If Neil L. Rudenstine had arrived at Harvard 10 years later, his legacy might have been very different.When he came to Cambridge in 1991, he was charged with two tasks. Both were monumental and crucial to Harvard’s future. One: the first-ever University-wide Capital Campaign. Two: pulling together a Harvard that was stretching at the seams, whose faculties were often disconnected, or even conflicting.

With Harvard’s wallet now $2.6 billion fatter, he has been indisputably successful at the first. With the planning that campaign required, plus other University-wide initiatives, he is widely acknowledged to have been successful at the second. As important as those two tasks have been to Harvard, they may have cost Rudenstine an even larger legacy than the one he leaves.

But Rudenstine’s agenda was not entirely his to define. Six of his 10 years included that gargantuan Capital Campaign. While he maintains that he spent the majority of his time on other things, no Harvard president had ever faced such a task before.

“I wouldn’t say I was handed [the agenda], in the sense that I was given plenty of opportunity in the search process to talk about it,” he says. “And certainly to voice my opinions, and be engaged with it. And if I didn’t like what was in some sense already mandated as goals and aspirations for the institution, I had plenty of time to pull out. And if I didn’t think that some of those goals matched some of my talents, I had plenty of time to pull out.”

Rudenstine didn’t pull out. And here he is, 10 years later. In his wake he leaves a conflicting record—the potential for a larger campus, a fatter wallet, a more diverse University, but a diminished bully pulpit and a distinct sense of distance between students and University administration.

"I hope President Summers will not have to start planning a University-wide campaign or raising a few hundred million dollars in the first 30 months, and that’s as it should be,” Rudenstine says. “It’s not as if there is anything that was imposed upon me or anything that I didn’t know coming in. But there wasn’t a lot of flexibility about what was on the table.”

“We picked him originally because we thought the number one thing Harvard needed at the time was someone who could pull the whole university together more,” explains Robert G. Stone Jr. ’45, who sat on the search committee that chose Rudenstine. “Secondly, we hoped he’d be a good fundraiser.”

He was a good fundraiser—an excellent fundraiser. Rudenstine and his cohorts raked in half a billion more than their goal. But there were other costs.

“I didn’t have the freedom and flexibility to take two or three years to get to know the place and gradually think about the needs and two or three years later, start a campaign. There was a tremendous amount of front-end work that had to be done,” he recalls. “And it had to be done pretty fast.”

Rudenstine—a president who once had large pizza-box signs in the Yard proclaiming students’ love for him—now departs a College in which he has seen as remote, in which student protesters launch their anger at him, Harvard’s most visible leader. At a University whose reach is so vast and whose population so large, connecting with students—once his forte—became an impossibility.

Whether it ‘s fair or not, former Princeton dean of students Rudenstine is widely criticized for this.

“At Princeton I could actually set priorities,” he muses. “I could actually be directly engaged in college affairs, say what I thought and have a chance of moving forward.”