Setting All the Parts in Harmony

By Otto Friedrich.

"My name is Derek Bok," the tall, graying man said to a surprised group of freshmen not too long ago, "and I preside over this bizarre institution."

Neatly put, but when Bok took over the presidency of Harvard 15 years ago, at the age of 41, he probably would not have spoken so candidly or so casually about his institution. Though affable and articulate, Bok was and is a very private man. "He's got an envelope around him," as one associate puts it. Yet in the course of his tenure, Bok has successfully steered Harvard through some enormous changes.

In Bok's first year, he administered a budget of $204 million; today he controls $650 million. Previous presidents had little to worry about in the way of federal regulation, but Title VII of the Civil Rights Act required Bok to alter hiring policies for his whole faculty. The energy crunch and chronic inflation ravaged many universities; Bok created the Harvard Management Corp., which invested Harvard's $3.5 billion endowment in profitable stocks. Yet throughout these official and financial labors, Bok has paid primary attention to Harvard's intellectual and ethical goals, not only of the college but particularly of the business and law schools. His concerns have reverberated far beyond Cambridge. "The president of Harvard is de facto the educational leader of the country," says another college president. "He raises the issues first, and then they become the agenda."

No Harvard president could remain totally immune to criticism, and there are some who think Bok tends to speechify too much and others who think he should see more of the students. But on balance, he wins high marks. "Bok has continued to grow rather than rigidify," says Sociologist David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd. "He's a rarity." Law Professor Archibald Cox, whose experience with presidents includes being fired as Special prosecutor in Richard Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, is equally enthusiastic. Bok, he says, "has set all the parts and players in harmony."

Bok shows an admirable indifference to pomp and circumstance. He tootles around Cambridge in an antiquated Volkswagen Beetle, newly repainted red. When he flies, he goes tourist class (and gets a wry pleasure out of occasionally seeing some grant-enriched professor in first). He seems quite unconcerned about his salary ($128,900), which is less than he pays several of his deans. He was the first president since 1911 who chose not to live in the presidential mansion in the Yard, preferring to remain in his colonial home in Elmwood. As he walks across the Yard, he often stoops to pick up pieces of litter.

While the rest of Harvard was starting to quiver with pre-350th birthday preparations, Bok spent one of his last weeks in August rafting down the Colorado River with his three children: Hilary, 27, Victoria, 24, and Thomas, 17. (His wife Sissela, a professor of philosophy at Brandeis and author of two well-received books, Lying and Secrets, normally accompanies him on such expeditions but had to go to Sweden to visit her ailing father, the famous sociologist Gunnar Myrdal.) Bok has always been an athletic sort of academician. A basketball star as well as a Phi Beta Kappa at Stanford, he continued to play in Cambridge as head of a campus team called "Bok's Jocks." One day six years ago, he sank a running left-handed hook shot and decided that was the moment to retire forever. He still plays a sharp game of tennis two or three times a week. He is also, of course, a heavy reader. (Current favorites include Thucydides and some of "Conrad's more obscure works.")

The grandson of the celebrated Dutch immigrant who wrote The Americanization of Edward Bok and for 30 years edited the Ladies' Home Journal, Derek Bok was trained as an attorney and came to the Harvard law faculty in 1958, then became dean of the law school in 1968. He still cherishes a lawyerly faith in due process and in reasoned consensus. "Someone with more intellectual flair might leap past process, but it means too much to Bok," says an aide. "He's almost obsessed by a need for fairness."

Another key to Bok's leadership is that early on he appointed five new vice presidents (Harvard never before had more than one) to be responsible for such chores as finance and alumni relations. Thus, while Bok somewhat diffidently did his share of fund raising, he could concentrate on the traditionally fractious faculty, which was dispirited and divided after the student clashes of the 1960s.

At the end of each academic year, Bok sends each of his ten deans a long letter outlining his objectives for their schools, his criticisms and his personal observations about who is doing what. "Those letters are the most advanced form of leadership I've ever seen," says one Harvard official, "firm, subtle, intimate, full of ideas, so beautifully crafted."

One problem that has taken up a lot of Bok's time lately is divestiture (Harvard's holdings in corporations doing business in South Africa: $416 million). More than once, students have jeered at him: "Hey, hey, Derek Bok, throw away your racist stock!" Bok strongly condemns apartheid, but he opposes total withdrawal. "The most obvious result of divestment," he wrote recently, "would be that the university would lose the influence it currently has to persuade companies to oppose apartheid." But students still demonstrate outside his office, and occasionally Bok stops to reason with them in his methodical fashion.

Inside his office, Bok leans back in an easy chair, a leg draped over one of its arms, and reflects on his duties. "My biggest job," he says, "is to create the atmosphere where creative people can do well. There are a lot of people running hard in this institution, and there has been a remarkable absence of smugness and self-satisfaction." Only a cynic would find in that statement a faint touch of self-satisfaction.

With reporting by Robert Ajemian/Cambridge