For the next 25 years, he did.

The highlight of Slichter's tenure came in 1990 and 1991 when as, the Corporation's Senior Fellow, he chaired the committee charged with selecting the University's 26th president.

Corporation member Judith R. Hope remembers Slichter's organization as being instrumental for the nine-member search committee, which eventually selected Rudenstine as the successor to former President Derek C. Bok.

The committee considered of every Corporation member expect Bok, as well as three members of the Board of Overseers, the University's lower governing board.

In addition to chairing the discussions and deliberations of the committee, Hope says, Slichter oversaw hundreds of interviews with students, faculty, alumni and staff that allowed the committee to ascertain a direction for Harvard.

And once that picture was developed, Slichter helped keep the committee on course.

"As we went through the process, he constantly focused us back on not so much a list of people but a list of qualities and a list of needs and a list of interests that we needed to look for," Hope says. "The search was very much a joint effort,..but Charlie's leadership helped keep us focused on what we were all about."

Slichter was also a guiding force when Rudenstine took a three-month medical leave of absence last November, leaving Albert Carnesale to fill the roles of acting president, provost and dean of the Kennedy School of Government.

"Charlie was just a very steady hand, and we were often talking several times a week during those couple of months," Hope says. "Charlie was certainly adept and able in that situation to hold everything together."

Beyond his leadership abilities, Corporation member stress Slichter's commitment to academic values.

"He is one who always defends the traditional role of the University as an educational institution," says Geyser University Professor Henry Rosovsky, who serves on the Corporation. "I think he has a kind of natural suspicion of a university getting involved in too many things not directly related to its mission as an educational institution."

Slichter says he is especially proud of his service on two key committees of the governing boards, one of which, the joint committee on appointments, is quite important in the academic guidance of the University.

That committee includes two members of the Corporation as well as two from the Overseers, with the president serving as chair. According to Slichter, its charge includes consideration of appointments for deans, administrators and key professorships. The committee also meets with deans to discuss broad policy issue such as affirmative action, according to Slichter.

Slichter is also proud of his service on the Corporation's Committee on Shareholder Responsibility. That committee considers how the University should deal in a socially responsible way with proxy issues--such as votes for directors--in corporations for which the University holds stock.

During Slichter's tenure, the University applied a complex set of principles, which include whether the social conduct of a company was beneficial to its employees. Largely as a result of the committee's analysis, the University decided to divest itself from all its tobacco holdings, while still maintaining an interest in some companies who dealt with apartheidridden South Africa.