Gates recalls a recent chat with Rudenstine in which the president said that if the only thing he had accomplished during his time at Harvard was the growth of African American Studies and the DuBois Institute and the recruitment of African American faculty, then his tenure would have been a success.

“No [other] president in the American academy has ever made a statement like that,” Gates reflects, “and meant it.”

Rudenstine’s recruiting efforts did not go unnoticed.

“I was certainly impressed by how hard he worked to get me to come to Harvard,” says Wilson, who came to Harvard in 1996 as a University professor.

“President Rudenstine was very focused on leaving this as one of his legacies in good shape, and he has done that, both in recruiting my colleagues and providing resources for research at the Institute,” Carswell Professor of Afro-American Studies and of Philosophy K. Anthony Appiah says.

“It’s not an occasion to celebrate when a man of such intellect, grace and poise departs the scene, especially one who has exhibited such strong commitment to values of inclusivity and excellence in the particular form of strengthening Afro-American studies here,” says Professor of Sociology and of Afro-American Studies Lawrence D. Bobo.

With achievements like the Afro-American studies department, Radcliffe and Allston under his belt, Rudenstine seems bemused to realize that many people still see him as a moneymaker.

“I find it intriguing and somewhat ironic that people should think of me as a fundraiser,” he muses. “That’s not how I think about myself.”

In his mind, at least, Rudenstine is a teacher first.

“I don’t think of [fundraising] as something divorced from either my academic or intellectual life or my life as a teacher,” Rudenstine observes. “The only kind of fundraising that makes sense in a university is that which grows out of understanding as much as you can in terms of the actual academic mission of the institution.”

Just as the endowment and the campus grew, so did the president. “He developed his fund of knowledge and his confidence in the ways things could work,” Fineberg explains.

“I think he’s not lost any of his idealism, but I think it’s tempered-tempered by experience,” Gomes says.

As Rudenstine reflects on his time at Harvard, he describes it as a powerful experience—a time that, while sometimes trying, also strengthened his faith in education.

“There’s a way in which complexity increases affection,” he says, “And I think this is the kind of place that, in the long run, does that.”

“Was he seeking this job? I don’t think so. But once asked he served with every part of his soul,” explains Huidekoper.

—Staff writer Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at shoichet@fas.harvard.edu

—Juliet J. Chung, Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan, David H. Gellis, Andrew J. Miller and Kate L. Rakoczy contributed to the reporting of this article.