Sitting on the Edge of a Precipice

When Derek Bok stopped to consider his first six weeks as President of Harvard, he allowed as how he "felt a little as if I'm on the edge of a precipice looking downward." He may be, but he shows no apparent signs of trepidation.

Bok is approaching his new job with a quiet calm, a calm brought about by a combination of confidence and apprehension. He has assembled an experienced, highly-competent legion of vice presidents and presidential assistants, and he has, over the past nine months, laid a careful foundation on which to build solutions to Harvard's maze of administrative problems.

In doling out the daily worries of the University to his aides, Bok has freed himself to concentrate on the larger problems which surface in the accompanying interview: 'cultivating federal assistance to universities, coordinating plans with Cambridge and the housing situation, and studying ways to alter and improve education throughout the University, but particularly on the undergraduate level.

Bok also has made sure he will have answers ready by the fall on the major issues raised within the student body and the community in the last two years. He is preparing a stance on the question of equal admissions for women; he will issue a policy statement on the Riverside housing problem. He may also release Harvard's affirmative action plan on minority hiring practices in the University.

But perhaps, as Bok says, his chief responsibility--especially in this first year--will be making key appointments throughout the University. There are at least two deans in the graduate schools who must be replaced; Dean May is stepping down as dean of the College at the end of this year; and a new dean of Radcliffe must be found.

There are several clues to how Bok's Administration will differ from that of President Pusey. It will be larger, more autonomous with regard to the Governing Boards, more active in the community and in government relations, and, most noticeably, it will center its attention on the educational structure of the University. The administration of services and finances will once again become means by which to upgrade academic programs and to provide support for the deans of the University.

More differences in the Bok Administration are sure to become apparent as the year progresses. One thing is certain--the pattern will be different from that of Massachusetts Hall during the past two decades.

Below is a sampling of points made by Bok which do not appear in the accompanying interview.

ON MILITARY RESEARCH AT HARVARD:

Bok does not feel much more military research is forthcoming, and he says he supports the Faculty's guidelines on research adopted last year. "But," he says, "the (Faculty) report does set forth certain requirements relating to the manner of conducting research projects that might be applicable to military research. For example, we would not accept research projects for anonymous sponsors or research whose real purpose is misleadingly disclosed or research that carries a security classification or requires security clearance of University personnel or otherwise limits general publication of results."

ON HAVING A TROUBLESHOOTER: Bok said he would rely "quite heavily" on his administrative assistants, Stephen Farber and Walter Leonard, for most special projects. He will not have someone outside the Administration--such as Archibald Cox '34, Williston Professor of Law, under President Pusey--act as a troubleshooter. He did say, "I find that John Dunlop is a very effective troubleshooter for any problems arising in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and I doubt very much whether I would need to supplement him with any resources of my own."

ON A PROVOST: "I'm going to sit back and try to figure out where my major needs are, where I feel most in need of being complemented." If he thinks a provost is necessary, Bok will appoint one. "But it clearly will be someone not in a hierarchical position in any way...not a box on an organizational chart beneath me through whom everyone must pass in order to get his business done."

ON FIGHTING: "I'm sure there are issues--particularly where issues arise that threaten the freedom or autonomy or the health of higher education--when it becomes very appropriate, it seems to me, to rally around such university presidents as agree with you and speak out very firmly. Who else is to do it?" Medical School area where several hundred units of community housing will be built.

Q. How would you describe the University's financial situation at present, and can you predict where cutbacks in spending, if any, will come?

A. As I understand it, the University once again ran a deficit this year for the third year in a row; the deficit will probably be slightly larger than the deficits in the two preceding years, although certainly not on the massive proportions of the Columbia deficit. But I think we are experiencing a process which has gone on at other universities and which was well described in great detail, with many graphs and figures, by the provost of Princeton, Bill Bowen, who appropriately enough is an economist.

What Bill Bowen suggested was that merely to maintain the program that you have--keep up the library, maintain the departments and the teaching programs that you have--requires a growth of expenditure every year which exceeds the likely growth in revenue which you will get from traditional sources, namely tuition, foundation giving, government grants of a traditional variety, alumni contributions and so forth. Now when you have such a divergence--even a divergence of only a couple of percentage points--you go through the following process if these tendencies persist over a large number of years. You begin by reviewing the non-academic parts of the operation and you find that you can make certain cuts in maintenance and upkeep, and you can effectuate various economies in purchasing and in computer services and so forth. As the process continues, however, these economies are one-time economies and cannot be relied upon again. You may then find yourself cheating a little bit by simply deferring things that you're going to have to do at some later point. You put off on repairs and so forth in order to keep the deficit in balance. Then you may get to a further stage, which various universities have been going through, in which you seek revisions in financial aid policy to put more emphasis on loans rather than grant. You may also begin to cut back on your faculty. Because of tenure, that has to be done either through attrition or through not making as many appointments of junior faculty. If the process is allowed to continue still further in a major university, you either have to start cutting out large academic programs--I think some of that has gone on at Columbia--or you have to be absorbed into the state system. That's the process that goes on, unless something happens to reverse the tendency for expenditures to outrun income.

The obvious way of curing that disparity is to seek funds from some new source, and that source is presumably the federal government. The federal government is not a new source because it has already supplied, on the research side, very substantial amounts of money. But what is going on now is a very critical drama in the Congress of the United States where several different points of view are contending over the form of new federal support. One point of view is expressed by those who would really like not to have new aid given to higher education, and they are hoping that the other two points of view kill one another off so that no action is taken in this session. The second point of view is the one that would provide unrestricted grants of money to institutions on the basis of some formula, which is usually expressed--as it has been by Edith Green of the House Committee--as a certain number of dollars per student enrolled.

The third approach would give aid to universities in the form of providing substantial grants to needy students who would then take them to whatever institution they wanted to attend. When they enrolled in the institution, they would not only bring their federal scholarship with them, they would also authorize the federal government to provide supplementary grants to the institution to reflect the fact that the cost of a student significantly exceeds the tuition he pays. Now if one of the latter two points of view prevails, then the current strain on our budget will be somewhat lessened. If not, and the odds are against any action this year, cutbacks will become increasingly severe.

Getting back to the University, as I said before, we operated at a slight deficit last year. There were several areas where we experienced substantial losses--the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Harvard University Press and the Computing Center. The Harvard Houses increased their cumulative deficit to approximately $700,000. On the other hand, the Education School, we were pleased to see, completely wiped out its prior deficit and operated in the black. So far as I know, the other graduate schools, with the exception of the Medical School, also operated in the black.

At this point, it is not clear just how much will have to be trimmed from the budget and where. We have to look at a long list of areas where careful spending will add up to considerable savings on a yearly basis. In this way we can hopefully avert a situation as drastic as that at Columbia. By instituting cost consciousness throughout the administrative organization of the University--at the Computing Center, the Press, in central services and so forth--we can partially offset increases in operating expenses and higher wages. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is another matter. John Dunlop is, of course, much better aquainted than I am with the particular aspects of the Faculty's budget, but the deficit has been steadily growing, and it may be greatly augmented by the expected deficit of more than $750,000 at Radcliffe resulting from the new merger agreement.

Q. Would you cutback funding for special programs or study groups before you would want to cut the size of the Faculty?

A. I think it is very hard to generalize. Many programs, special institutions and projects are independently funded or even endowed so that they do not cause a burden on the University's unrestricted resources. As for faculty, much depends on whether one is talking about cutting down on visiting professors, reducing the number of new appointments of junior faculty, or allowing tenure vacancies to remain unfilled. In the end, the deans must arrive at decisions based on the particular facts of each case.

Q. Although you have had only limited contact with undergraduates to this point, how would you judge the tenor of the student population following Harvard's first quiet spring since 1968?

A. I think it would be very hard for me to make any judgement at this time. We know extraordinarily little about the psychology of large groups. Moreover, some of the most recent data from universities have shown that problems which upset students the most are related to issues over which the universities have very little control. I can't even begin to say what the fall will bring, though I try, through personal contact and conversation with students, to keep myself informed of what students are3