“I didn’t have the freedom and flexibility to take two or three years to get to know the place and gradually think about the needs and, two or three years later, start a campaign. There was a tremendous amount of front-end work that had to be done,” he recalls. “And it had to be done pretty fast.”

“At Princeton I could actually set priorities,” he muses. “I could actually be directly engaged in college affairs, say what I thought and have a chance of moving forward.”

At Harvard, Rudenstine spent the bulk of his time on projects that will position Harvard for success 20 or 30 years from now, and the immediate consequences of his work are not always apparent to students at the College. The main thing Harvard College students today know about Rudenstine? That he raised a colossal amount of money.

And ten years after Rudenstine’s arrival, the presidential search committee made undergraduate education the top priority for the candidates who wanted to lead The World’s Greatest University, even though Rudenstine had promised to do just that when he first arrived a decade ago.

The search committee met with College students and officials, including members of Phi Beta Kappa, Undergraduate Council members and House masters to gauge the state of undergraduate education at Harvard. In October, Stone said the committee had realized that the new president would have to devote considerable energy to the College.

“Most of us have begun to realize that the College needs some attention in terms of student-faculty ratios, which we’ve been working on for some time,” he said.