I ran into Neil Leon Rudenstine a week or so ago. He is a dude from less-than-scenic Danbury, Connecticut whose dad was a prison guard and whose mom, to the best of my knowledge, worked as a waitress her whole life. He, Neil, is also the President of Harvard University, the head of the most prestigious educational institution in the world, and, if the pursuit of knowledge is the most noble of human aspirations (as many sages have suggested) then he has the most significant position on the face of the earth.

I happen to know “Neil,” which is what all the bigshots call him, even to a sapling like me. I used to think it was disrespectful and impertinent to do so, but this is Neil who, according to Crimson reportage, has “no ego” to speak of. I know Neil because, when Crimson comp posters encouraged prospects with the possibility of interviewing the president, I took them at their word. Every two weeks, more or less, my reporting partner and I were ushered into the president’s chamber in the back of Mass. Hall for an hour with Neil L. Rudenstine and the University press secretary who made sure Dr. Rudenstine didn’t say anything stupid. I started interviewing him freshman year and I retired in my junior.

I ran into Neil at the Law School, where we were both set to participate in the same ceremony, me as a Glee Club singer and him as the Presider. After three years, he learned my face if not my name, and we bumped into each other on the steps heading up to the hall where several dozen Harvard veterans—workers from all departments, geology to grounds—were assembled to be honored for their 25 years of service to Harvard. Neil and I made eye contact and he greeted me with the warmth of a January sun, bright but distant.

“Happy New Year.”

That’s what he said to me. He paused after the first word, as if searching for the perfect object for his modifier. New Year is what he came up with. It is not the academic New Year. It is not the Christian New Year or the Y2K New Year. It is not the Chinese New Year. It is not the fiscal New Year. I, bewildered, replied in kind and my friends and I went our way, up to the balcony to sing, where we offered our official greeting to the President, a 20-second Latin chorus in his praise that the Glee Club is supposed to sing whenever the president comes into view. Tradition.

At the ceremony, the once-professor Rudenstine talked about commitment to the University, the kind of commitment that keeps a librarian behind the same reference desk for a quarter century, the kind of commitment that is pretty hard to come by these days. I’m no fan of the Progressive Student Labor Movement, but I couldn’t suppress the percolating wellspring of ironic indignation within my chest when the president spoke of the rarity of such service. Security guards and custodians, young Turks who age into sparkling-eyed old men after a lifetime helping fancy Harvard kids, are an endangered species around here—not because it’s so hard to find such people, but because the University now “outsources,” viewing labor as an inorganic commodity rather than a human enterprise and an endeavor of communities. This is in order to keep costs down, which is an admirable and even a necessary priority at this sprawlingly expensive place.

But Dr. Rudenstine’s peculiar position, dishing out charming platitudes to a crowd whose interests he undercuts—while at the same time empathizing with their position better than the overwhelming majority around here—epitomizes the weirdness of his job and his performance, that bizarre quality that has him no doubt parading around his mansion with a New Year’s buzzer in his hand...

He is down to earth. He is aloof. He is an icy contradiction. In one interview with him last year, I was astounded by the revelation that he stays up-to-date on the latest developments in nearly every academic field. In other words, he reads not only the latest in Shakespeare scholarship but also genetics. He reads in some eclectic discipline for at least an hour every day, he says. He was a professor of English, with a deep affinity for the poet Sir Philip Sydney, and after Harvard, he plans to work on a project cataloguing art, another area in which he is a connoisseur. He is famous for his handwritten thank-you notes. And his speeches are utterly charming, as he every year dubs himself an honorary member of “your classy class” at the Commencement Baccalaureate.