“It’s really very important that the next president and the next administration have a sense of total…flexibility and freedom without the sense that there’s somebody hanging around and thinking about what they’re doing,” he says. “I didn’t read the curricular review report, not because I don’t care about the curriculum, but because it’s someone else’s curriculum now.”
Not all Harvard presidents remained as detached from the University as Rudenstine has become.
Presidential giant Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1853, was famous for retiring to his home on Brattle Street, where he provided an outlet for anyone looking to complain about his successor A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1887.
Lowell in turn promised his successor, James B. Conant ’14, that he would stay out the way, only to retire to Boston where he remained influential among the Brahmin elite that served on Conant’s Corporation.
Rudenstine’s predecessor, Derek C. Bok, spent the year after his presidency at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences before returning to Harvard as a professor at the Kennedy School of Government, where he remains.
Though he remains disconnected from the day-to-day operations of the University, Rudenstine says he still returns occasionally to visit with friends. And he says he comes to the Boston area at least five times a year to visit his family.
When asked whether he misses Harvard, he struggles with the question.
“You can’t be at Harvard and not have the feeling that it is an extraordinary community intellectually and in its wholeness, its entirety. As many parts as it has, it still has a powerful identity as a whole. And it’s not replicable,” he says. “And so to the extent which you are deeply engaged with that and stimulated by it and puzzled and perplexed by it, you’ve got to miss it in some ways.”
But don’t expect Rudenstine to be taking on any mammoth administrative tasks at Harvard—or anywhere else—anytime soon.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to teach. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to read a lot of books or listen to music or to go to any number of things in New York,” he says, pointing out that he and his wife attend numerous concerts, museums, films and opera performances in the city.
“The good thing is I don’t get myself into anything that I don’t want to get into,” he says. “Now I don’t always know where I’m going to be, but at least I know I have no one but myself to blame.”
—Staff writer Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at shoichet@post.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer David H. Gellis contributed to the reporting of this story.