Bok's Deregulation

SINCE WORLD WAR II, the federal government has dramatically increased its financial support of private universities and colleges. Science departments and medical schools were the first to rely on Washington, but government support has extended to research in the social sciences and humanities, to construction of new facilities and to financial aid for students.

In his 1974-75 Annual Report, President Bok acknowledges that dipping into government coffers has been useful but the funds have also led to a dependency which Bok does not view as entirely benign. In the past decade, he writes, the government has assumed an increasingly active and direct role in the affairs of private universities. Because they could not survive a cutoff of funds, the institutions have had to tolerate "unwise" and "intrusive" regulations in such areas as privacy of student records, affirmative action, retirement pension plans and protection of human subjects in scientific research.

Such regulation, Bok says, threatens the diversity and autonomy that have made the American system of higher education "the best in the world." The burdens of compliance, he says, have become increasingly heavy: costs, institutional bureaucracies and administrative demands on faculty time have mushroomed along with government regulation.

Bok's warnings on the dangers of federal intervention are impressive. No one wants a system of higher education in which admissions policy, research goals and educational philosophy are rigidly controlled by a single dictatorial department in Washington, D.C.

Yet Bok's vision is more disturbing for what it leaves out than for what it depicts. His report displays no concern for the very real problems that have occasioned government intervention, and no sense of the historical failure of private institutions to confront those problems without external pressure. The implied message is clear: discrimination, invasion of students' privacy and abuse of human subjects may or may not go on at Harvard, but they are in any case less trouble some than the government's attempt to prevent them. Bok has vigorously attacked the symptoms and even the medicine, but he has ignored or belittled the disease.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION provides the most striking example of Bok's confused priorities. Regulations in that area have led to "the preparation of exquisitely detailed pieces of paper," Bok says, rather than to concrete improvements for minority and women faculty. Bok's discomfort with affirmative action is well-rooted in the Harvard tradition; Harvard took three years, from 1970 to 1973, to draw up a plan for improving its hiring record that would meet the government's minimum standards. Those three years of negotiation and revision, in fact, account for much of the paperwork and expense that Bok bemoans.

Harvard's faculty before affirmative action had been the preserve of white males. The information-gathering process triggered by federal requests in 1970 revealed a desolate situation: no female full professors, pitifully small number of blacks at all levels of the Faculty. Nor had Harvard done much to improve matters; as Bok's special assistant Walter Leonard has written, "Many male administrators and faculty members are inherently incapable of perceiving race and sex discrimination without the intervention of some external force." The federal government intervened in university hiring, not out of a perverse desire to upset the lives of college administrators, but because the administrators had shown themselves unable-or unwilling-to fight discrimination on their own initiative.

Bok shows little sensitivity to the historical situation:

There was also little evidence to show that minority faculty were victimized by systematic discrimination; careful studies suggest that these professors were already receiving larger salaries than white colleagues of comparable background and experience."

But salaries were never the central issue. The catch, obviously, was how few minority professors there were to enjoy the attractive wages. Bok indicates he understands the reason for the dearth of minority faculty members when he says that,

"The real difficulty lay in the acute shortage of black and Spanish surnamed Ph.D's . . .

But having acknowledged the fact, Bok passes on, as if the number of black and Spanish surname Ph.D.'s was an act of God beyond the control of the blameless universities. Affirmative action law recognizing that discrimination at one rung of the ladder affected hiring at all higher rungs applied rules to student admissions as well as to faculty hiring.

With one final shrug, Bok dismisses Harvard's history of prejudice against women:

As for women, a better case for discrimination could be made. But it was also apparent that women were handicapped because the critical years for promotion occur at the time in their lives when they are most burdened with competing family responsibilities.

When it comes to assessing the results of the past few years of affirmative action, Bok shifts deftly from the specific to the general, citing a Carnegie study that found little improvement for women or minority faculty across the nation. He might as well have stuck to Harvard, where the statistics are almost as gloomy. In a few areas there has been progress, but black admissions are down in some schools, most of Harvard's small number of female teachers perch tenuously on the lower rungs of the ladder, and blacks still comprise less than two per cent of the tenured faculty. Not impressive, assuredly, and one possible reaction would be to condemn all attempts to improve the situation. Just as plausible, however, would be to condemn the situation itself.

Certainly President Bok is no champion of discrimination, and his annual report does not attempt to justify Harvard's long history of prejudice. But with his attack on affirmative action regulation Bok allies himself with those who accept, or at least ignore racism and sexism at Harvard. Attacks on affirmative action have accelerated during the past two years and, while they have at times focused on legitimate issues, too often they have provided a thin veil for the feeling that integration has gone far enough. More than a few deans, department chairmen and professors could view the annual report as tacitly approving that feeling, as approving a go-slow policy on the hiring of women and minorities, as approving a policy of resistance to the spirit of affirmative action.

PUBLIC PRESSURE forced the government in 1966 to assume an active role in the protection of human subjects in scientific research. As in the case of discrimination, the government was reluctant to interfere in what had been a preserve of academia. A series of exposes however, on the unethical behavior of a few scientists-highlighted by the Tuskegee case, in which poor blacks with syphillis were left untreated, and the Willowbrook case, in which mentally retarded children were deliberately infected with hepatitis-demonstrated that scientists could not always be trusted to police themselves.

The National Institutes of Health responded with rules establishing research review committees at all institutions receiving NIH money. The committees were to include community representatives and members of non-medical professions. NIH also set up standards of "informed consent," specifying the kinds of information researchers had to provide their subjects before experimenting on them.

These rules were long overdue. At times they may have added new problems to the old; they certainly did not go far enough in providing protection to subjects and many universities were slow to comply. Yet the number of unethical experiments-of which Harvard has had its share-have diminished during the past decade. While the change is due in part to scientists' increased awareness of ethical guidelines in research, some of the credit belongs to regulation.

Bok ignores the history and simply lumps scientific regulation with the other undesirables. He comments specifically only once: "Decisions about the direction of research should be left to individual investigators rather than deans..." The phrase, "direction of research," is vague and in another context the statement might seem benign. But in the midst of Bok's complaints it could be interpreted as a slap at the NIH-mandated review process and as a boost to the misguided notion that "freedom of inquiry" guarantees to all scientists the right to do as they please with their experimental subjects. Not that Bok accepts that notion; but since he offers no evidence that he rejects it or that he appreciates the need for oversight, and since he includes rules for protecting subjects in his implied condemnation of regulation, some researchers will certainly welcome his report as ammunition in their battle against externally enforced ethical standards.

THE ISSUE OF government regulation relates to a host of complex problems surrounding the role of the university in society, and Bok is right to be concerned. Moreover, the effects of regulation have not all been positive. Some rules have certainly not been well thought out, while others have been too weakly framed to accomplish much of anything. There is room for improvement and, as Bok says, Harvard could contribute to the formation of wiser policies.

But that is only part of the story, and Bok unfortunately neglects the rest. Surely the most sensible approach to easing the burden of federal regulation would be to join with the government in attempting to remedy problems. America's system of higher education may be "the best in the world," but its faults are nonetheless serious. Lessening federal involvement will do nothing to remove those deep-rooted faults.

Bok's solution is to step up Harvard's lobbying effort in Washington, D.C. "This is not a congenial task for educators," he writes, "who dislike the thought of seeming to play the part of lobbyists. But it is wrong to conceive of the effort in such narrow terms." In one sense the idea is sound: any Harvard student knows that a pack of Harvard professors dispatched to lecture in Washington could easily lull to sleep whole departments of formerly alert government regulators. Yet Harvard might benefit more if, instead of lobbying in the capital to keep governmental regulations out of Harvard, Bok lobbied here in Cambridge to persuade Harvard to accept and even welcome those rules that, like affirmative action, promise improve the University