When Neil Leon Rudenstine assumed Harvard's presidency in 1991, the fanfare was predictably grandiose. Students hung banners from their dorm room windows proclaiming their love for "Rudy." Capitalizing on the enthusiasm, Rudenstine set to work almost immediately with his perceived mandate to unify Harvard's disparate parts and kick off its first-ever University-wide capital campaign with the unprecedented goal of raising $2.1 billion.

Eight years later, the campaign is drawing to a close, and for those who have been fundraising for nearly a decade, it is time for a break. Chief among those is Neil Rudenstine.

"There's a huge burnout factor in these jobs now, and he's been at it very intensively for eight years. One would just wonder how long an individual can keep up that kind of pace," says Charlotte H. Armstrong '49, outgoing president of Harvard's Board of Overseers. "Give the man a break--he's in his mid-60s."

Harvard, however, takes no breaks. Capital campaigns are now "a way of life," as Armstrong puts it. Harvard Law School (HLS) could be the first to begin the next wave of University capital campaigns, if its proposal is approved next spring.

But Rudenstine admits that the large drive wrapping up now will be his last University-wide campaign. Following its completion in December, he says he plans to stay a few years to tie up loose ends--raising money for areas like endowed professorships that haven't yet met their fundraising goals.

After that, however, he says planning for the next campaign must begin and adds that "whoever does the next campaign needs to be able to stay the whole way." And so he will bow out to make way for the next campaigner.

The rest of the Rudenstine era seems more or less predictable. Rudenstine's remaining goals are not far-reaching. There is nothing new on his list--he plans simply to finish projects he has already started. Upon taking office, he told senior officials that his would be a 10-year presidency. In all probability, he will leave Harvard with the Class of 2001.

Has Rudenstine's reign been good for the University? Undoubtedly, if Harvard's coffers are any measure of its success. In some ways, Rudenstine looks to have accomplished the goal that was set for him when he came in, cultivating greater concern for the University as a whole among its diffuse parts.

But the spirit of collaboration that many say he has introduced has cost the University strong, unified leadership. Rudenstine's tenure will probably be remembered for the role others played in formulating policy, rather than for what he himself accomplished.

The president of Harvard is a busy man, and the job he holds is probably more than any one person could ever hope to perform with unquestioned success. The bulk of Rudenstine's time, however, is caught up in the kind of minutiae more appropriate for a small college president than the head of a major University. As a result, it seems, the office of the president of Harvard University has shrunk under Rudenstine's well-intentioned hand.

Teaching Harvard New Tricks

In the year Harvard was founded, Thomas Hooker, the first preacher in Newtowne--present-day Cambridge--and his congregation packed up and moved to what is now Hartford, Conn.

But Hooker had already left a legacy for Harvard, in a 1626 sermon where he proclaimed, "Every tub must stand upon its own bottom."

Harvard, Puritan institution that it was, took Hooker's advice to heart and adopted his phrase as the motto that would govern the separate parts it established over the years. Each school of the University--referred to as a "tub" by Harvard administrators--has its own faculty, its own endowment and its own dean to run it. Each tub is autonomous and independent.

The role for a Harvard president, then, is a complicated one, since it is difficult to exert any control over the deans of the separate tubs, who often pursue their own courses at the expense of the interests of the University as a whole.