Harvard's Quiet Man

At 9:30 p.m. on the snowy night of Dec. 13, a taxi pulled up at Derek Bok's four-bedroom house in Belmont, Mass. Out stepped a well-tailored Boston lawyer wearing crimson socks. He was Francis Burr, Senior Fellow (chairman) of Harvard University's governing corporation. His mission: to offer the dean of Harvard's law school a new job as the university's 25th president. Bok, 40, recalls that he was "astounded."

With typical caution, Bok asked for ten days to think it over, then phoned Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr., once his favorite Harvard law professor and the man who later recruited Bok for the Harvard faculty. The two men and their wives met in New York City. Bok's fears that the job would be too wearing were eased by his discovery that the Brewsters "were quite exhilarated by what they do." On Christmas Eve, Burr again rode through a snowstorm, this time to hear Bok accept.

Not Unanimous. Last week Burr's corporation asked Harvard's 29 overseers to ratify its choice. They did--but not without hesitating. Several asked a nagging question: Who was Derek Bok?

"The dilemma and the appeal of the man all along," said one overseer, "is that he has the support of everyone from the corporation to the Harvard Crimson, and yet he has not revealed himself even to some of his closest friends." For two hours, the overseers debated whether Bok was really the man to handle Harvard's myriad problems, from troubled black students to finances and the demanding science faculties. The choice was not unanimous. Overseer Clifford Alexander, a black lawyer and former head of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, argued that the corporation had failed to query Bok sufficiently about his views on blacks, other minorities and women. When the vote came, Alexander abstained.

For all that. Harvard insiders are now convinced that Bok is a first-rate choice. His flaw, if it can be called that, is a record of such quiet accomplishment that his real mettle seems untested. A cheerful, flexible man, he grew up assured of financial security by his Philadelphia family's share in the Curtis publishing fortune. After his mother and lawyer father were divorced when Bok was five, his mother moved with him to Beverly Hills, Calif. She sent him --presciently--to a California Episcopal military academy named Harvard.

Gliding through Stanford University with distinguished grades which won him a Phi Beta Kappa key, Bok played freshman basketball, joined the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity, represented his junior class on the student council, and was sure only that he wanted to achieve something outside the family publishing business. He chose law because it gave him broad options. After his first year at Harvard Law School, he took a summer tour of India, striking up friendships with local people in Y.M.C.A.s by giving impromptu jazz clarinet concerts. In an interview with TIME Education Correspondent Gregory H. Wierzynski last week, he recalled that he had left Cambridge thinking that he had done badly on his first-year law exams. "One afternoon in Bombay when it rained eleven inches," he says, he learned that his first-year grades were good enough to put him on the Harvard Law Review. "So I came back to law school and finished."

Unlike his fellow graduates, who hustled off to top law firms, Bok spent a year in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship, studying economics at the University of Paris' Institute of Political Science. He also courted a stunning Swedish blonde--Sissela Myrdal, a psychology student and daughter of the famous Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. As Mrs. Bok, she recently had their third child while almost simultaneously finishing her work for a Harvard doctorate in moral philosophy.

Subversive Group. Bok's idealism ripened during his military stint with the Army's Judge Advocate General's office in Washington, D.C. He helped modify the rules that permitted the Army to charge draftees with being security risks merely because they had belonged to allegedly subversive groups before entering the service. He used his spare time to earn an M.A. in economics at George Washington University, and found that he had "missed the academic life--the opportunity to keep learning about subjects in a reasonably systematic way."

Instead of practicing his profession. Bok returned to Harvard, where he systematically learned and taught labor law, especially collective bargaining. While turning out exhaustive law-review articles on such topics as the anti-merger provisions of the Clayton Antitrust Act, he also put in long hours as an impartial arbitrator in labor disputes for institutions as diverse as the Lincoln research lab at M.I.T. and the Suffolk Downs race track.

Easing Pressures. As a law student, Bok was often irked by Harvard's intense competitive pressures; as a popular law teacher, he polished his pedagogy by selecting students for his oversubscribed seminars from the bottom third of the class. He became law dean in 1968. As he puts it, "When Harvard asks me to do something, I always seem to be saying yes."

Continuing to teach, Dean Bok abandoned acrid professorial quizzing in favor of letting students play the roles of parties in mock labor disputes. Yet he set rigorous standards. One third-year student spent ten days reading to prepare for a conference on his thesis with Bok. In 45 minutes, Bok blitzed off four related subjects and their legal questions, suggested sources, and began to structure the paper into chapters, while the student sat agape.

Sympathetic to student demands for pass/fail grading, Bok persuaded hostile faculty members to accept a compromise making the new system optional in the first year. He helped the manager of the law-school cafeteria figure out economical ways to make hamburgers taste better, suggested bright colors and contemporary art to redecorate dingy dorms and offices. A registered Democrat, he mobilized law-school alumni to write letters to Senators opposing the Supreme Court nomination of G. Harrold Carswell. Last spring he went to Washington to protest the U.S. move into Cambodia. As Harvard's president, he intends to keep speaking out on political matters.

Good Teaching. His chief presidential interest. Bok told Wierzynski, will lie in "curriculum and educational programs." In his view, "the students' obvious and legitimate concerns with the quality of teaching ought to be taken very seriously indeed." Beyond that, he is concerned about the current campus mood: "Students are quiet on the surface, but if you ask why they have changed, nobody has a very good answer. The concerns that students have about foreign policy, racism, national priorities and education have not been resolved.

"One has to work very hard not to make decisions under the pressure of disturbance. You are apt to reward behavior that you disapprove of and make bad decisions. If you respond to problems only when students are protesting, you are going to have a lot of protests."

Candid Trepidations. A quiet man devoted to gardening and children, Bok watches Captain Kangaroo with his 2-year-old son while dressing, explodes chiefly in games of tennis. He candidly admits to trepidations about taking responsibility for the nation's most famous university. He is worried about staying accessible, anxious about being "quick, strong and perceptive enough to see what one's own convictions are amid the ambiguous and complex problems of this place."

As if to avoid pride before the fall, Bok refused to read even favorable articles about himself in the press last week. "I am going to miss the law school's small size and personal interaction," he told Wierzynski. "People's expectations of this job are often unrealistically high. Actually the power of a president nowadays has been greatly diminished, yet as the head of the institution he is held accountable. Obviously the control I have over my destiny has been substantially diminished by this change. That is a frightening thought."

Frightened or not, Bok takes over on July 1 for a term that he wants to be shorter than Nathan M. Pusey's 18 years. "Derek Bok is by no means a finished person right now," says Harvard Law Professor Abram Chayes. Whether Bok emerges as "plastic man," as some critics see him, or as a dynamic leader of U.S. education, he has already discovered how Bostonians, at least, view one of the world's loftiest offices. After a packed press conference following his election last week, reporters adjourned the session with the solemn words: "Thank you, Mr. President."

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