Common threads run through the candidates' views on what a University president should be.

Point one--with a six-year capital campaign, Rudenstine has been limited in the amount of time he can spend with student. But his successor doesn't have to be. Every candidate wants a University president who is in touch with student concerns.

"Undergraduate life is obviously something I care about, and it should also be priority for the incoming president, or at least something she or he looks into," Averell says.

Gusmorino says that Rudenstine has done an excellent job of providing the University with resources to plan for the future. The key now, he says, is to make sure undergraduates are involved in policy decisions.

Gusmorino says he hopes to see a president who will work for a diverse faculty and institutional support for student-faculty interaction. Houses need to be renovated to provide more undergraduate space, he adds, and performing arts also need attention.

Candidates also clamor for more student input into the search itself. Barkley noted that Stanford, Brown and Princeton haven't "crumbled from allowing a student role in decision making, and neither would Harvard."

"Even at Harvard, when I was a freshman, they allowed UC reps to interview prospects for an assistant freshman dean's post," Barkley says. "I think that any candidate worthy of Harvard's presidency should want to be interviewed by some of its students." Barkley also criticized some of Rudenstine's responses from last week's Days of Dialogue event.

"People would suggest ways they wished Harvard were different and better, and Rudenstine would say something like, oh, we did it that way at Princeton. In his tenure he hasn't even addressed student concerns that were solved back when he was Princeton!"