But these remaining projects are not going to change the face of Harvard significantly. For all intents and purposes, Rudenstine's course is set.

And while he has worked himself into the ground since he took the job in 1991--his exhaustion at one point became national news--a long look reveals that Rudenstine's accomplishments are sometimes dubious.

By bringing Harvard's deans together to govern, he has not really given himself any more power or made the system any more efficient.

A truly centralized administration isn't possible, not simply because the deans would never stand for it but because it is not part of the Harvard culture.

"Harvard's very decentralized," says D. Ronald Daniel, treasurer of the University and member of the Harvard Corporation. "We don't have any intention of changing that."

"It makes the authority of the president and the role of the president less than it would be at other universities," Daniel says. "The president's leadership is expressed through the people he makes the deans."

And in fact, the deans are still fighting. They quibble over who gets access to big donors--railing against the centralized fundraising office of the capital campaign.

Supposedly, they are collaborating on their efforts to set up international outposts, but Harvard's only office abroad--located in Hong Kong--remains exclusively the domain of the Harvard Business School. And while HLS is ready to push ahead with another campaign, Knowles is dragging his feet, insisting Harvard settle into a noncampaign mode.

Knowles in particular has a "something of an upper hand in dealing with the president," in the words of one former University official. "He is pretty politically skilled, which is interesting because Rudenstine had vastly more experience when he came to the University, and Knowles had not been terribly active in the public affairs of the Faculty."

Knowles, the official says, "doesn't miss a trick."

One current administrator says Knowles is far more conservative than Rudenstine, especially when it comes to spending money. He is skeptical, for example, of plans to move ahead on "distance learning" at Harvard--education over the Internet and through correspondence. Rudenstine, on the other hand, wants to push forward with planning on the topic.

And in the most dramatic example of the clash of temperaments, Knowles last year resisted the Harvard president's desire to implement a financial aid increase to rival those being announced throughout the Ivy League and beyond. Only this fall did Knowles decide to unveil a plan of his own, and only after the Corporation had voted to take a much larger chunk out of the endowment for annual spending.

On issues past and future--from the $200 million science initiatives Knowles finally consented this year to ill-fated plans for a film studies center--Knowles will continue to dictate the pace of life at Harvard's largest school. Knowles combines a smaller vision with a bigger, more forceful personality.

If Rudenstine's presence at Harvard appears weak, he is practically invisible on the national scene. His behind-the-scenes tactics have substituted for taking a public stand as affirmative action has been rolled back nationwide.

Says C. Douglas Dillon '31, who presided over the overseers in 1969 and is a former secretary of the treasury, Rudenstine has not been "quite as active trying to influence legislation in Washington as some other presidents."