Bok to Basics

Derek Bok

Higher Learning

Harvard University Press

206 pages; $15.00

THE PRESIDENT SAID, "Let there be a Core Curriculum." Then it came. And it was good.

Then he said, "Let there be a graduate school of public policy to train the Future Bureaucrats of America." Soon that came, as well. And it, too, was good.

Okay, so the analogy between the Lord Almighty and Harvard President Derek C. Bok isn't all that precise. But Bok is an important guy. As the head of the oldest and most prestigious university in the country, he is the de facto leader of American higher education. When he talks about the issues facing America's colleges, people listen.

If you don't believe me, believe U.S. News and World Report. Bok consistently ranks among the most respected and influential Americans in the magazine's annual survey, and is always the educator highest on the list.

Bok takes his job--and its prestige--seriously. He has tried to live up to his reputation in recent years by issuing reports sharply critical of American higher education in general, and its professional schools in particular. Now he has produced Higher Learning, a 206-page survey and critique of the state of American higher education, circa 1986.

"How well do our universities educate their students, and how could they do better?" Bok asks in the book's introduction. No one knows for sure, he writes, just what or how much the students of America are learning. That's the answer to the first question. And the answer to the second?

Well, Bok seems to be saying that our universities could do their job better if they--ahem--tried to do the things Bok has done and tried to do here at the Big H. In any event, he says, our era's information explosion and the growing intractability of our social problems give America's institutions of higher learning a special importance in determining the standing of the United States in the world.

"Of all our national assets," he writes, "a trained intelligence and a capacity for discovery seem destined to be the most important."

Bok writes that American history and traditions have given the country's colleges several distinct advantages over those of other nations. First, they enjoy "a remarkable freedom from government control. Universities on the continent were formed under state charters and are funded almost exclusively from public coffers.

In America, on the other hand, any group or organization with enough money can establish a private college or university. From 1960 to 1980 alone the number of four-year institutions in the U.S. rose from 1451 to 1810.

This has resulted in the second distinguishing feature of higher education in the United States: the sharp competition among colleges and universities for students, faculty and funding. Competition has made American schools far more responsive to some important constituencies--alumni, foundations and corporations, for instance--than their European counterparts.

But while Bok concludes that the benefits of America's system of higher learning far outweigh its costs, "success is no cause for complacency."

BOK HAS SEEN the future of American higher education, and it is something called "competency-based learning." In the bad old days, switch-wielding professors demanded rote memorization of facts and the ideas of others. But to meet the challenges of a new era, Bok writes, a "critical mind, free of dogma, may be the most important product of education."

Competency-based learning would presumably come close to producing such minds. Now being tried out only at some small, experimental schools, it stresses the development of communication, analytic and problem-solving skills, as well as the abilities to appreciate the arts, to make value judgments and to interact socially.

Bok is not optimistic, though, that professors at major research universities would ever go along with such a plan. Overly protective of their departmental fiefdoms and academic specialties, they are not likely, he says, to find the time or willingness to define such a set of shared objectives and then orient their teaching towards its goals.

The best that can be hoped for is some compromise that--tada!--sounds a lot like our very own Core Curriculum. This highlights the fundamental problem with Bok's thoughtful, well-conceived book. It's almost too well conceived. His purpose in writing it at times seems to be to defend, in the guise of a formal study, his tenure as president of Harvard. Budding bureaucrats need some help dealing with social problems? Well, our Kennedy School is a great place. Professional school students need some ethical training? We're doing it here, folks.

Bok obviously is not a neutral observer on the subject of higher learning. Too often, though, his biases muddle his attempt at a sober piece of work. One could easily come away from the book thinking that all the good being done in America's universites is the work of administrators who need to overcome the retarding influence of a distracted, if not apathetic faculty.

Still, Higher Learning is valuable for its survey of the state of American higher education. It also makes fascinating reading for those Bokologists who have the time to read the book and want to gain some insight into the mind of Harvard's once and future president.