View From the Ivy Tower

I

WHEN HARVARD PRESIDENT Nathan M. Pusey '28 called in the police to evict demonstrators occupying University Hall on April 10, 1969, then-dean of the Law School Derek C. Bok called the occasion "the saddest day of my life." The students' decisions to seize the offices of Harvard's deans as a means of protesting the war in Vietnam had met general disapproval from moderates, but the nightmare of brutality inflicted by police in the core of the Yard forced a painful reappraisal of the University's relations with its students and its role in society.

In the wake of the bust, students went on strike, the governance of the College was radically reformed, and the campus ROTC chapter was abolished. Perhaps for reasons of prudence, perhaps for reasons of principle, and probably for reasons of both, the Faculty voted 255-81 to support a resolution condemning the Vietnam war on October 7, 1969.

According to Beyond the Ivory Tower, collective political statements issued by university officials or faculty members should be avoided unless the matter bears directly on the principle of academic freedom or the preservation of a democratic society on which free universities depend. President Bok derives his rationale from the doctrine of institutional neutrality. He means not neutrality in the pejorative sense of collaboration with evil through passivity, but neutrality in the strict sense of refraining from the use of "non-academic methods such as divesting stock, boycotting suppliers, or issuing formal political statements on political issues."

The university, Bok argues, has entered into an anomalous kind of contract with the rest of society, an arrangement which has grown increasingly enigmatic as the scope and influence of the "multiversity" has spread. Society must seek to guarantee what Justice Felix Frankfurter described as "the 'four essential freedoms' of a university--to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it should be taught, and who may be admitted to study." In return for this autonomy, the university must abide by "the basic obligations required of every participant in a civilized society" the fulfillment of contractual commitments, the avoidance of deceptive acts, the observation of the law, and the principle of not inflicting unjustified harm on others.

The assumption of certain duties in exchange for certain inalienable rights is a simple enough idea in theory. The application of this principle however, provides university administrators with endless moral and practical dilemmas. Would President Bok, for instance, call in the police to evict students occupying University Hall? Judging by his reaction to the 1969 upheaval and his patience when students protesting Harvard holdings in Gulf in April 1972 occupied his own office for a week, he would not have. Legally speaking, though, Bok might be obliged to arrest and press charges against student trespassers. The fact that he didn't attests to his personal morality. It also testifies to his pragmatism; he had learned the lessons of 1969 well. To Bok, the university's virtue is inevitably bound up with Machiavelli's concept of virtu: the employment of prudence in the service of all specific ends. His ethics and ethos are relativist.

The question serves to illustrate that Beyond the Ivory Tower operates on-two levels. The first concerns the sanctity of the Ivory Tower itself, which Bok skillfully goes to great lengths to defend. His discussion of the ideal of the university's "four essential freedoms" is stirring and convincing, if not refreshing. The second level focuses on the methods the university should employ to both safeguard those values and exert positive influence on society. This dominates most of the book and can summed up by the words "cost-benefit analysis." The interplay between the two levels proves far from satisfying and raises several disturbing questions.

Life in the Ivory Tower is far from placid--the vigor Bok shows in addressing difficult issues deserves praise. The continued use of phrases like "notwithstanding" notwithstanding, the book is clearly written and provocative, which will come as a welcome surprise to those who have slogged through his open letters.

Last spring, Bok gave three reasons for his decision to write his six open letters and they probably explain his reasons for expanding them into a book. "First," he said in an interview, "the letters provided a way to outline my position clearly, consistently and systematically." Second, Bok "was distressed at the level of discourse about moral issues--it was being diminished to the level of slogans, chants and picket signs. I write the letters not so much to persuade as to establish a level of discourse." Finally--and "this is a subtler point, and while I may not have succeeded in this respect, I have no regrets"--he wanted to combat what he considered "an excessive amount of cynicism toward established institutions. Of course, there are many grounds for disappointment, but I believe it exceeds the proper level."

While Bok rightfully debunks simple-minded slogans such as "you are either part of the solution or you are part of the problem," Beyond the Ivory Tower, like the open letters, was conceived as a reaction to "activist" protest. Derek Bok acknowledges that he and his colleagues throughout the country were evicted from their Ivory Towers in the late '60s and forced to come to grips with difficult problems. The fact that many members of the academy acquiesced in the activities of a certain senator from Wisconsin a decade earlier, and failed to reassess their roles in society when faced with a frontal assault on academic freedom, shows that the "multiversity" had to be shaken from below to lessen its rigidity. The university-as-fortress had bred a state-of-siege mentality; thus Nathan Pusey called in the police.

II

IN THE FALL of 1980, The Crimson disclosed a preliminary report prepared by one of Bok's special assistants which purported to show that high test scores for Blacks and women tend to overpredict their academic performance while in college. The Klitgaard report caused much controversy, for many Blacks argued that the study's premises threatened their right to be at Harvard. Bok refused to disavow the report, instead planing the blame for the upset on the study's disclosure.

Readers of Beyond the Ivory Tower will find that chapter four, "Access to the University and Racial Inequality," functions as an effective rebuttal to the Klitgaard report, although it is never mentioned by name. Bok questions the merits of the assumptions underlying meritocracy, contending that there exist "reasons for preferring minority applicants quite apart from a desire to stone for past discrimination." The rationale for preferential admissions policy, gives a large pool of qualified applicants, entails the contributions minority students can make in later life, the value of increasing racial understanding among students at a college level, and the reaping of benefits of education by those good students.

Here as elsewhere, Bok seeks to lay down an ethical line. The practice of hiring minority professors preferentially, he writes, "threatens to diminish the academic enterprise by lowering the quality of teaching and research." Rather than promoting justice, he says, preferential hiring practices "unfairly penalizes candidates of superior ability while holding little promise of achieving greater equality in the society as a whole."

When it comes to the thorny issue of technology transfer, Bok advocates lucrative research agreements with particular companies where the university gets money and the company gets favored treatment on patents emerging from the funded research, as long as the strings attached do not pull too tightly on academic freedom. On the other hand, he sees too many dangers inherent in the university assisting its own professors in commercial ventures by investing in the company.

University administrators' freedom of action is similarly circumscribed in considering the social consequences of research, especially when the financing comes from its own funds. They "must walk a narrow path tightly bounded on one side by the requirements of academic freedom and on the other by the overriding responsibilities exercised as the principal source of research funds and the ultimate guardian of public welfare and safety."

Other pressing issues Bok deals with include universities assisting foreign governments which may be repressive in character, university investments in South Africa, university boycotts of companies with suspect business customs, university acceptance of gifts from donors who made their money through exploitative means, the university's responsibility to teach ethics, and the university's obligations to the local community. These are all complex matters and this review cannot do justice to them. Bok attacks them directly, using a balanced, legalistic style of argumentation which considers conflicting positions and then renders a verdict in judicious fashion.

The thread that runs through Beyond the Ivory Tower is a distinction between collective and individual action. Essentially, educated individuals in the university community have the right and should be encouraged to speak out on moral issues. They should write articles, collect petitions, organize debates, and engage in the intellectual discourse that provides the life-blood of any university:

...society respects the autonomy of academic institutions because it assumes that they will devote themselves to the academic tasks that they were established to pursue. This does not mean that universities should refrain from trying to influence the outside world. It does mean that they should exert an influence by fostering the reasoned expression of ideas and arguments put forward by their individual members and not by taking institutional steps to inflict sanctions on others. Universities that violate this social compact do so at their peril. They cannot expect to remain free from interference if they insist on using their economic leverage in an effort to impose their own standards on the behavior of other organizations.

Ultimately, we get an argument for engagement--to a point. The university must participate in society rather than withdrawing from it, a recognition of its changing and pervasive character as an institution. But it must adhere to the social contract by staying neutral when it is asked to address social problems by nonacademic means. Bok quotes a passage from Milton's Areopagitica to outline his own position on engagement: "'I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where the immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.'"

Bok's agreement to support the Shah of Iran's request for assistance in developing an institute of science and engineering when approached in 1974 suggests the practical application of that philosophy. He concedes that "there could be little assurance under authoritarian rule" that scientific education "might have eventually served to strengthen freedom and human dignity." Of course, notes Bok, "Subsequent events made it impossible ever to know whether the institute would have served as a force for good or for evil. Years of effort came to nothing beyond a jumble of half-completed buildings near the shores of the Caspian Sea, deserted monuments to the thwarted ambition of the Shah."

Why, then, did Harvard rush to engage in such a morally ambiguous venture? A cost-benefit analysis: "After consulting with our colleagues and with Iranians of differing political persuasions, we concluded that the possibilities for achieving useful results outweighed the risks involved. Though reasonable people may disagree with this assessment, the factors involved seem sufficiently imponderable that few would consider us morally derelict for proceeding." This case offers an interesting interpretation of neutrality.

Had the project in Iran reached fruition, the University would then have had a vested interest in the stability of that country's regime. In discussing ROTC and stocks. Bok gives a further clue to his view of an institution's organic character. Consider his view on ROTC: "Of course, there is no compelling reason why a university should be obliged to commence an ROTC program in the first instance any more than it should be obliged to start an extracurricular program. The problem arises when a program already in existence is terminated on political grounds." A university can therefore decide to "engage" itself in South Africa. ROTC, and Iran for whatever reasons. When forced to deal with the consequences of this engagement, however, it cannot resort to political or moral decision-making. Rather, institutional neutrality should prevail.

This approach seems to constitute an ethic of irresponsibility. Still, we can grant Bok his contention that academic freedom would be imperiled. But it is harder to accept his argument that institutions should have neither friends nor enemies, only interests. This notion lies behind his plea for neutrality in the nonacademic realm: a university must protect its vested interests for the sake of academic freedom. Thus he focuses on method instead of effect; thus he strives to make detached cost-benefit analyses; thus his motives and his morals are in the end utilitarian. But there is no organic, causal connection between interests and ideals--unless one is rationalized.

III

CHAPTER 10, entitled "Taking Political Positions," sketches most clearly Bok's ethical distinctions. Introducing the controversial conception of neutrality, Bok states that "there is a difference between the obligations of someone who has pushed an innocent child into the river and the responsibilities of the spectators who line the shore. By taking some positive action that inflicts harm on others, we incur duties that do not fall on the mere bystander [his emphasis]." The implication of this analogy is that Harvard has no complicity in apartheid by virtue of its stock portfolio. "Granted, universities have not caused apartheid in South Africa.... Granted, they will probably not make matters any worse by purchasing produce or stock form companies that tolerate apartheid or exploit their workers [his emphasis]."

Whether or not we agree that divestiture is an effective means of influencing positive change (Bok argues that it is not), the image of the innocent bystander reflects the most inappropriate of parallels. Bystanders have no choice when it comes to witnessing an accident. They just happened to be there. The Harvard Corporation, though, has many investment choices. As Bok points out, drawing the line in such cases is difficult. For example, how can a university decide what comprises "tainted" money or business practices? Sometimes, though, considerations of morality might outweigh considerations of consistency, to use a cost-benefit analysis. And because the Corporation has engaged itself (affirmatively) in certain companies, it might examine its "duties."

Bok descends from the liberal tradition of the Enlightenment. Despite his assertions of the absolute nature of the value of academic freedom, it seems incorrect to argue from the assumption that Harvard is not embedded in certain value-laden frameworks.

Harvard, first of all, stands for progress--its pursuit and the hope of its attainment. Taken to its logical extreme, the idea of institutional neutrality erodes the University's reason for being. Progress implies change blended with continuity. Isn't one of the Core Curriculum's primary purposes to provide a common set of (Western) values, a common method of approaching relevant moral and political issues? Isn't the message of Derek Bok's fundraisers that the schooling of students in American values has become increasingly urgent in a period of federal entrenchment and international complexity?

It appears incongruous that Bok, who is so attached to certain liberal civic values in Beyond the Ivory Tower, ignores a precept of John Locke's that preceded the felicific calculus of utilitarian theory: consent. Consent is signified by the things we say or do and suggests a commitment. When a corporate institution invests or accepts donations, it acts; it commits itself; and it confers legitimacy on the object of its enterprise. Viewed in this light, "neutrality"--even of the strictly defined type--becomes a facade for vested interests. If Harvard were to balance its arguably defensible investments or gifts with strong institutional stands against social injustice, thereby making it clear that it does not mean to consent to evil, perhaps Bok's argument would hold water. But the acrobatics displayed by the Corporation this spring only buttress the conclusion that Harvard proceeds institutionally from prudence rather than morality.

Beyond the Ivory Tower's cost is $15.95; its benefits consist of an original approach to the vexing problems faced by private universities. The synthesis struck is animated by a genuine and admirable belief in progress. How odd that its effect is a resounding defense of the status quo at Harvard.