When University President Neil L. Rudenstine announced last May that he would resign effective June 30, 2001, it soon became clear that the search for Harvard's 27th president would be unlike any other search before. The nine-month long search for Harvard's 27th president would take the nine search committee members all over the country--from Stanford to Cornell to Columbia and Yale--and would require months of research and thousands of pages of secret communications. Technology would be used as never before, and for the first time, a woman would make the final round.

The people:

The search committee itself has changed little since Harvard began. It is still composed of six of the seven Corporation members, the University's second-oldest and highest governing board. The seventh member, the outgoing University president, does not sit on the committee. For its part, the Corporation was a band of titans: captains of industry and academics of the highest caliber.

The committee was led by Robert G. Stone, Jr. `45, Chair and Senior Fellow of the Corporation, a member of the Corporation for over a quarter-century, and a veritable treasure trove of institutional knowledge. Strong-willed, persuasive and energetic, Stone is credited by other committee members for keeping the sprawling search focused.

Likewise for the strong-willed Hanna H. Gray, who as president emeritus of the University of Chicago and a former interim president of Yale knows exactly what it took to manage a modern university. As decade ago, Gray—then an Overseer—sat on the committee that selected Rudenstine. Harvard's search was her fourth in four years, having also sat on the executive search committees for Bryn Mayr College, the Smithsonian Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Some had even taken to calling her the "Kingmaker."

Rounding out the group were D. Ronald Daniel, former chair of McKinsey and Co., a Corporation member, University treasurer, and chair of the Board of the Harvard Management Company, which oversees Harvard's $19 billion endowment; James R. "Jamie" Houghton `58, chair emeritus of Corning, Inc., and a member of the Board of Directors of a half-a-dozen companies ranging from Exxon Mobil to MetLife, who has most recently he has filled his time as the chair of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the youngest member of the search committee—the only one under 60—Herbert S. "Pug" Winokur Jr. '64-'65.