This fall, Rudenstine plans to teach a seminar on 20th century lyric poetry at Princeton, where he has taught several other seminars over the past few years.

“I vary the subjects because I find that’s a good way to keep myself mobile and keep my mind reasonably fertile,” he says. “It keeps me learning.”

Rudenstine and his wife, Angelica Zander Rudenstine, spend several days each week in Princeton, N.J., where they own a house a few blocks away from campus.

“The counterpoint between New York and Princeton is one that we both really like,” he says. “In terms of the pace of life there are things I can do in Princeton that it’s very hard to do in New York.”

In Princeton, Rudenstine says he is more free to shape his time.

“When I get up at seven in the morning and I start reading a book and listening to music or just want to go for a long walk or whatever the case may be, I feel that the time is there,” he says. “Angelica and I can have a long breakfast together, we can talk about a lot of things. We can go out for walks. We can think longer and more deeply—and certainly read longer.”

Rudenstine—who graduated from Princeton in 1956 and eventually went on to serve as dean of students, dean of the college and provost there—now sits on the university’s board of trustees.

Spending more time at Princeton, Rudenstine says, “is, for all kinds of reasons, interesting and has meaning for me and puts me in close touch with an institution I’ve been close to all my life.”

In addition, he serves on several other non-profit boards, including London’s Courtauld Institute, the New York Public Library and the Goldman Sachs Foundation.

What About Harvard?

Since he left Harvard, sightings of Rudenstine on campus have been few and far between. He attended the October 2001 installation ceremony for his successor, University President Lawrence H. Summers, and was also spotted at memorial services for former Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey ’28 and former University Professor Robert Nozick. He last sat onstage in Tercentenary Theater in June 2002 when he received an honorary doctor of laws degree.

“He feels like he did his job, came and went as he said he would. And I think that his legacy will only grow in luster—I’m confident of that,” observes Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes, who teaches a course on Harvard’s history and its presidents. “He’s the man for whom the ovations grow louder every time he returns.”

Though in his Mellon Foundation office, Rudenstine is only a few stories away from the courtyard where he met with Du Bois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. in 1991 and hashed out the development of Harvard’s powerhouse Department of Afro-American Studies, Rudenstine avoids any discussion of his successor’s flap with the department.

Indeed, he declines to discuss any details of Summers’ tenure.

With regard to Harvard, Rudenstine describes himself as “not at all uninterested but disengaged.”