Neil is fragile, remember. He had a breakdown from what was termed exhaustion not long before we arrived on campus and had to recuperate for several months walking tropical beaches. Maybe he was totally different before that. Either way, it shows how the job as it’s conceived of now could wear down a man, especially the kind of career administrator the school is likely to pick now. Neil has taken some stands in defense of affirmative action. He is not, however, a leading figure in that debate although his commitment to it is vigorous. Besides that, the New Republic observed two years ago, he is an example of a phenomenon today that the magazine calls “The Incredible Shrinking College President.” Nice work, Harvard.

A whole mess of intrigue and thinking swirls around the office of the president. We look up to that office. When we want to make a point, we take over that office. But that office is empty and enigmatic. I have known Neil and he is truly strange. His speaking voice makes him sound inebriated or maybe stroke-ridden. He fidgets with his socks constantly. And as I have said, he is at once overwhelmingly genuine and stridently superficial and distant.

This is the president I know and this is the presidency I know. Freshman year, in the Glee Club as usual, I attended my first, and last, Phi Beta Kappa ceremony and afterwards I introduced myself to Neil because I had just gotten the nod to interview him full time. I walked back with him to Mass Hall after the ceremony and we chatted about, of course, my summer plans. I was so excited. I wonder if he wanted to know about my undergraduate life in anything more than the details that are really abstractions that fill his mind when he talks about the school, the kinds of details that make college viewbooks so captivating to eager matriculants, fantasizing about their new lives.

That event, though, was a wash for Dr. Rudenstine. Four years of college life are for me made up of little moments, some around seminar tables and others with friends over beer, and still others like that one on the paths in front of Harvard Hall when I introduced myself to one of the leading men in America. I never forgot it and in time I came to understand it better. This is what the president is, a cloud drifting through meetings and appearances in order to fight for this place that has been my home. A new installment is on the way, and to him I wish a happy new year.

—James Y. Stern ’01 is the former editor of Fifteen Minutes, the weekly magazine of The Harvard Crimson.