President Neil L. Rudenstine addressed nearly 1,000 alumni, alumnae, and friends Saturday morning in Sanders Theatre at a major assembly for The University Campaign. The Campaign seeks to raise $2.1 billion by December 1999.

Highlighting the campaign's progress and goals, Rudenstine spoke as part of the University Campaign Leadership Forum weekend. Participants from around the country gathered in Cambridge for events including class dinners and panel discussions ranging from sciences and technology, to the University's management and finances.

Observing that The University Campaign has "gone remarkably well by any conceivable standard," Rudenstine also urged the audience not to lose sight of what is left to be done, namely, that $500 million has yet to be raised.

"Harvars longa, fortuna brevis, pecunia fugienta," Rudenstine said in allusive, improvisatory Latin, explaining, "Fortune is fickle, the markets will falter, but Harvard has to be here forever."

While remarking on the changing nature and scope of American higher education over the decades, Rudenstine also outlined a far-ranging agenda, embracing the constant effort to attract the most outstanding faculty and students to Harvard, to provide them with the academic resources they need to do their best work, and to sustain forward progress in such spheres as international studies, diversity, and information technology.

Meeting the $2.1 billion target, he said, will be only one measure of the campaign's ultimate success. "We will not really have succeeded if we achieve our overall dollar goal -- formidable as that is -- but fail to complete some of the most significant projects that we identified at the very beginning of this campaign as essential to Harvard's future," he said.

The areas requiring concentrated attention include, among others, "resources for Widener Library and other parts of our extraordinary library system; endowments for important new professorships in several fields; support for our most hard-pressed professional schools, such as Education and Divinity; funds to maintain our momentum in information technology and international studies; plus financial aid -- at the graduate and professional school level, as well as for undergraduates."

Rudenstine observed that universities confront a changing landscape in which more and more important matters have significant international dimensions, and in which research is opening new pathways to useful fundamental knowledge.

"Navigating the new global, intergalactic spaces, and interpreting our unfolding genomic future -- so that we make the right judgments, and take the right actions -- is the most important task we face as we enter the final phases of the campaign and begin to think about the landscape that lies beyond."

Rudenstine called attention to two significant transformations in American higher education. One, he said, occurred in the late 19th century and early 20th, a "Magellan-like age of discovery," when "aspirations grew, knowledge grew, the curriculum grew, buildings grew, and the budget grew. . . . At the heart of this ancient saga was the struggle to turn miniature colleges into emergent universities," he said, as various programs of graduate and professional school education were created and re-created, and serious research began to gain wider respect.

One important result of this era, he observed, was the recognition that "the only way to create a major university with major museums, libraries, research institutes, and fields of learning that were important but not necessarily 'populous,'" was to seek substantial endowment support for such activities. "In that way, the total educational program -- and total intellectual capacity -- of the University could be vastly enriched and intensified without requiring student tuitions and fees to bear more than a fraction of the cost."

Another major transformation occurred following World War II, Rudenstine noted, driven largely by a new and intensive partnership between universities and the federal government for the conduct of research.

In addition to dramatically enlarging the research capacity of universities, Rudenstine said, this development further defined American universities as places where "research" and "education" not only coexist, but mutually reinforce one another to create a powerful whole.

Research and education, "at their best, have always been linked together," Rudenstine said. "The fact that they reinforce one another at all levels, from the undergraduate college through to our executive education programs, is exactly what has made the American model of a university -- and certainly Harvard -- so distinctive, and so effective."

Looking forward, Rudenstine asked, "What steps should we be taking to make certain that the University stays abreast: to ensure that those who follow us will feel that we have done as much for them as our predecessors did for us?"

For one thing, he said, Harvard must "keep up our momentum in the field of international studies. If the world will be a more crowded and interdependent place, then our students and our faculty must have better opportunities to travel, explore, and learn about what is out there. . . . All in all, it will be essential for people to be able to work effectively with a widening range of fellow human beings from different national and other backgrounds."

As part of this effort, Rudenstine suggested that Harvard might consider locating "a limited number of outposts overseas," as bases for Harvard researchers and students who undertake fieldwork in countries around the world.

"We need to be able to sustain their projects over time, to build longer-term relationships with people and nations abroad, and to place ourselves more directly in touch with the societies that we study. In other words, we need to extend our wings -- tentatively, carefully, but with some sense of real excitement."

In addition, Rudenstine said, Harvard will need to invest further in new information technologies that are already having a "powerful, deep, and irreversible" impact on higher education. Such technologies are no substitute for the work that needs to be done in classrooms, laboratories, or seminars, he said. But, properly harnessed, he said, they can bring us closer to "the ideal that integrates the activities of research, teaching, and learning, blurring the lines among them, while bringing faculty and students closer together in common pursuit."

Rudenstine reaffirmed the University's continued commitment to diversity, and especially to bringing together students from many different backgrounds and perspectives, spanning a wide range of talents and interests. He added that strong programs of student financial aid will remain essential to realizing this goal.

"Unless we can create the conditions in college that will allow our students to learn directly from one another -- to discuss and test their different beliefs and points of view -- then we will not have educated them fully or prepared them to take on the role of leaders, either in our own diverse democratic society, or in the larger, complicated international arena."

He also noted Harvard's commitment to progress on initiatives related to women, citing recent efforts in the Kennedy School and elsewhere, as well as Harvard's collaborative relationship with Radcliffe. "There is still much to be done, but the signals are pointing in the right direction. I am also happy to report that we have, during the past year and a half, received a number of campaign commitments" that will help support some of the Harvard initiatives.

In closing, Rudenstine recalled the admonition of former Harvard President Conant -- that universities must constantly strive to avoid "the curse of complacent mediocrity." Thanking the assembled alumni for their help and support, Rudenstine said that the efforts associated with Harvard's first modern University-wide campaign "have drawn us together, created fast friendships among us, and have already set standards beyond what we imagined when we first began. . . . Let us remember that we are, for this generation, trustees of this very great university, and we need to reach as far and as high as we can."