President Neil L. Rudenstine, the man with the Midas touch, shepherded a team of seasoned fundraisers to the Harvard Club in Manhattan last Thursday to make presentations to an intimate group of alumni who are politely referred to as "large potential" donors.

But these fundraisers weren't the usual suspects from the development office-they were a group of Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) student volunteers making a pitch for the PBHA Centennial Campaign, and the luncheon was a far cry from going door to door to Cambridge residents, a common PBHA fundraising tactic.

Only six years ago, 700 PBHA supporters marched on University Hall after Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis `68 announced plans for greater administrative control over an organization controlled entirely by students.

Now, Rudenstine has scheduled time in the final months of his Harvard tenure to lend some fundraising muscle to PBHA's effort to raise $7.25 million for a PBHA endowment.

Students at PBHA say they need the endowment to alleviate a perpetual funding headache.

The University is allowing alumni donations to PBHA's campaign to count toward alumni class totals each year. This means that individual class officers can promote giving to PBHA's campaign without fear of cannibalizing their own numbers.

"It's a very difficult decision [to offer class credit] because it takes money away from the class, but there are certain organizations we feel we need to help," says Nancy Couch, who is a senior consultant to the Harvard College Fund. "The University is strongly behind what PBHA does and usually during a capital campaign we offer class credit."

Couch, who retired from the University Development Office (UDO) last year, is still the primary resource in the UDO for cash-strapped student groups looking to raise funds with help from the University-for anything from the dance team's travel expenses to a national competition to the Harvard Student Agencies (HSA) endowment.