Bok's Past--and Future

In 1971, when President Bok moved into Massachusetts Hall, a reporter asked him how long he thought the Bok Era would prove to be.

"Not as long as those of some of my predecessors," replied Bok, explaining then that sometime in the 1980s he wanted to return to the professorship he still holds at the Law School.

Now as the 54-year-old Bok approaches his 14th year overseeing the University's 10 schools, numerous departments and $586.9 million budget, there is private talk of his stepping down from the presidency sometime after Harvard throws its huge 350th birthday party in 1986.

Bok, though, refuses to say whether his 1971 predictions still hold true. "Oh, The Crimson is always asking me when I'm going to retire," laughed Bok in a recent interview. "Well, I consider that a private matter, and I assure you that if I decide to retire, [The Crimson] will be one of the first to find out."

And no one else around Massachusetts Hall is ready to comment for the record on Bok's intentions. "I hope [he'll be around for] a long time," says senior Corporation member Hugh Calkins '45, who joined the seven-man governing body in 1968. But how long does Bok hope to be around? "I have no comment on that," Calkins quickly responds.

Nathan M. Pusey '28, whom Bok replaced on July 1, 1971, served as president for 17 years. The man Pusey took over from, James B. Conant '14, was in power for 21 years.

Usually, though, running a university is not the kind of job anyone keeps for more than about a decade. "I think the average lifetime of a university president is about five years," says Brandeis chemistry professor Saul G. Cohen, one of 30 members of Harvard's Board of Overseers, which would give routine approval to the selection of any Bok replacement. "It's a pretty terrible job, although I think Harvard is probably one of the more pleasant places."

Both Pusey and Conant went on to other careers after their lengthy tenures Pusey serving as head of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York City and Conant as High Commissioner to Germany.

Possible positions mentioned for Bok have included an ambassadorship to Sweden, home of his wife Sissela. Bok of course declines comment.

It is not the first time Bok has been mentioned for a government position. In 1973, William Loeb, publisher of the feverishly conservative Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader recommended that Bok be appointed special Watergate prosecutor. "Bok is probably a Democrat, if not an independent," wrote Loeb, who often has used the front page of his morning paper for jibes against liberal Harvard types.

"On the basis of personal experience [though] I can say this is one if the few men that in my lifetime as a hardboiled newspaperman I have run across who has absolute integrity," Loeb wrote. Coincidentally, Bok had in 1962 been appointed by a court to determine the damages to be paid by the Union Leader in a messy anti-trust case, and Loeb did not forget the young law professor's favorable decision.

With the talk of Bok's departure, there are also rumors of successors. Geyser University Professor Henry Rosovsky, who stepped down June 30 as dean of the Faculty, is considered a top contender by one New York-based education writer.

The writer, who asked not to be named, notes that Rosovsky publicly leaked in 1978 that he had rejected the presidency of Yale, "and nobody does that unless he's got his eye on something better. Rosovsky certainly has politicked for the position."

His construction of the nationally acclaimed Core Curriculum particularly weighs in his favor, the writer says, as does his extensive pavement-pounding for the Harvard Campaign.

Last week, for instance, Director of Development Thomas M. Reardon announced a new $5 million gift for which Rosovsky was largely responsible.

Another Harvard administrator who sprinted through the ranks in Bokian fashion is Rosovsky's successor as dean, A. Michael Spence. But Spence, a Princeton graduate, is not tied either to Harvard or to academia, according to his friend and colleague Richard J. Zeckhauser, professor of Political Economy.

"If he takes a further administrative post, it's only 50-50 to be in academia, and only 50-50 to be at Harvard." Zeckhauser, who teaches a course on decision making under uncertainty, speculated in February. "I think he'll be president of Princeton. That's my best guess.

Bok's history at Harvard includes a repid ascent up the ladder--full law professor at 30, Dean of the Law School at 37, and appointment to president on January 11, 1971--all by the time he was 40.

He came into the office at what is now called by many professors the "Time of Troubles," while anti-war agitation still simmered, two years after the famous University Hall take-over.

Bok had already dealt with student rebellion during his Law School dean ship, and his success there no doubt figured in his appointment.

As one Bok Legend has it, a small group of students took over the Law School library one night in 1969, to protest not the Vietnam War on any such topic, but the school's grading system.

Bok had been in office less than a year. But when he was called at home well after midnight to come talk with the students, he made sure to bring enough coffee and doughnuts for everyone. "I want to thank you all for coming here to show your concern for the Law School," Bok said when he climbed on a table to address them.

If Bok lacked Pusey's remoteness from students, he also broadened the president's circle of confidants, reworking the Mass Hall bureaucracy to include four new vice presidents instead of the one Pusey had. That, according to Calkins, will prove to be one of the most important legacies of the Bok era.

"When he came in, you have no idea how primitive the administration of the University was," says Calkins, who often served eloquently as the point man for Pusey and the Corporation during the troubled years of 1969 and 1970.

Bok has also overseen several major projects during his 13 years--the Radcliffe merger/nonmerger, the growth of the Kennedy School of Government, the $302 million Medical Area Total Energy Plant nightmare and the $350 million Harvard Campaign, which has seven weeks to drum up $20 million for its goal.

The former Stanford basketball star and clarinet player was reluctant for the first seven or eight years to use the pulpit of the Harvard presidency to address the nation. But with the publication of his 1982. "Beyond the Ivory Lower: Social Responsibilities of the Modern University," annual reports on the legal and medical professions and other public ruminations on different topics. Bok is widely considered the prime spokesman for higher education in America, challenged perhaps only by Notre Dame's President, the Rev. Theodore Hessberg. "I have the highest possible admiration for Bok," says Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti. "He has been a superior leader of not just Harvard but higher education as a whole--he really works tirelessly for all of us."

"The president of Harvard is always in a unique position to exert leadership, and he has certainly done that," says Robert Atwell, acting director of the American Council on Education, who gives Bok special credit for his work in pushing the NCAA to toughen academic standards for student athletes. "For him to do that is really an act of citizenship, because Harvard doesn't have any of these problems."