How and why did they come to this decision? Somewhere deep in the bowels of the Harvard Archives are 31 boxes. They are labeled with the number UAI 15.1795.7, and contain around 10 cubic feet of files from the search for Harvard’s 26th president. As is typical with many of Harvard’s “secret” files, they are sealed for 80 years—not to be read or opened until the year 2071. If precedent is any indication, the records of the search for Harvard’s 27th president won’t be unsealed until the year Summers himself would turn 126.

This secrecy is paramount, University administrators say—the pool of candidates for the presidency would be diminished immediately if contenders knew they would face public comment and scrutiny. So with the resources and money of the University at its disposal, the search committee went to great lengths to avoid the public eye. But now, in dozens of interviews with search committee members, candidates, administrators, faculty and staff over the year, a clearer picture begins to emerge of the process that led to the turning point: the Feb. 25 interview.

When University President Neil L. Rudenstine announced last May that he would resign effective June 30, 2001, it soon became clear that the search for Harvard’s 27th president would be unlike any other search before. The nine-month long search for Harvard’s 27th president would take the nine search committee members all over the country—from Stanford to Cornell to Columbia and Yale—and would require months of research and thousands of pages of secret communications. Technology would be used as never before, and for the first time, a woman would make the final round.

The search committee itself has changed little since Harvard began. It is still composed of six of the seven Corporation members, the University’s second-oldest and highest governing board. The seventh member, the outgoing University president, does not sit on the committee. For its part, the Corporation was a band of titans: captains of industry and academics of the highest caliber.

The committee was led by Robert G. Stone, Jr. ’45, Chair and Senior Fellow of the Corporation, a member of the Corporation for over a quarter-century, and a veritable treasure trove of institutional knowledge. Strong-willed, persuasive and energetic, Stone is credited by other committee members for keeping the sprawling search focused.

Likewise for Hanna H. Gray, who as president emeritus of the University of Chicago and a former interim president of Yale knows exactly what it took to manage a modern university. A decade ago, Gray—then an Overseer—sat on the committee that selected Rudenstine. Now Harvard’s search was her fourth in four years, having also sat on the executive search committees for Bryn Mawr College, the Smithsonian Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Some had even taken to calling her the “Kingmaker.”