The Final Word on Neil Rudenstine

If Neil L. Rudenstine had arrived at Harvard 10 years later, his legacy might have been very different.When he came to Cambridge in 1991, he was charged with two tasks. Both were monumental and crucial to Harvard’s future. One: the first-ever University-wide Capital Campaign. Two: pulling together a Harvard that was stretching at the seams, whose faculties were often disconnected, or even conflicting.

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

But Rudenstine’s agenda was not entirely his to define. Six of his 10 years included that gargantuan Capital Campaign. While he maintains that he spent the majority of his time on other things, no Harvard president had ever faced such a task before.

“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 here he is, 10 years later. In his wake he leaves a conflicting record—the potential for a larger campus, a fatter wallet, a more diverse University, but a diminished bully pulpit and a distinct sense of distance between students and University administration.

"I hope President Summers will not have to start planning a University-wide campaign or 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.”

“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 search committee that chose Rudenstine. “Secondly, we hoped he’d be a good fundraiser.”

He was a good fundraiser—an excellent fundraiser. Rudenstine and his cohorts 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.”

Rudenstine—a president who once had large pizza-box signs in the Yard proclaiming students’ love for him—now departs a College in which he has seen as remote, in which student protesters launch their anger at him, Harvard’s most visible leader. At a University whose reach is so vast and whose population so large, connecting with students—once his forte—became an impossibility.

Whether it ‘s fair or not, former Princeton dean of students Rudenstine is widely criticized for this.

“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.”

Like those before him, 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, attended by over 15,000 people.

Among his top goals, the newly arrived Rudenstine cited improving undergraduate education, diversity and student aid. Above all, he intended to “knit the University together” by creating programs between the faculties and introducing the first post-war provost. Rudenstine wanted to shift the age-old University paradigm of “every tub on its own bottom” to “every tub on each other’s bottom,” to create an interdependent relationship between the many tubs—aka faculties—of the University.

But as Plummer Professor of Chrisitan 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 their Harvard presidential terms, Nathan M. Pusey ’28 was charged with bringing the University together after the turmoil of World War II. Derek C. Bok had to restore continuity and rebuild infrastructure after the turmoil of the 1960s.

Rudenstine was, in a sense, “chosen to fuel the engine,” according to Gomes.

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 imperative purpose. Harvard needed money-and fast. Enter the first-ever University-wide Capital Campaign—requiring a planning process that tied the various faculties together as never before. With the Faculty of Arts and Sciences running an operating deficit, fundraising was about to become everyone’s favorite pastime—and Rudenstine’s life.

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

“He nearly broke himself in those first two years. 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. I think he was often exhausted,” Gomes observes.

He was, in fact, exhausted. 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.

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

“He focuses on you and your concerns, rather than his own, however pressing these may be,” Knowles says.

“His whole presidency has always been about Harvard and what’s good for Harvard. It’s not about Neil Rudenstine and what’s good for Neil Rudenstine,” adds his provost, Harvey V. Fineberg ’67.

Rudenstine acknowledges that he should have realized that he was “pressing too hard” at the beginning of his tenure.

“It’s not just because it wasn’t good for me,” he says. “It wasn’t good for Harvard.”

He says he simply underestimated the intensity of the initial agenda.

“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.

Looking back, Rudenstine, now in his mid-60s, laughs, “I might have felt I was still 35 or even 45 or even 50, and I wasn’t any of those things.”

To many, Rudenstine’s foray into fundraising conjures up the image of a miserly Ebenezer Scrooge—a greedy businessman counting gold coins in the shadows of his office in the southwest corner of Mass. Hall.

But those who have watched Rudenstine transform Harvard from an institution with an annual operating deficit to a flourishing corporation with an endowment in excess of $19 billion disagree.

Over the years, the English poetry scholar has become a savvy businessman. But fundraising, they say, is a human process—one that requires intense persuasion and skillful interaction.

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

“I’m glad that I’m not rich, because if I were rich and he asked me for money I would give it to him,” Gomes says.

In his fundraising endeavors, Vice President for Finance Elizabeth C. “Beppie” Huidekoper says, Rudenstine tries to “match an individual’s interests with the University’s needs.”

Rudenstine’s unprecedented success with the Capital Campaign allowed him to implement his vision for Harvard on a more tangible level. Rudenstine embarked on an attempt to expand and develop the campus—to truly construct a University.

For Rudenstine, the aesthetics of the University were paramount. Under his leadership, extensive renovation occurred at Harvard landmarks such as Memorial Hall and the Harvard Union. First-year residence halls and other Yard buildings underwent a five-year, $65 million overhaul. Holyoke Center and William James Hall were reconditioned, and countless new construction projects proceeded at the Business School, the Law School, the Medical School and the College.

But Rudenstine’s renovations were not a purely artistic endeavor. He carefully combined his aesthetic vision with his 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.

As the most successful fundraising campaign in University history came to a close, the University announced that $4 million would be used to reconstruct the tower of Memorial Hall, which burned down in 1956. Though Pusey was reportedly heard saying, “Isn’t a pity it didn’t start at the bottom?” as the historic gothic tower was engulfed in flames, many saw the truncated tower as a psychic wound emblematic of a greater void within the University. Its restoration symbolized a new era of renewal, restoration and growth.

Another piece of Rudenstine history lies across the River, in Allston, where the University now owns 52 acres of land. Before Rudenstine’s arrival, the University bid for the land under a different name. But the actual deal went through under his tenure. When word leaked out that the buyer was Harvard, town-gown relations—already tenuous—spiraled downward.

And 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.

But Thompson points out that the Allston land purchase exemplifies Rudenstine’s vision for Harvard’s 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.

Nevertheless, Rudenstine had to spend time mending fences. In the later years of his tenure, he succeeded in improving the situation in Boston, if not in Cambridge.

According to Stone, Rudenstine’s academic credentials—he had been provost and dean of students at Princeton—also increased his appeal for the search committee of 1991.

Associate Provost Dennis F. Thompson, who also worked with Rudenstine at Princeton, says that he was impressed to see what he describes as “one of [Rudenstine’s] most striking qualities” carry over from the much smaller world of Princeton to the mammoth Harvard.

For Rudenstine, the adjustment wasn’t easy. Princeton was a small environment, heavily focused on undergraduates and without many graduate students. Harvard, with its nine graduate schools, was more complicated.

Former Princeton dean of students Rudenstine was widely criticized as removed from the student body.

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

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

Although Rudenstine taught at Harvard as a graduate student, in many ways, he was the proverbial new kid on the block. “He had been provost there, and becoming President here took some adjustment because you have to delegate much more here,” Thompson says.

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 quickly overwhelmed.

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

And so the search processes began.

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, “trying to get to know people inside and outside the institution.”

Yet again, Rudenstine proved himself to be an unpresidential president. As Huidekoper points out, “Most presidents don’t do their own searches.”

“This is a process in which Neil has always been deeply engaged,” Carnesale observed.

Rudenstine reorganized the administration so that the Deans were 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.

“If you’re going to have a system where every tub is on its own bottom, you’d better have an outstanding captain for each tub, and those are the deans,” Carnesale said.

But Rudenstine’s most significant change to Harvard’s administration was the recreation of the provost position, which had been eliminated by Pusey. Rudenstine envisioned the Provost as a “cloned president,” as not only a tool for delegation, but also a means of unifying the University. The Office of the Provost oversaw interfaculty initiatives, for example—one of Rudenstine’s favorite projects, which unified academic interests—like Mind, Brain and Behavior—across the schools. Some still debate the definition of the position, which is young in the span of Harvard history and still evolving.

Rudenstine selected Jerry R. Green, an economics professor, to be his first Provost. But Green resigned a year later, after reported irreconcilable disputes. After his resignation, Green was quick to point out Rudenstine’s flaws, accusing him of being overly focused on College-related issues and overlooking more pragmatic matters. Green’s successor, Carnesale, went from the provostship to the presidency of the University of California at Los Angeles. The third provost, Fineberg, defines his job:

“In my mind the most important function of the provost is to serve as the deputy to the president. You want someone who has a complementary personality to the president, who can stop in and chat for 10 minutes at the end of the day.”

Once he began his Harvard tenure. Rudenstine quickly earned the reputation of a voracious learner and listener—a distinction that would only grow as time went by. Ten years later, many still vividly remember their first encounters with Rudenstine. From Mass. Hall meetings to Lowell House teas, Rudenstine made a notable first impression.

In his initial meeting with Rudenstine, Dean of Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles remembers, “I saw him as he is: an infinitely thoughtful and charming man, intellectually serious and wide-ranging, engaging, and having a wonderful (and sometimes whimsically distilled) sense of humor.”

When asked by a group of alumni to describe the new “Rudenstine Harvard” in two words, Knowles replied, “global warming.”

“He learns from everything. He observes a lot—the surface conversation, the subtext, the demeanor, the tone,” says Fineberg.

While Rudenstine’s predecessors were powerful speakers and shakers, Rudenstine was a listener—and generous with his time.

“He doesn’t work in a vacuum,” says his assistant, Beverly Sullivan.

“He’s thorough, and he’s conscientious. He’s solicitous. He really does get input. He listens to all sides,” Huidekoper says.

But Rudenstine was by no means a passive president, friends and colleagues say. He was a master of persuasion and consensus-building, a useful skill when one must juggle the often-conflicting interests of Harvard’s tubs.

“The president of Harvard cannot command people to do anything,” Gomes says.

Thompson says Rudenstine displays a “deep intelligence and broad understanding” which “has won him the respect of the faculty here who’ve come in contact with him.”

At the same time, some have criticized him for listening too long and hard, seeing his willingness to listen as an inability to act on his own.

Theodore Roosevelt, Class of 1880, is famous for saying “speak softly, but carry a big stick.” With its position at the forefront of national education, the mantra might as well be about Harvard. Historically, some of the nation’s most important education reforms have emerged from Harvard’s own bully pulpit.

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. Rudenstine’s predecessor, Derek C. 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.

Rudenstine is the first to admit that media relations are not his number one priority. Aside from regular interviews with campus journalists, he rarely interacts with the media. 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.”

According to Rudenstine, there has been a historical shift in the meaning of the bully pulpit in relation to university presidencies. Over the last 50 years, he says, the number of institutions of higher education has rapidly increased.

“There are more than 3,000 more voices of presidents who are part of the higher education community in this country,” he explains.

“The so-called ‘bully pulpit’ is a chain round 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,” Knowles explains.

University spokesperson Joe Wrinn argues that a stronger national voice would not have been heard.

“There’s far too much static out there as far as people promoting their causes. Everybody has a P.R. person. Everyone has an expert,” Wrinn says.

“So much happens outside the airwaves,” he explains. “That’s how work gets done, and Neil gets things done.”

Huidekoper points out that the Universities of today are larger, more complex institutions.

“I think each person brings different things to the job. I think it’s harder today to use the presidency as a bully pulpit than it was twenty years ago,” Huidekoper says.

In addition, she explains, Rudenstine’s deep respect for the faculty made him less inclined to speak publicly.

“He thinks they should speak for themselves,” she says. “I think he feels that one person should not try to represent Harvard.”

According to Princeton President Howard Shapiro, Rudenstine’s reserve has not hampered his influence. Rudenstine, he says, is very thoughtful in his meetings with other university presidents and has led the way with several choice issues such as national science policy.

“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.

Ironically enough, after his first year at Harvard, Rudenstine was praised for speaking out more than Bok. When Peninsula, a conservative campus magazine, printed an issue condemning homosexuality, sparking campus-wide debate, Rudenstine responded by publicly showing his support for gay Harvard students and faculty.

In response to the article, Gomes publicly announced that he was gay. Though the Harvard community was generally supportive of Gomes, a small group of students called for Gomes’ resignation. At a time when many would have kept a lower profile, Rudenstine spoke out in support of Gomes.

“I could not have had a more supportive or loyal boss,” Gomes says. “He was wonderful, both formally and informally, publicly and privately.”

Later in the year, when racial tensions flared on campus, Rudenstine regularly met with students and publicly advocated the importance of diversity, making his viewpoints heard on a wide range of issues.

Though his public profile gradually diminished after his first year as President, Rudenstine continued to speak 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 insuring that our universities serve all people, and not just a privileged few,” Carnesale says.

“My sense is there are some things on which you definitely should speak out and other things where it would be more effective to use discussion in a quiet way,” Rudenstine explains.

In 1943, Conant and Provost Paul Buck were riding on a train together. Conant turned to Buck and asked, “What are we going to do about the Harvard-Radcliffe relationship?”

“Nothing,” Buck answered. “It’s like a scrambled egg, and there’s no way to unscramble it.”

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 College were put aside and negotiators from both schools got serious about making an agreement. At 12:01 a.m. on October 1, as Radcliffe officials toasted the end of the 120-year-old institution’s independence from Harvard underneath an apple tree in Radcliffe Yard, what was formerly known as Radcliffe College ceased to exist, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study was born.

Though the shift was described in simple business terms, it came as 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.

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

“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 Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study Dean Drew Gilpin Faust.

Faust first discussed the Institute with Rudenstine in December 1999, and formally became the Dean of the Institute four months later.

“I found his presentation of the new endeavor very compelling,” she says.

But Faust points out that Rudenstine’s support for Radcliffe has not diminished.

“He made it possible and continues to offer me and the Institute support in ways too varied to enumerate. The Institute would not exist without him,” she says.

In terms of Harvard history, the Harvard Radcliffe merger may be one of Rudenstine’s greatest accomplishments.

Another Rudenstine legacy: the Afro-American Studies Dream Team. Rudenstine also counts its recruitment among his proudest accomplishments. When he arrived, the department was struggling with only one tenured professor and one concentrator.

“Things were pretty rough,” explains department chair Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr.

In an attempt to rebuild the languishing department, Bok hired Gates as DuBois Professor of the Humanities in February 1991, three months before the search committee selected Rudenstine as Harvard’s next president.

But Rudenstine began his intensive recruiting and cultivation efforts for Harvard’s Afro- American Studies Department months before he set foot in his Mass. Hall office.

In May of 1991, the newly selected Rudenstine invited the newly recruited Gates to lunch. It was there, surrounded by the vibrant flowers of the Mellon Foundation’s garden, Gates remembers, that Rudenstine planted the seeds for the rebirth of African American Studies at Harvard.

The tale of how Rudenstine asked Gates to make a “fantasy list” of scholars for the department is practically Harvard legend. Rudenstine handed Gates a blank sheet of legal paper. Gates made a list that included Lani Guinier, Cornel West, William Julius Wilson, the Higginbothams, Lawrence D. Bobo and Suzanne P. Blier. A decade later, he notes, they’re all at Harvard, and the Afro-American Studies program—ranked number one in the nation—is planning to accept its first class of doctoral candidates this fall.

“Black people have a saying that he or she not only talks the talk, but walks the walk,” Gates explains. “And no one has walked the walk more boldly in terms of diversity and affirmative action and Afro-American studies than Neil Rudenstine.”

Before Rudenstine, Gates explains, the total endowment for the DuBois Institute and the Department were “negligible.” Now, after Rudenstine’s intense fundraising efforts, the endowment is a hefty $39 million—and growing.

And before Rudenstine, the Harvard library collection had no papers from African-American scholars. Now, Harvard has the papers of 1986 Nobel Prize Laureate Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Shirley DuBois—among others.

Rudenstine is clearly proud of the accomplishment.

Gates recalls a recent chat with Rudenstine in which the president said that if the only thing he had accomplished during his time at Harvard was the growth of African American Studies and the DuBois Institute and the recruitment of African American faculty, then his tenure would have been a success.

“No [other] president in the American academy has ever made a statement like that,” Gates reflects, “and meant it.”

Rudenstine’s recruiting efforts did not go unnoticed.

“I was certainly impressed by how hard he worked to get me to come to Harvard,” says Wilson, who came to Harvard in 1996 as a University professor.

“President Rudenstine was very focused on leaving this as one of his legacies in good shape, and he has done that, both in recruiting my colleagues and providing resources for research at the Institute,” Carswell Professor of Afro-American Studies and of Philosophy K. Anthony Appiah says.

“It’s not an occasion to celebrate when a man of such intellect, grace and poise departs the scene, especially one who has exhibited such strong commitment to values of inclusivity and excellence in the particular form of strengthening Afro-American studies here,” says Professor of Sociology and of Afro-American Studies Lawrence D. Bobo.

With achievements like the Afro-American studies department, Radcliffe and Allston under his belt, Rudenstine seems 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.”

Just as the endowment and the campus grew, so did the president. “He developed his fund of knowledge and his confidence in the ways things could work,” Fineberg explains.

“I think he’s not lost any of his idealism, but I think it’s tempered-tempered by experience,” Gomes says.

As Rudenstine reflects on his time at Harvard, he describes it as a powerful experience—a time that, while sometimes trying, also strengthened his faith in education.

“There’s a way in which complexity increases affection,” he says, “And I think this is the kind of place that, in the long run, does that.”

“Was he seeking this job? I don’t think so. But once asked he served with every part of his soul,” explains Huidekoper.

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

—Juliet J. Chung, Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan, David H. Gellis, Andrew J. Miller and Kate L. Rakoczy contributed to the reporting of this article.