“He’s been the conscience—not just within Harvard, and not just within the higher education community, but in society at large, for recognizing the importance and the value to all of us in ensuring that our universities serve all people, and not just a privileged few,” Carnesale says.

Rudenstine arrived at Harvard fresh off a stint as an executive vice president at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Prior to that, he had served as a dean and provost at Princeton. The adjustment to Harvard wasn’t easy. Whereas Princeton was a small environment, heavily focused on undergraduates and without many graduate students. Harvard, with its nine graduate schools, was more complicated. There were more players. And true to Gomes’ words, the University president was often the one with the least power.

“I think the crucial thing, which is very different just structurally not only from Princeton, where I worked before, but from virtually every other major university that I know of, is that in most universities...the president is actually president of a given faculty and a college, and fundamentally has decision-making power in that role,” Rudenstine says. “If there’s a dean of the faculty it’s a dean who’s working with and directly under the president in the college and the graduate school of arts and sciences.”

At Harvard, Rudenstine says, that’s not the case. The Dean of the Faculty, the Dean of the College, the Dean of Undergraduate Edudcation and the Dean of the Graduate School are responsible for undergraduate and graduate education.

“And that means the president, except in very indirect ways, really has to basically step aside and allow those people to do the job. And, in that sense, they’re like the deans in every school at Harvard.”

Rudenstine’s successor has already vowed to pay attention to the College, expressing interest in significantly enlarging the Faculty, for example. But Rudenstine had the same goal. It remains to be seen whether the president of the University is the man for that job.