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A lot of water has passed under the proverbial bridge since junior English professor Neil L. Rudenstine left Harvard in 1968. The University's incoming president has been an administrator at Princeton, served as a top foundation executive and raised three children, among other accomplishments.
But Rudenstine's friends and former colleagues say that the intervening years have not changed him much.
"I remember him as an intellectual person and an exceedingly gracious person," says Professor of Law Lloyd L. Weinreb. "He was then what he is now. There really is a continuity."
Rudenstine first came to Harvard in 1960 as a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department. He remained to serve as a tutor and later as an assistant professor, and his students and colleagues from that period remember him as a skilled scholar and teacher.
Lowell Professor of the Humanities William Alfred remembers Rudenstine as having "a very fine mind, a very good critical mind for literature."
Alfred said that his students spoke highly of Rudenstine, frequently calling him one of the best teachers they'd had at Harvard.
"'He listens to people,' they said, 'He doesn't try to impose his ideas on them, he just helps them to have the confidence to open up their own,'" Alfred recalls.
Harvard Overseer Mathea Falco '65, who was an undergraduate in the History and Literature Department when Rudenstine was a tutor there, says Rudenstine was well liked by fellow concentrators.
"He was then, as he is now, remarkably attuned to the concerns of undergraduates," says Falco.
Rudenstine may not have changed much over the last 22 years, but Harvard certainly has. Yet Rudenstine says that for the most part the campus feels like familiar territory.
"Coming back, I really do feel in many respects at home. So it's not as if I feel in the midst of a strange place or a totally transformed place," he says. "At the same time there's no question that the scale is larger, the institution is much more complicated."
One result of the University's growth, Rudenstine points out, has been that it has become more difficult for individuals to make connections with people in other departments or faculties.
"When I was in the English Department, I had as many friends, I think, on the faculty of the Law School as I did on the faculty of the English Department and from other parts of the place," he says. "That I think, would be less common now just because everything has grown more, and scale matters."
One such friend was outgoing President Derek C. Bok, who was a young law professor when the two first met. Although Bok and Rudenstine did not have much in common professionally, Bok recalls that he and his wife "shared a lot of intellectual interests" with the Rudenstines.
The Boks and the Rudenstines have remained close friends over the last couple of decades, and Bok agrees that Neil Rudenstine has changed very little during that time.
"I find in some ways he's changed less than most people I know, and I mean that as a compliment," he says. "He's kept the boyish qualities that one likes, and he was prematurely wise when he was young."
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