“I hope President Summers will not have to start planning a University-wide campaign for raising a few hundred million dollars in the first 30 months, and that’s as it should be,” Rudenstine says. “It’s not as if there is anything that was imposed upon me or anything that I didn’t know coming in. But there wasn’t a lot of flexibility about what was on the table.”

As Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes says, “Every president of Harvard is chosen with a kind of implicit shopping list of things to do.”

At the outset of his term as Harvard’s president, Nathan M. Pusey ’28 was charged with bringing the University together after the turmoil of World War II. His successor, Derek C. Bok, had to restore continuity and rebuild infrastructure after the turmoil of the 1960s.

The presidential search committee of a decade ago had defined items on their to-do list, too.

“We picked him originally because we thought the number one thing Harvard needed at the time was someone who could pull the whole University together more,” explains Robert G. Stone Jr. ’45, who sat on the committee that chose Rudenstine.

“Secondly,” Stone adds, “we hoped he’d be a good fundraiser.”

A good fundraiser he certainly was. Rudenstine and his development officers raked in half a billion more than their goal. But there were other costs.