—or if the 28th president of Harvard will again see improving the College on the docket.

—Staff writer Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at shoichet@fas.harvard.edu.