In the first few months of the second Trump administration, the White House in effect declared war on the nation’s colleges and universities, and particularly the most selective and prestigious among them. Vice President JD Vance had famously declared in 2021 that “the universities are the enemy,” but conservative antipathy against higher education for its alleged role as the breeding ground of progressive ideology goes back at least to the 1960s. In that turbulent decade, the universities became entangled in national debates over the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, and the counterculture. The present-day controversies over political activism on college and university campuses echo the debates of the 1960s in important ways.
Neil L. Rudenstine has been a key observer and participant in the shaping of American higher education since the 1960s. He served as President of Harvard University from 1991 to 2001, after decades of teaching and administrative experience that included service as Dean of Students, Dean of the College, and Provost at Princeton University. His career in academic administration began by chance in the fall of 1967, when as a junior professor of English at Harvard he came across a left-wing student group “imprisoning” a recruiter from the Dow Chemical Company in protest against the company’s complicity in the Vietnam war. His intervention was credited with helping to bring the protest to a peaceful resolution, and led to his involvement as an academic administrator in later campus debates over subjects including identity politics, climate change, and America’s global role.
In his new memoir, Our Contentious Universities: A Personal History, Rudenstine draws upon his experiences to explain why universities have become increasingly fractious institutions and why they have come to be at the center of the country’s culture wars. In this podcast interview, the former Harvard president discusses the sources of student and faculty radicalization in the 1960s, the parallels between the ‘60s campus protests and those of today, and the financial and institutional difficulties that beset many of the country’s leading universities. He suggests ways that the universities can respond to the political attacks against them from the Republican Party, and also how they can attempt to restore public trust and better serve the needs of the nation and the world.
Transcript
Neil Rudenstine: There’s tremendous criticism and willingness to try to undermine the institutions that we regard as so important to the society as a whole. And there’s, at the moment, a limited amount you can do to stop that.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And it’s a real honor to be joined today by Neil Rudenstine, the former President of Harvard University; he served in that office from 1991 to 2001. Prior to that, he had been an Executive Vice President at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and an English professor at Princeton who also served as Dean of Students, Dean of the College, and Provost. And prior to that, he had been first instructor and then an assistant professor at Harvard in the Department of English and American Literature and Language. Welcome, Neil Rudenstine!
Neil Rudenstine: Greetings, nice to be with you.
Geoff Kabaservice: Good to be with you. You served as president of Harvard at a time when I was in graduate school writing a dissertation on Kingman Brewster, who had been the president of Yale University during the 1960s and ‘70s. And for a few years in the mid-1990s, I was enrolled at Harvard through the program that allows ABD graduate students who have finished all of their degree requirements except the dissertation to cross-register at a number of other universities. So I studied your presidency from afar and up close, so to speak.
Neil Rudenstine: Very good.
Geoff Kabaservice: I was interested to see the news recently that your 2012 book The House of Barnes, about the Barnes Foundation and its founder, had recently been reissued in a new edition from the American Philosophical Society Press through the University of Pennsylvania Press. And then I was very interested to learn that your forthcoming book Our Contentious Universities: A Personal History would be issued through the same presses in March of 2025. So I’m delighted to have a chance to talk with you about both of those books.
Neil Rudenstine: Wonderful. I’d be happy to do so.
Geoff Kabaservice: Terrific. If I’m not mistaken, you recently celebrated your ninetieth birthday?
Neil Rudenstine: Yes, two days ago.
Geoff Kabaservice: Happy birthday!
Neil Rudenstine: Thank you.
Geoff Kabaservice: So you’ve been more or less continuously involved with the world of universities, in some capacity or another, for over seventy years: from the quiescence of the 1950s through the tumult of the ‘60s, the culture wars of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and now this new moment of radical activism. What made you want to write this history of higher education over that time through the lens of your own career and experiences?
Neil Rudenstine: Now, when you say this one, do you mean the Contentious book?
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes.
Neil Rudenstine: Well, I started out just intrigued by what was going on, because it seemed to me that what was happening after 2000 was rather different from what had happened in the ‘60s, and I wanted to try to see if I could clarify that. So I worked quite hard to go back to the ‘60s, and reconstruct what I could of what had happened in terms of protests, student protests, and then began to try to filter through to recent events. So it was more a question of my continuous interest in universities as such, but then also what was actually happening that was making them seem rather different than they had been.
Geoff Kabaservice: So as a big question, what was so important about the 1960s in the overall history of higher education?
Neil Rudenstine: I think the important thing was that it was the first time there was organized, powerful protest by students against universities. There had been many kinds of disruptions in earlier eras, but they were all mostly raucous things having to do with student upset about any number of little things that had to do with the running of the institutions — but they were not political events. The 1960s was the first expression of protests that were actually political in nature by students. So that was in itself an important marker for me. And obviously then, afterward, there were other political protests as well, and then I wanted to find out why they were so different later on than before.
Geoff Kabaservice: And of course the present protests have many differences with those of the 1960s, but are there also important similarities and continuities?
Neil Rudenstine: There are some similarities and continuities, yes, in the sense that in both eras they were protests against the institutions as institutions and what they stood for. But the thing that really distinguishes the current ones is that the students are in effect protesting against one another, groups against one another. That started in the ‘90s, and that was quite different. In the ‘60s, all the students were more or less united against the war in Vietnam, and therefore against what they thought the universities were doing to support the war. In the ‘90s and afterward, the students began to protest against one another. That was a radical difference and could not have existed in the earlier time because of the nature of the institutions themselves.
Geoff Kabaservice: I understand. We’ll get back to the question of universities, but let me just detour for a moment into your other book on the Barnes Foundation. I did want to say, first, I very much enjoyed that book when it came out in 2012, and this new edition is even better. It includes a sort of brief update, but also some splendid color plates of some of the treasures in its collection.
As listeners probably know, the Barnes Foundation is one of the world’s great repositories of modern art, particularly Impressionist and post-Impressionist works. It was founded in 1922 by Albert C. Barnes, one of the great modern collectors, who also built a splendid complex of buildings that included a gallery as well as an arboretum and teaching facilities. But it was in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, which is one of the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia, and for much of its history it was very difficult for the public to access. And then finally, after decades of litigation, it moved to a far more accessible location in the center of Philadelphia on Ben Franklin Parkway in 2012, around the time that your book came out.
As I said, I enjoyed your book very much, but I found myself wondering, as I reread it, how your perspective as a university administrator informed your analysis of the Barnes and its problems prior to its move.
Neil Rudenstine: Oh my gosh, that’s a complicated one. Well, I’m sorry to hesitate, but I don’t know how my university experience really helped, except in the sense that the Barnes was obviously not being run well. And for a university administrator familiar with economics and with the whole process of how you run what Barnes himself wanted to run, which was an educational program — of course he didn’t want it to be a museum, he wanted it to be an educational program — how you run an educational program appealed to me in terms of the interest of what he wanted to achieve. Because obviously, as a university administrator, I was also interested in the educational aspects of what he was doing.
But unfortunately, he was so resolved that he had found the one way to teach art history, and the only way to teach art history, that nothing else would be admissible. That in itself intrigued me, but it also made me realize that he was just off the mark, so to speak. Because there are obviously any number of ways to teach art history and other subjects that are quite legitimate, and he was not going to allow any of that to happen in his institution.
So I got very interested: Why did he come to his conclusions about how to teach art history? What was the reasoning behind his theories? Were the theories any good? And so on. So the whole idea of how to teach, what to learn, how to learn, coincided with my own interest in universities and teaching and learning. And I discovered, obviously, that his theories were not correct — they didn’t hold up — and that only intrigued me more to keep writing.
Geoff Kabaservice: I visited the Barnes several times during the 1990s when it was in Lower Merion, and I found it quite charming in that setting. But in reading your book, I actually became much more reconciled to moving it into a more accessible location. Because it was clear from your book that it was really not tenable to keep the Barnes in that place under the operations and administration that then held.
Neil Rudenstine: Right, absolutely. For example, he would not allow any events of a social or fundraising kind to take place in the institution, and that meant of course he couldn’t raise any money. And that meant that when he started to go into debt, the debt just got worse and worse and worse each year, with no possibility of getting new funds at all because of the way he had arranged matters. So in that sense, there was no hope for it to stay in Merion. That was a pity, in a way, because the Merion location is quite beautiful and the building was very nice. But he simply had arranged matters in such a way that it was economically unfeasible.
Geoff Kabaservice: Absolutely. And you did such a good job in that book of laying out the context of Barnes’ collecting in America, the different currents in art history and art teaching, as well as the institutional problems that ultimately culminated in the 2012 move. A great book, I recommend it to all. We have limited time to talk here, but I did want to mention that your wife, Angelica, is a renowned art historian as well. And I think you’re coming up on your 65th anniversary?
Neil Rudenstine: That’s correct. We’ve been married since 1960. Right.
Geoff Kabaservice: Congratulations. I think of you as being an institutionalist, and marriage clearly is among the institutions you consider valuable.
Neil Rudenstine: Yes, no question about it. I care tremendously about the institutions as such and about their health and, at the moment, their survival. I’m quite worried about what might happen to universities under the new administration in Washington. So yes, I’m very much an institutionalist, and whether it be the Barnes or whether it be Harvard or Princeton or whatever the case might be. And I think there’s a considerable amount of threat at the moment, and I’m quite worried.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think with good reason. I’d like to ask just a few questions about your early upbringing. Is it fair to say that you were an early beneficiary of what we now call meritocracy?
Neil Rudenstine: I think so, because as I think you may know, my parents were immigrants, or their families were immigrants, and they had very little education. So I was very lucky to win a scholarship to go to a very, very good boarding school when I was twelve or thirteen years old. And that really allowed me to begin to be intrigued, intellectually and otherwise, about education and institutions of education. So I was, as I say, very lucky indeed and it was no question…
Geoff Kabaservice: That was the Wooster School in Danbury, Connecticut, correct?
Neil Rudenstine: That’s correct. The Wooster School in Danbury, Connecticut, which was a very small school at the time, ninety students and ten faculty. But marvelous faculty, who probably a decade later would have gone on to teach in college, because the universities of course were expanding at that time but there were no opportunities when I went then. So we had fantastic teachers and a wonderful school, with very, very good students. In our class of twenty students, five of them went to Yale, one of them went to MIT, two went to Williams, two went to Princeton, and so on. It was a very unusual moment and a very unusual group of people.
Geoff Kabaservice: You were one of the students who went on to Princeton, from which you graduated in 1956. And you wrote in your book that Princeton was widely regarded as the most conservative of the Ivy League institutions. I wonder what you meant by that?
Neil Rudenstine: Well, I think that certainly when the protest era began in the ‘60s, the Princeton protests were less fierce than at many other places. It was much, much worse, for example, in terms of people being really badly hurt and wounded — literally wounded — in places like Michigan, Berkeley, Columbia, and so on. By comparison, Princeton was definitely besieged, but it was not so bad as at the other places I just mentioned. So I think probably the atmosphere was a little more conservative. But also the administration was far more willing to actually listen to students and to try to set up ways in which students could be heard — in discussions about the war and so on — at Princeton than at other places. Some of what happened at Princeton had to be attributed to very wise and thoughtful leadership on the part of the administration, not just conservatism among the students.
Geoff Kabaservice: Indeed. So you were a Rhodes Scholar and you went to Oxford University in 1956 after graduation. I want to say that you were in the same Rhodes class as Willie Morris, the Southern author and editor?
Neil Rudenstine: No question. Willie and I were very good friends and remained so after college. Yes, no question. He wrote a little book called My Two Oxfords and dedicated it to me, actually.
Geoff Kabaservice: Oh, terrific.
Neil Rudenstine: Yes, he was wonderful. He died so much earlier than he should have, and that was a great loss indeed. But he was a wonderful person and a very, very good writer, and a very brave person when he was editor of one of the major magazines.
Geoff Kabaservice: Harper’s, yes, that’s right.
Neil Rudenstine: Yes, Harper’s.
Geoff Kabaservice: I understand that you met your wife at Oxford as well?
Neil Rudenstine: I did, right. We met in 1959, we got married in 1960.
Geoff Kabaservice: Okay, terrific. So you then went on to Harvard for a Ph.D. in English, writing your dissertation on Sir Philip Sidney. And then, as I said, you became first an instructor and then assistant professor at Harvard. And your career was impacted by a chance encounter in 1967 on Harvard Yard, where members of Students for a Democratic Society, the leading radical student group of that era, had in effect imprisoned a recruiter from the Dow Chemical Company.
Neil Rudenstine: Correct, yes. That was one of those moments in life where chance or serendipity makes essentially almost all the difference to what follows later — because I happened to go by that demonstration and managed, after quite a bit of talk and so on, to persuade the students to let the recruiter go. And I didn’t tell anyone except my wife, but somehow people in the crowd attributed some of that to me, and that led to an offer from Princeton to be their dean of students at a time when protests were becoming more and more rampant. If none of that had happened, I would have carried on being an assistant professor of English indefinitely, I’m certain, and then I hope becoming ultimately a professor. But my entire career would have been utterly different without that one event.
Geoff Kabaservice: As you said, you were critical of the SDS for having imprisoned this Dow Chemical recruiter. And you were in that sense at least on the center-right when it came to the question of student demonstrations, even though you were sort of identified by the Princeton alumni as having been on the left.
Neil Rudenstine: That’s correct. I was sympathetic in the sense that I thought that Vietnam was a great mistake on the part of the nation. But at the same time, I did not think that the way out of the dilemma was to actually obstruct universities in any way or to imprison recruiters or whatever the case may be. So I was on the one hand sympathetic because of my feelings about the war, and at the same time unsympathetic because of my feelings about the need to protect universities.
Geoff Kabaservice: So you quoted from a 1970 article in Daedalus by McGeorge Bundy, who I knew quite well, where he wrote, based on his experience as Dean of the Faculty at Harvard, that the university is for learning. It’s not for politics, it’s not a place for growing up, it’s not even a place to cultivate virtue. His quote is: “The university is for learning as an airplane is for flying.” But it seems that in the 1960s, there came a number of other views about what the university was for and should do.
Neil Rudenstine: Right, no question. Many students of course, as well as other people, felt that universities should be much more entangled in the world of events and the war and so on. And of course, later on, while not necessarily the same thing, they felt that universities should be serving the nation in terms of solving problems, international as well as national problems. That was rather different from the view that the university was there, as the statement you just read said, for learning — to take courses to think hard, to talk to your fellow students, to talk to your faculty, to learn as much as you could about the world, but not necessarily to try to change the world. Except obviously, in the long run, you want to have people who care about the nation and the world and who are willing to try to make things happen that are good. That’s not necessarily the purpose of the institution itself while you’re a student.
Geoff Kabaservice: Right. How did we go so quickly from the quiescent 1950s to the radical 1960s?
Neil Rudenstine: Well, I think, no question, if it hadn’t been for the war, it would not have happened. The war was really the major thing, but there were other reasons that some students felt very much that things had to change. For example, there was still a very, very strong sense that the African American students — in the South, but also all over the country — and not just the students but African Americans in general, but certainly the students as well — were not being treated fairly in any sense of the word. And that had to be changed.
So the civil rights movement was of course a very strong parallel movement to the movement against the war, and many of the protests had to do with that. When I got to Princeton, the Black students had organized their own major organization and took over one of the major buildings at Princeton in order to demonstrate against the whole civil rights injustice situation that existed in the country.
So there were several reasons why things moved so fast, but certainly between the war and the civil rights movement and the general feeling that things were not what they should be. Remember, those were also the times when there were terrible assassinations — JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King — and these also helped to motivate students to think that there was just too much that was too wrong and too much that had to be corrected in order to get back to a good state of affairs.
Geoff Kabaservice: So the president of Princeton, during the time that you were a dean there, was Robert Goheen. He was president from 1957 to 1972, which as you pointed out made him one of the very few presidents to have served all the way through from the ‘50s through to the ‘70s. And I thought he was one of the great presidents of that era. And I met him a few times, and we had lunch in the Princeton Faculty Club, which had formally been his house. I think we were both kind of amused by that.
But he told me that there were essentially two things going on, one of which was that Princeton had to modernize. We had talked earlier about how it had been a conservative place. And that made it more difficult to modernize, in the sense that there was no long tradition of African American students there. There were problems with the social system, such as the eating clubs and the bicker system. There were problems with anti-Semitism. And that was something that he had to work on, and you had to work on, in the modernization process.
Neil Rudenstine: That’s correct, absolutely. And Bob was very committed to making those changes. But he was also a product of early Princeton, before the World War, and therefore he was inclined to go steadily and moderately. One of the people who made a big difference to the tempo was Bill Bowen, who was the provost under Bob. Bob appointed Bill to be provost. And they saw eye to eye on what had to happen, but Bill was more — how should we say? — willing to move ahead rapidly on some of those things. So Bob and Bill made us a very unusual and superb combination of leaders together and made the difference, for example, in Princeton going co-educational very, very quickly compared to other places, and also any number of other changes in terms of how the place was governed. Bob and Bill made all kinds of reforms that made students feel that they were able to have their voices heard more than at many other institutions.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, and I think it speaks well of Bob Goheen that he was able to be, in effect, pushed faster than he might have wanted to go by the younger Bowen.
Neil Rudenstine: Correct, absolutely. No question about it. And it was I think very brave of Bob to take on a provost who he knew was going to want more of him than he might otherwise want. No question about it.
Geoff Kabaservice: We also talked about this question of moderation with regard to student protests. He felt that there were perils on both sides. If you called in the police, as happened with demonstrations at Harvard and Columbia, and tried to crush the protest, it ended up alienating and radicalizing moderate and even liberal students. But on the other hand, if you took a course that was more appeasement, as arguably happened at Cornell in 1969, that also would prove disastrous for the university. There was essentially a moderate path that had to be taken between those alternatives, but it was very difficult to thread.
Neil Rudenstine: No question, yes. We made a decision early on that we would not call the police, but of course that meant we had to have some other way of dealing with a demonstration that was radical, and it was not easy to find a way. We were able to have enough administrators and enough faculty members who managed to win some of the respect of some of the students so that when things went badly, we were able to wait out the situations more than to try to crush them.
For instance, when Nassau Hall was first taken over by the SDS and other students, I went into the building and I spent a day and a half just walking the halls, talking to students, saying that this is interesting, but it’s not going to do anything to help the war. I was trying to persuade them just to leave, which ultimately they did. And that was the general approach we tried to take, which was to not condone anything they did obstructively, but to try also not to crush them. That was a difficult row to hoe, but it seemed to us to be the only one to avoid catastrophe.
Geoff Kabaservice: You mentioned in your book Alvin Kernan, who had been a professor of English and literature at Yale University — actually the acting provost in the 1969-70 school year there — and then came to Princeton as the dean of the graduate school. And he wrote one of the great academic memoirs, In Plato’s Cave. He had been badly alienated from student radicalism at Yale, but he felt that when he came to Princeton that the radicalism had worked its way into the faculty. What did you think of Kernan’s critique?
Neil Rudenstine: Well, I have actually a whole chapter in my book on Kernan. Al Kernan was a great friend of mine, and I admired him, respected him tremendously. We were good friends. But I think myself that he was tremendously shaken by the whole student movement, in a way that was perhaps more than needed to be the case, so to speak, because Yale itself and the Yale English Department were centers of theory that was antipathetic to Al’s whole view of how literature ought to be taught and thought about. So that’s one of the reasons why Al left Yale, I think, because he felt the place had become radicalized theoretically as well as in terms of protests. So when he got to Princeton, he was in one sense comforted, but in another sense he never got over the original feeling of a tremendous sense of being shaken to the roots by what was happening.
So the book he wrote, I think, was interesting and in many ways certainly profound and perceptive. But at the same time, I thought it was an overreaction to many of the things that had happened or were actually happening in some of the better places. So I was both sympathetic and critical of what Al had written. But he was a marvelous person. He was a great dean at Princeton, who made a big difference, and a very, very good companion, so to speak, in terms of literary studies.
Geoff Kabaservice: Bill Bowen became president of Princeton after Goheen left to become ambassador to India, and you then became the provost of Princeton as well. And unfortunately, those were the years of stagflation, so that was perhaps a fairly arid time to be an academic administrator, particularly one in charge of administering the budget.
Neil Rudenstine:
Right, no question. Yes, we had not anticipated anything quite like what happened in terms of stagflation, which meant of course stagnation and inflation — inflation particularly of interest rates, huge changes in the national economy that made it absolutely essential to try to figure out how to balance the budget when everything was costing more and revenues were not increasing at all. So we had a difficult several years. And student costs, tuition and fees, went up tremendously during those years — doubled in fact in about five or six years. So we had a tough time just getting to the point where we could make ends meet and not lose too much ground against inflation.
At the same time, for some reason, things seemed to work. That is, students agreed that they would participate in the whole budget process and do it responsibly, which they did. So we managed with their help as well as the help of the faculty to make things work. But it was not at all an easy time. And only when the stagflation ended were we able to begin a fundraising campaign that allowed us to make up ground and make some headway in terms of new initiatives that were very important, especially in science, through the university afterward.
Geoff Kabaservice: So you then went to the Andrew Mellon Foundation for a few years and then were offered the presidency of Harvard in 1991. And Harvard, of course, is a much bigger institution than Princeton, a richer institution. And yet one of the things that people find puzzling from outside is that Harvard is a university where money is always in short supply. You had a quote from Drew Faust, which is that “We are rich and poor at the same time.” Can you explain that to people who do not have the inside view of Harvard as you did?
Neil Rudenstine: Yes. The problem with Harvard finances is a very complicated but difficult one, but the issue is the following. All the money that comes into Harvard comes not into the center, where the president and the provost and other people are, to be distributed for whatever good reasons may be to various parts of the institution for important reasons. It goes directly to each school, each dean and its faculty, and nothing fundamentally of any consequence goes to the center where the president is. That means if you want to take a new initiative, you have very little money at the center to do it with, because the business school or the law school or the medical school, whichever school you want to talk about, has its own money. It gets its own tuition fees, it gets its own endowment returns, it gets its own annual gifts and so on, and dispenses of them however that particular entity wants to do. And the center has very little money at all.
So in one sense, the institution is rich because many parts of it have quite good fundamental finances. And at the same time, the institution is poor in the sense that it cannot have the center command resources of any consequences in order to undertake important new things. So if you want to do a new… For example, one of the things that seemed to be necessary to do — it might seem less consequential to some people, but very important to the institution… Harvard has a wonderful museum, but it badly needed tremendous amount of investment in order to make it possible to run in the best possible way for students to learn from. But there was no way to get the money because the museum itself had very little money, and all the rest of the money was of course in the different schools. And so finding the money from the center of the institution in order to reconstruct the museum was incredibly difficult. So we were very poor in that sense, while at the same time parts of the institution were flourishing, they were quite rich.
Geoff Kabaservice: So you were recruited for two principal reasons to the presidency of Harvard. The Corporation correctly assessed that you would do a tremendous job in what were perceived to be the two biggest problems with the institution at that moment, one of which was its internal fragmentation, its internal division, the fact that the different schools and components of Harvard weren’t really in communication. And the other was that the university needed to raise a great deal of money. What made you well suited for both of those responsibilities?
Neil Rudenstine: Well, that assumes I was well suited — it was not obvious that I was well suited. But to the extent to which I wanted to take that job on at all — and it took a lot of thought before I decided to do so — I felt that, one, I could set a tone that could get people to think about one another rather than only themselves in the institution as a whole. And that came out of my Princeton experience, because I was able at Princeton to get people to work together quite well. And I thought: Maybe we could do the same thing in Harvard. It will be harder, but it might be possible.
The other thing was much more unknown. I really had never had experience raising money at Princeton of any significance at all. So the raising of the campaign money was a new thing altogether for me, and I had no idea how we would manage it or whether we could manage it. If it did work, it was because, again, I managed to get people to think about not just themselves but about other people in the institution, other parts of the institution, and that allowed them to work together on the campaign.
Also, I did insist for the first time in modern history [at Harvard], that the campaign should be a total university-wide campaign — with every part, every department, every school participating together, so that everyone was working for the greater good of the entire institution. Earlier campaigns had been school-by-school. The Law School might decide it needed money, so it would have a campaign, or the Business School might, or the Medical School might. But there never had been a university-wide campaign where all the schools participated together and appealed to all the alumni, which were several hundred thousand, to contribute to the place as a whole. That did make a big difference, I think, and allowed us to raise the amount of money we were able to raise in the end.
Geoff Kabaservice: You took on the responsibility for that university-wide capital campaign right as you arrived at Harvard in 1991. And the most that any university campaign had raised prior to that time was $1 billion, and Harvard set the goal for $2.1 billion — and in the event it raised $2.6 billion. In the process, you raised the endowment from $4.7 billion in 1991 to $19 billion by the time you left in 2001. And you had a comment about fundraising that I think many people would find surprising. You said: “Fundraising is at bottom intellectual and educational in nature.” Can you explain what you mean by that?
Neil Rudenstine: Yes. Well, most people who have considerable means and who might possibly give a large amount of money want to be persuaded that the reason why they might give the money is because it really is needed to improve the quality of the institution in significant ways. And if you’re going to persuade people that, you better know what you want the money for and why it’s important to have it. So the educational and intellectual part of what the institution needs, and why it needs it, is a crucial aspect of the whole matter.
So if you’re going to ask, for instance, John Loeb — who gave $100 million — for $100 million, you better have a good reason for asking him. You better have some good ideas that are really important to help the institution be a better place and a more consequential institution than otherwise. That’s what I mean by that. If you don’t have the intellectual and educational reasons first, then you’re not likely to succeed terribly well in the fundraising itself.
Geoff Kabaservice: In many ways, you were one of the first university presidents to be a sort of next-level fundraiser — and you were, as I said, tremendously successful at it. But you wrote that it took one-third to one-half of your time during your years that you were president. And there was that moment in late 1994 when you reached such a point of exhaustion that you had to take a three-month leave of absence. So I suppose the question would be: Are the demands of fundraising too much on the university presidents at this point?
Neil Rudenstine: Well, they’re certainly considerable, no question. And I think one of the aspects that made ours demanding was the fact that it was international. That is, we decided, as I said, that we would invite the entire institution to do the campaign together as a unified institutional endeavor. That meant, of course, we had thousands of alumni all over the world, and part of the reason why it was exhausting was that we were flying… I mean, I made three trips to China. We made a trip to South Korea, to Japan, to virtually every place you can think of, plus South America, of course — We went to Argentina, we went to Brazil, we went to Mexico — as well as traveling all around the United States.
And during the early phase of the campaign, it was not at all obvious that we were going to make our goal, because the goal was really quite ambitious. And so the consequence of both the travel, the worry about whether you were going to make your campaign goal, plus having to run the rest of the institution, just led at one point to quite a bit of exhaustion.
Geoff Kabaservice: So you wrote at the end of your book about the situation facing universities now, particularly in the wake of all of the unrest on campus following the Hamas October 7th, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel. And you approach this question from a position of deep sympathy for today’s university presidents. But what advice would you have for them about how to restore the university to a higher standing in public opinion, how to fend off attacks from both within and without?
Neil Rudenstine: Oh, that’s a really difficult one. Well, I do think that some of the steps that have been taken by many institutions have been the right ones. That is, they have clarified what’s meant to be possible or not possible in terms of protest. They have been much more clear about that. Second, they have been willing to use discipline, when it had to be used, in a way that beforehand they were not really doing. That made a big difference, in order to make people think twice before they did something destructive. So those two things together helped to calm, I think, a good deal of the movement. And this year, of course, is a very different year from last year in terms of protests, and much more quiescent.
So in those senses, I would say one has to get one’s own house in order first, better than it was in the case last year. And second, clarifying as much as possible — but I don’t think it’s very easy to clarify what constitutes breaking the rules, so to speak, what is anti-Semitic, what is problematic from the point of view of talking about other people in the institution. Those things have to be clarified as much as possible. But I think that some people may expect more than what is possible than by simply putting forward definitions of anti-Semitism, rather than trying to make people feel that it’s important to have students and others care about the rest of the institution’s people.
I think there are some things you can do, and they have helped actually to make this year a better year than last year. But I think some of the problems remain because they simply are human problems. In my first year at Harvard in 1991, we had students working against one another because of the diversity of the populations. The Black students were not getting on with the Jewish students, the Jewish students were not getting on with others. Many people had a lot of problems trying to accept a whole new idea of homosexual students at the university. And there were many, many, many incidents when they got at one another — fortunately not in a serious way that harmed people, but certainly in a way that disturbed people.
And that was the beginning of the whole effort to try to see if you could possibly get a diverse community of very different students to live together harmoniously. That’s one of the problems, obviously, that we still have to wrestle with, and it’s not an easy one to solve. You can do some things, but you can’t count on things working. You can try to do certain things that are obviously helpful.
Geoff Kabaservice: When I was at Harvard, I spent a certain amount of time having lunch at the Signet Society, which often brought me into connection with Henry Louis Gates. I liked Skip very much, and one of the great successes of your presidency, I think, was the building up of Harvard’s Department of African-American Studies under Chairman Gates, from maybe one full-time tenured faculty member and a negligible program to being a robust program with some of the most famous faculty anywhere in the country — and by all accounts the number one program of its kind in the United States. And I think Skip Gates actually had a very positive impact in convincing people that one could have greater diversity without sacrificing standards.
Neil Rudenstine: Correct, absolutely. And of course, I went to Harvard at exactly the same time that Skip Gates was going there too, so we struck a bargain early on that if he would produce first-class, absolutely excellent people, I would find the money to support them. Skip was a great recruiter of course, and nothing would have happened without him. But because I could provide the resources and the sense of desire to have it succeed, and he could actually do the work, that produced the kind of department you just described. And I think people felt that it was a very good department in the sense that nobody felt that we had given up standards in order to get recruits. It worked very, very well.
Geoff Kabaservice: But as a last question for you… Universities, particularly the highly selective universities, have come under attack from conservatives and the Republican Party, for the last decade, in a way that would have seemed unusual prior to that time. And universities like Harvard make a very inviting target because they’re so big, they’re so rich — at least in terms of the endowment being multiple billions of dollars. The faculty is almost all to the left. And these universities are seen as influencing other institutions in the cultural worlds — particularly museums, let’s say — to also move to the left and to have a particular conception of identity politics.
So I suppose the question would be: What could institutions like Harvard do to try to cool the temperature of them being caught in this political crossfire? And what they could do to convince conservatives that, in fact, these are institutions that are very important to the functioning of our society and our civilization?
Neil Rudenstine: A very good question, and a difficult one. I think that there’s no question that there’s tremendous criticism and a willingness to try to undermine the institutions that we regard as so important to the society as a whole. And there’s, at the moment, a limited amount you can do to stop that. Because, first of all, the faculty no question tends to be more liberal than not, but that’s because conservatives don’t see the faculty jobs as particularly interesting or worthwhile. There aren’t that many openings, they don’t pay that much, and the odds of getting a really good job are very, very small. For whatever reasons, liberals are willing to try that task but conservatives are not. We’re not going to change the faculty very easily or soon, if at all. So while that criticism of the institution and the faculty remains, it’s going to be a very, very difficult row to hoe.
I’m very concerned myself, worried about what may happen in the next decade, worried that people may begin to tax the endowments even more without realizing what they’re doing to the institutions. For instance, when you tax the endowment, of course you tax the amount of money there is for student aid and you have less of it, which means that you get fewer poor students and fewer African American students than even now you’re getting and so on. So I’m worried from that point of view that there may be deliberate moves to try to take endowment away from the institutions.
I’m worried that they will also simply try other means of constantly, one way or another, undermining the fundamental reason for the existence of these institutions. We can’t do without these institutions, obviously. They’re a source of our leaders. They’re a source of so much information and so much, what should I say, of the amount of new ideas and new reasons for helping out the institutions across the country to achieve better means of solving problems: human problems, institutional problems, citizen problems. Without all that, how do they think we’re going to function as a nation? So I’m worried very much about what will happen, and I see some ways to try to help, but I don’t see very many right now. We need new leadership in Washington and a new kind of spirit in the country in order to get things back on track.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, Neil Rudenstine, thank you so much for your leadership in higher education, thank you for talking with me today, and congratulations on the new edition of The House of Barnes as well as your forthcoming Our Contentious Universities: A Personal History.
Neil Rudenstine: Well, thank you so much for talking with me.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating, or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC.