Bok's Loyalty Brings Him Back

University President Lawrence H. Summers wasn’t the only Harvard official to climb aboard a jet and fly to a vacation destination the weekend before his resignation.

While the soon-to-be outgoing president enjoyed a five-day ski trip in Utah, two members of the Harvard Corporation—the University’s top governing board—convened in Sarasota, Fla., for a secret rendezvous with the man they hoped would temporarily take the University’s helm: Derek C. Bok.

Bok, a former president who led the University from 1971 to 1991, wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson yesterday that Corporation members Nannerl O. Keohane and James R. Houghton ’58 surprised him with an offer to assume the University’s top post at a Feb. 18 meeting in the coastal Florida city.

After several hours of discussion with the two officials, the 75-year-old Harvard veteran accepted the invitation.

“The decision did involve a substantial change in the content, direction, and pace of my life,” Bok wrote Monday. “On the other hand, I have a strong sense of loyalty to Harvard, and I understood quite quickly after discussing the situation at the University that this was not an invitation I could conscientiously refuse.”

Summers, who will step down from his post on June 30, had informed the Corporation of his intention to resign just three days earlier, leaving the board’s five members with little time to find an interim replacement.

Calls to members of the Harvard Corporation last night were not returned.

Bok has maintained a constant presence at Harvard since he left the presidency in 1991, serving as faculty chair of the Kennedy School of Government’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and as a University professor.

Last month, Bok stepped down as chairman of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, after eight years at its helm. But Bok wrote in an e-mail that he had decided to resign from the organization in early January, and that it “had nothing whatsoever to do with recent events at Harvard.”

“All this occurred before I learned of the resignation of Dean Kirby and the problems that ensued,” he wrote Monday, referring to Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby, who resigned in late January after The Crimson reported that Summers had forced him out.

Bok, who has become a high-profile writer on issues of higher education since he left the presidency in 1991, said that he has not yet planned his transition back into University governance.

“I still have a lot of learning and a lot of consulting to do before I can plan intelligently,” he wrote yesterday.

Summers spent Presidents’ Day weekend on a ski trip with his children in Utah, returning quietly to Cambridge on the eve of his resignation. He announced on Feb. 21 that he would step down from his post at the end of the academic year, citing an inability to work with some members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to advance his agenda.

—Staff writer Javier C. Hernandez can be reached at jhernand@fas.harvard.edu.