The Graying of Derek Bok

This is the second of three articles.

"Becoming a college president today," The Crimson editorialized as Derek Bok took his first tentative steps in Massachusetts Hall, "is like signing on to administer the Munich pact in 1939." If the resignation of Nathan M. Pusey '28 had dulled the volume of protest, it had done little to get at the underlying conflicts. Harvard, as Bok told the Corporation fellows who first approached him about the job, needed something more than a man who could deal with the "problems of the moment." "Even if we happen to have weathered the physical disorders," the new president said in his first speech to the Faculty, "these protests may prove to be the turbulence that marks a new atmospheric condition. Problems have been uncovered which will not soon be resolved, however civilly we behave."

For Bok, the balance of the past eight years has been spent reacting to those problems. "A lot of our time and energy," says Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University and one of Bok's chief advisers, "is devoted to dealing with problems rather than taking the initiative." Under Bok, the limits of the president's powers have become apparent. In an age when the sweeping influence of an Eliot or a Lowell is not longer possible, Bok's presidency has excited or angered few. The phrase that best describes the last eight years, in the opinion of many, is "non-controversial."

The major reason behind that image is the nature of the environment in which Bok has worked. The central challenge of Bok's presidency--and that facing higher education in the '70s--has been what senior fellow Francis H. Burr '35 once labelled "creative entrenchment." In an era when funds for private universities have slowly constricted, Bok has spent an inordinate amount of time during the last eight years effecting changes aimed at making the University run more efficiently. The most visible have been administrative, and as a result, Bok has garnered the image of an administrator.

The first priority of his new job, in fact, had been to reorganize Harvard's archaic management structure. In 1970 on the Corporation's urging, a consulting firm came into the Yard to examine the University's failing bureaucratic machine. Using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as its model, the consultants concluded that Harvard was ill-prepared to face the future and suggested a sweeping decentralization of the administration. In his first year Bok heeded the consultant's advice, adding three vice-presidents--in finances, alumni affairs and development, and government and community affairs--where only one had existed previously. Bok's new appointees began overhauling Harvard's financial systems. A year or so later, Bok agreed to set up the Harvard Management Company, and while other universities wallowed in low-interest bonds, Harvard profited from its new investments in stocks.

WHERE MANY COLLEGES have slipped slowly toward financial disaster in the last ten years, Bok's men have kept Harvard in relatively stable shape. The University boasts the largest endowment of any and Bok is proud of the fact that, in terms of real dollars, spending has not increased since he took office. The flip side of financial efficiency, however, has been what one official labels the "corporatization" of Harvard. The University, he says, has become increasingly bureaucratized, routinized and inflexible since Bok took office; the result has been a "joyless" administration. Bok and his advisers realize, as Steiner says, that the controls have "no doubt had a negative effect on the 'feel' of the University," but they insist that they had little choice. "Harvard does run more like a corporation," says College treasurer George Putnam '48, "because it is a corporation."

If administrative changes were the first and most visible effects of the Bok years, they were not on their own sufficient to keep the University financially solvent. As the kickoff date for Harvard's $250 million fund drive approached, Bok--despite his vow on taking office that he would not spend a great deal of personal time raising money--was forced out onto the road. Although Bok insists that he does not "hate or dread" any part of his job, he admits that fundraising--which now consumes about 25 per cent of his time--is not his favorite activity.

Bok's distaste for fundraising, friends and colleagues say, is rooted in his essential modesty. "Bok is not a table-thumper," says John Blum '57, a former member of the Corporation, "he is a very diffident man." The first president of Harvard to forsake the official residence--Bok and his family live away from campus in Elmwood, a colonial house built in 1767 as a hospital for George Washington's troops and later used as the official resident of the dean of the Faculty--Bok does not enjoy the public exposure that comes with his office. As a close friend puts it, "Derek does not get off on the trappings of the job."

If Bok does not enjoy publicity, like a good solider he has learned to cope with it. Before he embarks on any public event, Bok steels himself for the evening, and a noticeable change comes over him. He is disciplined and systematic and has learned to look interested no matter what the topic of discussion. Bok's almost Puritan sense of propriety, friends say, has molded his public behavior until it fits his image of how the president of Harvard should act. "The appearance," Dean Rosovsky says, "very much belies the person."

The disciplined modus operandi characterizes Bok's actions within the University. Faculty members invariably describe his technique for solving problems--identify the issue, form a committee, gather differing views, and find a solution--as systematic, judicial or legalistic. Under Bok's almost Japanese style of confrontation-avoidance, conflicts are bureaucratized and thrown into committees where "reasonable people," one of Bok's favorite phrases make consensus decisions. "Significant changes," Bok says, "depend on taking into account the views of different groups. It is important not to have a lot of controversy," he continues, because "change only comes when you get a sense of what will command respect and at least give everybody's views an adequate hearing."

The result of this technique. Bok's detractors say, is a University in which change has to be wrenched from bureaucratic jaws and rarely moves outside traditional perspectives. If the deeply divided Faculty rendered change impossible during Pusey's last years, change under Bok is a terribly slow, plodding process. Some say, however, that Bok's lawyer's style insures that the final product will be acceptable to all. "When he tells me that something is okay," says Rosovsky, "I have the feeling that I've answered every question and every possible objection." If most Faculty members don't seek Bok as a colorful leader, they respect him and trust his decision-making process. "When the word circulates that "Derek wants things," one Faculty member says, "it doesn't backfire like it would have under Pusey."

Bok's "courtroom fastidiousness of mind," as another Faculty member labels it, is most apparent in the process that Bok constantly identifies as his most important task: making appointments. "Care in making appointments is crucial," Bok said in 1976, "for Harvard can easily survive a mediocre president if it appoints the ablest professors, but the institution will go downhill steadily if mediocre appointments are allowed to be made."

As a result of that view--most recently stated in his fifth open letter--Bok has strengthened the appointments process in many of the faculties and, unlike his counterparts elsewhere, chairs every ad hoc committee to review tenure appointments. At the proceedings, for which Bok takes anywhere from six to 20 hours to prepare, the lawyer-turned-president, one Faculty member close to the process says, "takes an active and leading part in questioning the witnesses from the departments." Departments know that they cannot slide a candidate past Bok, who turns down 10 to 15 per cent of all recommendations. "It's apparent that he has read the small print," says the Faculty member. Bok. Rosovsky says, "would like to be remembered for the quality of the Faculty."

Although most of Bok's appointments have been successful--"people picking is one of his biggest assets," says a Corporation member--Bok has made mistakes. Perhaps the most glaring was former vice president for administration Stephen S.J. Hall, who enraged many Faculty members and administrators with what one called his "looney schemes" for saving money. Those same administrators criticized Bok for not firing Hall quickly--although Hall left in 1976, the damage had been done. In the graduate schools, where most deanships have switched hands since Bok took over, Bok's choices have been criticized. At the School of Public Health, for example, Dean Howard H. Hiatt came under severe attack from the school's faculty and alumni, but Bok backed him up. Although the fire on Huntington Ave. has died down, the residue remains.

Bok cautions against losing the larger questions of the University in the day-to-day hassles of running Harvard; budgets, student housing and power plants are important, but only as a means to "a greater end." In his first annual report, Bok noted that no president can produce blueprints for the whole school. He envisioned his function as an issue-raiser. "My role is not to decide academic issues," he states today, "but to see that the most important questions are identified."

Bok's vehicles for this role have been his annual reports, in which he has systematically--and in contrast to other university presidents--tried to take on the larger questions. Save one of the reports--which Bok takes a month every year to prepare--they have concentrated on issues of educational curricula and priorities. "The things that interest me most are intellectual and academic," he says. Although Bok long ago gave up his own intellectual pursuits--labor law was too complicated and ever-changing to keep up with, he explains--he and Rosovsky use the same words to describe Bok: "fundamentally an academic person."

When Bok reorganized the administrative structure, he rejected the suggestion that he appoint a provost--a kind of vice president for academic affairs. "If he had a provost," says Rosovsky, "he would cut himself off from what interests him most." John T. Dunlop, Bok's first dean of the Faculty, echoes Rosovsky. "More so than presidents of other universities." Dunlop says, "he is really seriously interested in the quality and policy directions of educational programs." Others, including one senior Faculty member, do not question Bok's commitment to education but feel that, despite the reports, "it's hard to see a consistent educational philosophy emerging."

For the first Harvard president not to spend his undergraduate years in Cambridge, Bok has shown what many consider an intense interest in undergraduate education. "A president of Harvard," Robert J. Kiely, the Bok-appointed former dean of undergraduate education, says, "could easily say, 'I'm not interested in undergraduate education' and not do anything about it. Bok didn't do that." The president's second annual report criticized the aimlessness of undergraduate education and, some say, provided the impetus for the Core Curriculum. "Bok wrote the will for General Education," says one Faculty member, "and Rosovsky was the executor." Others differ in their assessments, saying that Bok merely tagged along and lent support; they also criticize the president for his essentially conservative view of education.

In many areas, Bok's suggestions in the annual reports--the development of a smaller, well-defined graduate school, the construction of a school of government--have taken hold. In the arts, Bok was primarily responsible for saving the Visual and Environmental Studies program, creating the Office for the Arts, and bringing Robert S. Brustein from Yale to direct the Loeb Drama Center. In all his writings, Bok has stressed the need for interdisciplinary programs and worked actively--as he did as dean of the Law School--to link policy-oriented schools. Bok believes that while the each-tub-on-its-own-bottom philosophy works well for financial matters, the great "social problems" must be approached with the help of many disciplines and perspectives.

IN OTHER AREAS, however, Faculty members criticize Bok's performance. Although Bok admits that one of his failures as president has been not increasing student-faculty contact, he rejected the notion of more informal contact between the two groups in his 1978 report, saying the Faculty had little time. In the graduate schools, many severely doubt Bok's commitment to traditional, non-policy-oriented programs.

More recently, as Bok has made bolder moves, he has become more controversial than before. In his latest annual report, Bok took on the Business School's curriculum when he "publicly attacked," in the words of a B-School professor, the former dean and the school's narrow emphasis on the case method and the training of private enterprise managers. Five years earlier, Bok had flatly stated: "No president can ever claim the knowledge to pass judgment on the proper direction of faculties so diverse and specialized as Business, Law, Divinity and Public Health," but pass judgment he did. "Derek is okay when he stays in the territory he knows," one B-School professor concluded, "but at times, he gets into swamps where the gators are as big as him."