For a Firm Foundation

IT HAS BEEN ten years and one month since Derek Bok was named president of Harvard University, and nearly ten years since he assumed office. Over the past decade, Bok has managed to keep Harvard gliding across turbulent times on an even keel. He has made himself a man of open letters, suing that ingenious and forthright method to silence critics and divert the energies of a contentious community. When the issue of Harvard's holdings in companies doing business in South Africa and a proposal to name the Kennedy School library after an American entrepreneur in South Africa threatened to alienate large parts of the community, out came open letters. The nationwide Nestle boycott and the proposed appointment of conservative Chicago economist Arnold Harberger to head the Harvard Institute for International Development again led Bok to take up his pen.

If any unifying theme can be detected in Bok's series of letters, it is a desire to set down the ethical responsibilities of a university. Now he is preparing another open letter, this one on the status of minority faculty and students at Harvard. Massachusetts Hall sources confided recently that Bok plans to expand and refine his series of letters for a book. One source noted the irony of such a project, recalling Bok's initial reluctance to write the open letters and pointing out that Bok only came to grips with the issues he has addressed because of widespread protest.

THIS FALL HAS not been easy for President Bok, but it might've been tougher. The most vocal protest on campus from non-minority students has centered on rather parochial issues. In fact, a student group named GUERILLA achieved its most effective demonstration early in exam period, when it organized a "study-in" at Lamont, managing within a few days to gain an all-night study area--the Greenhouse Cafe.

One can imagine the delight of the administration if all student protests involved nothing more controversial than a desire to read books into the dawn hours. But one set of issues will not wither away for Harvard or for Bok: the quality of life for minority students here. Since Bok spoke on race relations and minority issues at Commencement last spring, a series of unsettling incidents has occurred.

A preliminary report on Harvard admissions prepared by Bok's special assistant Robert E. Klitgaard '68 suggested that high test scores for minority students and women often overpredict academic performance. To show their displeasure, more than 200 students marched through the Yard and demonstrated outside Massachusetts Hall, presenting Bok with eight demands and threatening to occupy the building. The president of the Black Students Association, Lydia P. Jackson '82, received a death threat and a rape threat for her "political activities." These events corresponded with a number of national racially motivated incidents, including a cross-burning at Williams College. In response to the death threat, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with the Justice Department, visited the campus to investigate. And sources said recently the Civil Rights Commission would soon come to Harvard to talk with Bok about taking a stronger public stand against the regrettable, frightening incident.

University spokesmen did, like State Department spokesmen, "condemn and abhor" the racial incident, but Bok, the supposed leader of the University, remained mute. Perhaps the strange confluence of the death threat with the Yale Game influenced his low-key posture. But it should not surprise Bok or any other administrator that minority students grew, and are growing, increasingly disenchanted with the president's failure to take even a cosmetic, symbolic stand. After national circulation of the Klitgaard study, Bok vigorously apologized for any hurt caused by its disclosure, but issued no disclaimer of the report's findings. And these local events took place against a national backdrop of a Ku Klux Klan revival, an increase in racial tension in the South, and the election of a president who stands as a potential threat to affirmative action and civil rights.

For the majority of white members of the vaunted Harvard community, these troubles seem far from affecting their everyday lives. Rather than rally around the cause of minority students, white students clamor for longer library hours. The present situation and the insensitivity of white students would be absurd if it weren't so sad and insidious: the signs of the times indicate that avowed liberals are more interested in their private good than in the good of the community. The prevalent attitude constitutes not so much racism as a disregard for minority issues. As long as the majority of students and faculty here is unconcerned with race relations in general and Third World students' needs in particular, little progress in either sphere seems possible.

ABOUT TEN DAYS ago, the Gomes Committee, formed by Bok last spring to investigate the possibility of a campus Third World center, recommended the establishment of a "foundation" to improve race relations at Harvard. The nine-member student-faculty committee's report represents a step in the right direction; it constitutes the first official acknowledgement that minority students have needs unmet by existing institutions. But the final proposal was clearly struck in compromise, intended to appease the students who called for a Third World center without conjuring the specters of separatism so many whites fear. The report implies a peculiar defeatism. In referring to Third World centers at other schools, it says. "It is clear to this Committee that there is significant opposition to anything at Harvard that suggests a concession to racial separatism," adding, "... the perception of separatism persists, and... the perception almost always assures the reality."

If Third World students at Harvard are 'separatist," as some "perceive," it is only because of a certain, necessarily biased, perspective. Harvard admits a conspicuously small number of minorities and hires an indiscernible number of minority faculty. Simply by virtue of their small numbers and accompanying assimilation pressures, most minority students understand more about whites than majority students do about Third World students. "Separatism" is an entirely normative term: if anyone at this University is "separatist," it is the whites. Whites seem to be able to harbor ill feelings toward Third World students or to remain ignorant of their plight at a predominantly white institution without perceiving themselves as "separatist."

Minority students have reacted by agreeing with the "material concessions" proposed in the Gomes Committee report and by drawing attention to the report's failure to deal with minority admissions and faculty. Committee members anticipate a struggle in implementing the report's proposed foundation, but express cautious optimism. White students have yet to make themselves heard.

Bok has remained reticent. He has decided not to comment on the details of the proposal until they are discussed by the Faculty, and accordingly has not publicly thrown his weight behind the foundation. To some, this amounts to yet another refusal to assume responsibility, to take a leadership role, or to demonstrate symbolically concern for the legitimate needs of minority students. Who besides Bok, they ask, can show that this University is genuinely concerned with the status of minorities at Harvard? Sometimes open letters do not act as an adequate substitution for concrete action.

Bok's silence seems all the more mystifying given his Commencement speech last June. Some selected passages:

On the subject of increased minority admissions, "We did not launch this effort from a sense of collective guilt or a desire to atone for our national history of exclusion and discrimination. We had more positive, forward-looking goals."

On the current status of minorities at Harvard: "For the moment, we must acknowledge that many of our Blacks and Hispanics feel much like alien guests in a strange house."

On whites' perceptions of minorities: "We can all understand how troubling it is to encounter evidence of racial separation or feel the chill of rejection or indifference on the part of those one wishes to befriend. But white undergraduates need to consider these encounters from both points of view."

Finally: "Any lack of candor on our part will only force our Black and Hispanic students to labor under a greater burden of ambiguity, insecurity and distrust."

This last quotation resounds loudly. Over the course of this school year, Bok has proved the fulfillment of his prophecy. After ten years as president, he has unmaliciously, but nonetheless effectively, alienated the minority constituency at the University, even though his rhetoric suggests it is not in his interest.

THERE ARE SEVERAL reasons for Bok to endorse the Gomes Committee proposal vocally and wholeheartedly. Following his administration's characteristic cost-benefit approach, it would seem that the benefits far outweight the meager costs associated with the establishment of this halfway measure. He should recognize that since Harvard boasts the highest reputation of any school in the country, every University president has a vested interest in maintaining that prestige, in preserving the status quo. Bok has succeeded admirably in avoiding risk and minimizing conflict, but he has arrived at a critical moment. If the carefully constructed equilibrium at Harvard is to remain intact, Bok might consider the "reform in order to conserve" principle classically stated by Burke: meaningful reform now might avoid a full-fledged revolution later.

But these are crass arguments, arguments that accept the institution on its own terms, arguments ment to appeal to technocratic maximizers. Bok should take a stand on moral grounds, have the boldness to risk alienating the members of this community who oppose concessions to "racial separatism." He should come out for an even stronger financial commitment to Third World organizations, to minorty admissions, to the hiring of minority faculty. There is a point where delegation ends and leadership, both here and nationwide, begins. And although Bok's predecessor Pusey was widely assailed for taking matters into his own hands too often, for going so far as to call the police to evict with force students mainly protesting for peace, he at least showed his humanity, his capacity to love and hate, his faith in Old Harvard and what it stood for. Bok's presidency has largely proved a holding action, marked by a reluctance to come to terms with the possibility of a New Harvard and a correspondingly diminutive willingness to support a belief in a progressive University.

BOK COULD DISPEL much of the latent tension on campus by assuming an active leadership role in both race relations and Third World student interests. When Pusey was asked what qualification he considered most important to his successor, he answered, "a belief in God." A Crimson editor commented in January 1972.

Imagine the contempt and derision with which this was received in Langdell, Baker, Littauer, William James and the Computer Center. With all the important skills necessary to manipulate a great university, the godstruck old fool had cited something as intangible as a belief. For it was not only Pusey's belief in God which was pitiful and funny: it was his belief in belief of any kind. Nothing more amuses the men who run this university--and their compatriots who run our society--than men with beliefs and no power.

I do not doubt that Bok has beliefs, and I admire his willingness to put down his thoughts in open letters where they can be dissected and criticized. Anyone who attended last week's men's basketball game against Cornell will agree that Bok is capable of showing emotion. After Harvard won in overtime on a last-second jump shot, Bok raced down to the floor and embraced Crimson captain Tom Mannix. Maybe it is time for President Bok to embrace, publicly, the minority community at Harvard not just for the sake of better race relations but also for the sake of morality and humanity.

A spring evening in 1969. A few weeks earlier, former Harvard President Nathan Pusey had called in the police to evict students occupying University Hall. Many campus moderates became radicalized by the brutal display of force, and undergraduates went on strike.

On this night, the frenzy of the strike spilled over from Arts and Sciences to the hallowed halls of the Law School, and a group of impetuous first-year students held a "study-in" at the Law Library, refusing to leave at closing time to dramatize their demand for changes in the grading system.

Derek C. Bok, dean of the Law School, impressed the University's powers-that-be with his cool handling of this miniature crisis. He showed up to drink coffee and chat with the self-styled rebels. He assured them he would consider their demands very carefully. They went home. The Law School escaped turmoil, and Bok became known as Harvard's finest crisis manager.