A President for Harvard

The educational eminence known as Harvard last chose a new president 18 years ago. Then, it selected a little-known ancient history scholar who was president of Wisconsin's tiny Lawrence College, Nathan Marsh Pusey. Pusey will leave Harvard in June to head the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and this week the university's dual boards of seven corporation members and 29 overseers meet to end eleven months of speculation over his successor. On the eve of the announcement, all signs pointed to another complex man without national prominence: Derek Curtis Bok, 40, dean of the Harvard Law School.

Bok is much in the mold of Yale President Kingman Brewster, whose finesse and drive have lately nudged Yale's prestige ahead to the point of challenging Harvard's. Like Brewster, Bok has rugged good looks and a legal background, is youthful and a politically deft administrator. Though never a Harvard undergraduate like all previous presidents (he was an undergraduate at Stanford), he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law and has been on the faculty since 1958. He is respected within his specialty of labor law and is experienced as a strike negotiator, but he is boyish enough in outlook to have attempted to organize a faculty basketball team. Last year he co-authored a book on U.S. unions with the man who turned out to be his closest rival in the presidential deliberations, Harvard Labor Economist John Dunlop. Recently Bok turned down presidential feelers from Dartmouth and Amherst.

Coffee and Doughnuts. In breeding, connections and political outlook, Bok combines solidity to please the old guard and cautious liberalism to please at least some of the new. Of a Philadelphia Main Line family, he is the great-grandson of Cyrus H.K. Curtis, founder of Curtis Publishing, grandson of Edward William Bok, one of the first editors of the Ladies' Home Journal, son of a former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice, and son-in-law of Swedish Sociologist Gunnar Myrdal.

At first, the list of suggestions gathered from students, alumni, faculty and others numbered 900 and included such diversely improbable personalities as Abbie Hoffman and S.I. Hayakawa; it was narrowed to 23 men a month ago. From the beginning it was clear that the finalists would need reputations that had prospered among the moderates during the recent student protests.

During Harvard's crisis in April 1969, Bok was a member of the committee that Pusey consulted before police were summoned to the campus. Bok dissented from the decision to call in the cops. In the roiled aftermath, says Government Professor Stanley Hoffmann, Bok "was very useful in bringing some reason to the situation." Though he approves of discipline for the disorderly, Bok's first impulse is mediation. When he arrived to talk to students at a library sit-in in May, he came armed "with coffee and doughnuts, not threats.

Vision Question. While he is considered neither a brilliant scholar nor a radical innovator, Bok, as Hoffmann put it, was the "most unassailable" candidate on the committee's final list. "What we don't know is whether he has any strong educational philosophy," says Everett Mendelsohn, a history of science professor. All the time that the final selection was pending, Bok kept amiably mum. A believer in mixing academic and professional disciplines (he holds an M.A. in economics), he has encouraged law programs that blend social science with the school's conventional courses of study.

Harvard's 25th president will inherit a university with outstanding departments and graduate schools that have survived campus disruptions with few permanent scars. This fall, faculty and student energies turned from political disputes toward administrative and curricular reforms. In the decade ahead, says one professor, Harvard will face "a head-on collision between financial stringency and a need for a new look at the substance of education, including some experimentation that costs money." One priority: getting Harvard's independent units to cooperate fruitfully on broad planning. The man who takes over the university must be equipped to maintain campus civility, but his biggest challenge by far will be to provide vision as well.

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