If Neil L. Rudenstine had arrived at Harvard a decade later, his legacy might have been very different.

When he came to Cambridge as the University’s 26th president in 1991, he was charged with two tasks. Both were crucial to Harvard’s future. One: the first-ever University-wide Capital Campaign. Two: pulling together a Harvard that was stretching at the seams, with faculties that were often disconnected, or even at odds.

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

Rudenstine’s agenda was not entirely his to define. Six of his 10 years included that gargantuan Capital Campaign. No Harvard president ever faced such a monumental assignment before. The outgoing president maintains that he spent the majority of his time on other things, but it is impossible to deny the length and time-consuming nature of the task.

“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 as he prepares to hand over the keys to his Mass. Hall office 10 years later, he leaves a conflicted record in his wake—a fatter wallet, a more diverse University, the potential for a larger campus—but a diminished bully pulpit and a distinct sense of distance between undergraduates and Harvard’s administration.