Former Harvard President Neil Rudenstine Awarded Special Radcliffe Medal

Former University President Neil L. Rudenstine was awarded a Special Radcliffe Medal Thursday, making him one of three University administrators to receive the honor.

Rudenstine, who served as Harvard’s president from 1991 to 2001, was awarded the medal at an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

He joins Linda S. Wilson, the 7th president of Radcliffe College, and Mary Maples Dunn, who served as both acting Radcliffe College president and acting dean of the Institute, as recipients of the Special Radcliffe Medal.

At the ceremony, Rudenstine was introduced by one of his successors — former Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust — who served as the Institute’s founding dean — as the president who gave Radcliffe a newfound purpose following its official merger with Harvard in 1999.

“The future he made possible has yielded this vibrant entity of scholarship and engagement that is now 25 years old,” Faust said.

“Neil gave Radcliffe an identity that required it to embody the University’s highest intellectual aspirations — an identity that all but compelled the rest of the University to respect and embrace it,” she added.

During his time as president, Rudenstine shepherded a major academic planning initiative and the first University-wide capital campaign.

At the event, Faust recalled a conversation she had with Rudenstine, who said that “he was astonished to find Mass. Hall and Fay House regularly lobbying cannonballs at one another up and down Garden Street” when he was first appointed president.

“Neil was determined to change this, and tonight we honor him because he did,” Faust added.

In his acceptance speech, Rudenstine recounted the difficulty of deciding what Radcliffe’s purpose should be following the official merger, saying that “dozens of ideas were tossed overboard” because “they were obviously either dismally bland or simply mundane.”

It was when one administrator suggested the “Institute for Advanced Study,” Rudenstine said, that “everybody, including myself, said, ‘Bravo, fortissimo.”

“And everyone then said, ‘Let the happy deed be decidedly done,’” he added.

Rudenstine also went off script on Thursday to weigh in on national controversies surrounding higher education.

“As I read the newspapers every day bewailing the state of higher education, not to mention the protest,” Rudenstine said, “ I feel that if they could only come and spend an afternoon at the Institute here, they would be startled into total inability to say such things.”

“The Institute embodies, in my mind, exactly what we hoped it would do — enormous intelligence, enormous imagination, and the capacity to make higher education flourish,” he added.

—Staff writer Emma H. Haidar can be reached at emma.haidar@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @HaidarEmma.

—Staff writer Cam E. Kettles can be reached at cam.kettles@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cam_kettles or on Threads @camkettles.