“It seemed appropriate to withhold them from consideration,” one committee member deadpanned.

The second cut required a little more research, committee members say. Some of the names on the list were obviously ridiculous—people who lacked the skills or wherewithal needed for the job—and others simply did not live up to the claims made in letters of recommendation. The committee, assisted by Goodheart, assembled massive binders of biographical information on possible candidates. For the first time, the committee personally surfed the Internet for much of its early information gathering, tracking down biographies, vitaes, journal articles and even, in some cases, portions of books for background purposes.

The committee headed out into the field again as the list winnowed. They spoke with other faculty at institutions where possible candidates worked, and then, eventually, Goodheart’s office called directly, asking whether Mr. X or Ms. Y would be interested in discussing Harvard University and its future. Again, two or three members, and sometimes even four for the more serious candidates, would arrive at an interviewee’s office to talk about Harvard. They would ask the same questions asked at the beginning of the search: How is Harvard perceived? What does it need? Where is higher education going? Who would make a good president? Only rarely were interviewers told they were being considered for the job, but that fact was implicit in many of the interviews.

“You want to get a sense of a person, without necessarily giving the encounter the heavy freight of an interview for a position,” a committee member explained.

The committee met as a whole every other weekend, shuttling back and forth between places like Harper’s law firm and Houghton’s Corning offices in the Trump Towers in New York, and locations in Cambridge, usually Loeb House or the Inn at Harvard.

On December 10, the Corporation made its first major announcement—albeit privately to the Board of Overseers—that the slate of candidates had been narrowed to between 30 and 40. At their regularly scheduled December meeting, the Overseers gathered in the gilded ballroom of Loeb House to hear Stone read off the list. He proceeded slowly, pausing to explain the positions of non-Harvard candidates. Then-Vice President Al Gore ’69 and President Bill Clinton had all been stricken from the list, but he did read off some familiar names: Varmus, Sullivan, Fineberg, Summers, Clark, and then, surprisingly, the head of one of the largest universities in the world: Lee C. Bollinger, president of the University of Michigan.

Bollinger was an unusual candidate from the start—he had no connection to Harvard except that his daughter, Carey, had graduated from the College in 1998. But he encompassed many of the facets the committee was looking for: he was a popular and dynamic president who had reached out to undergraduates, had been a national leader in the fight for affirmative action and had helped jump start a special science initiative at Michigan. Most of all, though, he stressed that universities needed to focus on the fundamentals of academics.