Local students are often invited to utilize equipment in Shad Hall, the opulent $20 million gymnasium and recreation center McArthur built but hasn't opened to Harvard affiliates.

"He has been very supportive of the local community," Aguilar says.

Some consider McArthur unreceptive suggestions, but those who know the dean says he is simply selective in the issues he chooses to tackle.

"He gets portrayed as not being committed, but that's because he gets very involved in few things," Cash says. "He doesn't commit to things lightly but when he does he commits totally."

The Architect

One issue the dean has given his special kind of total commitment is architecture at the Business School.

McArthur restructured the administrative building to bring faculty into the same space. He also helped to design the school's chapel, which was dedicated to him by the Business School's class of 1959.

But the Chapel's design has drawn strong criticism from architecture experts, especially Boston Globe critic Robert Campbell.

"Sooner or later, I suppose, it was inevitable that the Harvard Business School would build itself a chapel," Campbell wrote, in a review last year. "It's already done everything else it possibly could to isolate itself from the rest of the world, wrapping itself around its own navel in a dream of privacy and wealth."

But McArthur has said he kept the design of the Business School self contained in order to create for the school "a community, not just a bunch of streets with cars and trucks."

Aguilar says the dean is searching for the familiar in how he designs the School. The idea for the chapel's shape comes from the dean's childhood, Aguilar says. And it lends insight into a man who hates wasting time and is so quick to take the initiative--Whether reforming the Business School curriculum or engineering a hospital merger--that he never lets himself be backed into a corner.

"When he was going to church in Canada, there was the idea of the devil trapping you in the corner," Aguilar says. "So McArthur came up with the idea of a round chapel."