Nevertheless, Rudenstine calls centralization “maybe one of the few most critical things a President can try to help happen.”

“If you don’t have direct oversight of authority for any one given faculty, then what you really want to try to do is make sure that the institution as a whole is coordinated as carefully and thoughtfully as possible,” Rudenstine says.

Whether it’s fair or not, the biggest criticism of Rudenstine remains his interaction with students, particularly those in the College. Most students shake his hand at the first-year barbeque and then rarely see him again, and his achievements for the University—broad changes that will position the University for success thirty years from now—have yet to touch undergraduates in a way they can understand. They don’t understand his connection to the College’s strengthened financial aid, to the disappearance of Radcliffe College from their diplomas, to the potential campus across the river or the more diverse atmosphere.

And his personal interactions with undergraduates remain a drop in the bucket of nine faculties’ students. Office hours, Memorial Hall lunches, House dinners, study breaks—none make a dent in the image problem he has with College students.

“They’re all great experiences as it were one on one and two on two, but they don’t necessarily touch a lot of individuals so directly,” he says. “I came with the expectation that it would be very hard. I mean, just look at the scale. Princeton’s total number of students all tolled, graduate and undergraduate, is about 5,900. Ours is over 18,000. Princeton has no free-standing professional schools. Harvard has nine,” he says. “You hope that the students you do meet with have a feeling that you genuinely tried to engage with them. But beyond that it’s very difficult.”

Rudenstine’s centralizing mission may have been largely successful. He has been the University’s president—not the College’s. While much of what he has done has strengthened the College, Harvard’s undergraduate education continues to have—at the very least—an image problem: large classes, distant Faculty and poor advising. It is a problem that caused the presidential search committee this year to hunt for someone who would do the same thing Rudenstine did at the beginning of his term: trumpet the College and undergraduate education.