Harvard’s search process is unique in many ways, not the least of which is its insular and secretive nature. Unlike schools like Princeton, no faculty or students were formally involved in the search for the 27th president. The choice was up to the nine search committee members—most of whom graduated from Harvard during the Eisenhower administzation.

But as one Corporation member put it, “If we were to include students and faculty, which students? Which Faculty?” With nine Faculties and a student body of 18,000 spread out between 12 schools, deciding who would represent those views would be a debacle, say Corporation members.

The lack of outsiders on the panel had one major advantage: it forced the search committee to spend the first months of its search interviewing dozens of faculty members here on campus and the “nation’s best minds” around the country. They met with select students from the College and other schools, and reached into many of Harvard’s nooks and crannies for ideas. Committee members interviewed the presidents and other high-level administrators of other Ivy League institutions, faculty members at other schools, researchers, government officials, other captains of industry, just about any “wise mind” the committee could find. The committee wanted to know where Harvard’s major problems lay, what the new president needed to focus on, and where higher education was heading in the coming decades.

“Our first phase wasn’t so much interviewing, as it was looking at the broader framework and collecting ideas, but not trying to judge and evaluate people,” one committee member explained. “We were just in a position of trying to explore with many of the first-rate minds in the country about issues facing education,” another commented.

Gradually, over hundreds of interviews, three interconnected issues emerged to top the list nationwide: distance learning, information technology and globalization. The Internet stood ready to revolutionize education and the world kept getting smaller. Harvard no longer was just an American university, it was a university for the world. Similarly, the disciplines of knowledge were becoming ever more closely linked: biologists now needed to work together with chemists, physicists and computer scientists. Reading, writing and arithmetic were no longer enough.

Closer to home, problems in the undergraduate experience at Harvard kept cropping up. Committee members firmly believed that the College was the “crown jewel” of the University, and thus were troubled by the issues faculty and administrators kept raising: classes were too big, there weren’t enough faculty, housing was overcrowded, and the sciences seemed to be falling by the wayside. Finally, it became clear to the committee members that Harvard had outgrown Cambridge. Over the next half-century, Harvard would need to shift across the river to land purchased in Allston, and the 27th president needed to lead the move. Harvard was looking for a 50-year plan. To top it all off, the committee decided it wanted someone who would work to foster diversity throughout the University.

Now, at least, the committee had a rough idea of what it was looking for. The next question was whom.