His father worked for years as a guard in a federal prison in Connecticut. To this day, his 76-year-old mother waits on tables at a restaurant in Danbury.
Neil Leon Rudenstine is the eldest son of the late Harry Rudenstine, a Russian Jew from Kiev, and Mae Esperito Rudenstine, a first-generation Italian American whose family came from a town near Naples. Neil was the first member of the family to complete high school.
Last week, he was named the 26th president of Harvard University.
Mr. Rudenstine’s appointment to run the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university caps a career trajectory that his colleagues say is the classic tale of the self-made man.
“In an era when higher education is opening up, Neil is the American success story,” says Arthur Levine, chairman of Harvard’s Institute for Educational Management.
Mr. Rudenstine’s academic career has included stints as a Harvard English professor, dean and then provost at Princeton University, and, most recently, executive vice-president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is described by colleagues as a gifted administrator, a voracious reader, and a “wonderful human being.” He succeeds Derek C. Bok, who, after serving 20 years as president, will step down at the end of June.
Mr. Rudenstine’s appointment is unusual in many respects. Unlike most Harvard presidents, he does not possess an undergraduate degree from Harvard (it’s from Princeton), although he completed his graduate studies in English there. At a time when college presidents are increasingly drawn from the legal and business professions, Mr. Rudenstine is a throwback to the days of humanists as college presidents. And his background is a departure from that of his 25 predecessors, who were of predominantly Anglo-Saxon heritage.
“I think it’s a brilliant appointment,” said Dennis F. Thompson, a Harvard professor of political philosophy who taught with Mr. Rudenstine at Harvard and Princeton. “It gives me great confidence in Harvard and the search process because it’s not an obvious appointment. It’s not a flashy celebrity or someone from the business world.”
While some people faulted the search for producing only white male finalists, the reaction from most quarters was positive. Mr. Rudenstine was the unanimous choice of Harvard’s search committee, which reportedly had narrowed the field to four candidates. The others: Martin Feldstein, a Harvard economist; Philip Leder, a Harvard geneticist; and Gerhard Casper, provost of the University of Chicago.
Although the committee was said to be looking for a scientist and someone familiar with the federal government, Mr. Rudenstine became a late favorite because he had covered so much administrative terrain in his years at Princeton as dean of students, dean of the college, and provost, as well as affirmative-action officer.
During that time, he forged a personal relationship with William G. Bowen, his administrative partner for 23 years and Princeton’s president for 16 years. Mr. Rudenstine was thought to be the logical successor when Mr. Bowen stepped down at Princeton three years ago, but he opted to follow Mr. Bowen to the Mellon Foundation. The degree of Mr. Rudenstine’s interest in a presidency was an issue for some committee members, who asked why he had not pursued Princeton’s top job. Mr. Rudenstine has said that he left because he felt Princeton needed fresh leadership.
Mr. Bowen called Mr. Rudenstine the ablest academic administrator he has encountered. “I have seen him address every imaginable kind of problem and some unimaginable ones, too,” said Mr. Bowen, Mellon’s president. “In every instance, he’s been wise, thoughtful, and firm when he needs to be.”
During Mr. Rudenstine’s time at Princeton, he helped preside over the university’s change to coeducation, the creation of a residential-college system, and the diversification of the student body. In a partnership unusual in higher education, Mr. Bowen and Mr. Rudenstine were said to complement one another. “He seems on the face of it less aggressive than Bill Bowen, who pushes for his views in a more obvious way,” said Harvard’s Mr. Thompson. “Neil’s style is more nuanced.”
In spite of the crush of publicity that descended on him, Mr. Rudenstine spent two days meeting with people at Harvard last week and wrote an open letter to the Harvard community, saying that he was “deeply and wholeheartedly committed to working collaboratively with the faculty and the staff.”
In the letter, he also said that his wife, Angelica Zander Rudenstine, an art historian and curator, “expects to be very much a part of this community and intends to help in as many ways as she can.” The Rudenstines have three children: Antonia, Nicholas, and Sonya.
In an interview last week, Mr. Rudenstine reflected on his appointment, the problems facing Harvard, and his academic career.
He said he had had a difficult time making a decision about the job, but he was eventually persuaded by “the fact that it was so superb an institution and so potentially satisfying a job.”
It will also be a daunting job. Harvard faces a deficit in the arts and sciences, discord over the low representation of minority-group members on the faculty, and complaints that the university’s decentralization has created, in the words of one professor, “a Soviet Union with separate republics.”
As for his agenda, Mr. Rudenstine said he endorsed the idea of establishing the position of provost, who could act as a “nerve center” for academic and budget decisions. Unlike many universities, Harvard does not have the position, and some faculty members and administrators believe a provost could help to foster more unity among the university’s 11 schools.
Mr. Rudenstine also said Harvard would begin preparing for a fund-raising drive with a rough goal of $2-billion, and that he wanted to address the quality of undergraduate and graduate education.
“There also needs to be a continual effort to find faculty members in particular and staff members and students from underrepresented groups,” he said. “We need a plan. And the plan has to be more than looking around to see who’s out there and inducing them.”
Asked about whether he ever expected to land in this job, Mr. Rudenstine said: “Never, never, never. I was extremely confused about what I wanted to do. I majored in a social program in the humanities at Princeton, then went to Oxford to study history, and I changed my mind to study literature.
“I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, and I thought about teaching secondary school. In my first eight years at Harvard, it never occurred to me that I would do anything but teach, read, and think. When I became dean of students at Princeton, my basic thought was that I’ll do this for three or four years and go back to being a Renaissance scholar. So it’s been an entirely unpredictable set of events.”
Mr. Rudenstine said his path in life was unusual because his parents had little formal education, yet they inculcated a love of learning in the family. “From another perspective, it is a rather American tale,” he added.
Mr. Rudenstine was raised as a Roman Catholic and grew up speaking Italian with his mother’s family. Later in life, he said, he began to understand more about his Jewish heritage. He also pointed out that he had attended an Episcopalian boarding school and a university with Presbyterian roots. “One way or another, I’ve become extremely ecumenical.”
Friends and colleagues, meanwhile, said the appointment was a natural choice for a man who has both tested administrative abilities and a vision for higher education.
“To an outsider, Harvard looks like a medieval gang of warlords without a sense of coherence,” said Lawrence Stone, emeritus professor of history at Princeton. “Everyone does their own thing. There has to be some sense of unity. If anyone can do it without ruffling feathers, it’s Neil.”
