Beyond the Mass Hall Mystique

"I don't dream at night. I really go from one year to the next without having dreams." --President Bok

"I would rather not talk about great successes," President Bok says when asked what he believes are his most significant achievements at Harvard. "I don't like reading about people who talk of their great successes. One person's triumph is another man's pitfall. Success is a very ambiguous thing."

"My favorite author?" Bok asks. "I really don't have a favorite author. I try to read a lot of things. For six or seven years, I would read a book club selection every month. But I appreciate Joseph Conrad's more obscure works."

President Bok starts to laugh at the growing list of open-ended questions, until the hearty laughter dominates the conversation.

Why do you think they selected you as President of Harvard?

"God, I don't know," he replies. "But they must have made some sort of evaluation. I don't know what it was. Frankly, I wasn't even terribly taken with the whole idea. I had just started up with the Law School."

A moment of exasperation. "What are all these questions you're asking me," Bok wonders aloud. "Each one of these could take an entire morning to answer. There are no simple one-sentence answers, that you're looking for, to these complex questions."

* * *

Not many students get to know Derek Curtis Bok.

Despite the visibility of his office, Bok remains an enigma in the eyes of most students at Harvard. They see him during Freshman Week, at basketball games. We invited him to a wine and cheese party in a dormitory room--and he came.

But few students have come into sufficiently close contact with the president to evaulate his personality and moral values. His private personna is obscured by the headlines that portray him only as a policy maker, the man who interprets injustices and to whom we address our grievances.

To most, Bok is distant. To some, he is too deliberative, a hypocrite perhaps. But it is impossible to pigeonhole Bok, for he refuses to give himself away.

This is a man who, on a Sunday afternoon, prefers a walk in the woods with his wife to sitting on a corporate board. He envies his daughter for being able to tour India. His friends call him "ruthlessly competitive" on the tennis court. As he makes his way across the Yard, he bends over to pick up pieces of litter.

Professionally, Bok is known--indeed criticized in some circles-for his reserve and caution, characteristics that seem to melt over into the way he deals with inquiries about his personal life. His close friend say it is for a very good reason: Bok, they say, is an intensely private person.

Bok's personality appears out of synch with the intensely public demands of his office, the head of the richest and most famous university in the United States. Despite his predilection to shun the spotlight, Bok's presidential tasks continually bring him into the public eye: from ensuring the quality of the Faculty, to serving as a spokesman for all of higher education, to indefatigibly hitting the road in search of the donations upon which Harvard survives.

But despite the vastness of his domain, Bok strives scrupulously to separate out his private and public lives.

"No, I'm sorry, absolutely not," Bok answers, when asked whether or not it would be possible to interview his children. "I don't think that it's fair to get them involved in all this business. Can you imagine if everyone started calling?"

Dr. David Nathan, Bok's tennis partner and neighbor, explains: "When he's on the tennis court, he's on the tennis court. I don't know anything about Harvard University."

"This man is intensely private, and he keeps his professional life and his personal life completely separate," says Nathan, a professor at Harvard Medical School. "I see a lot of Derek, but I see him only as a tennis player and a neighbor."

And Bok says he cherishes his private moments, especially those with his family, wife Sissela and three children Hillary, Victoria, and Thomas. He frequently states his inability to spend more time with his family is one of the great regrets that the office of the presidency brings.

"But when those afternoons do come, I like to take a long walk in the country with my wife, or see my children," Bok says. "We have an enormously important family life. I have tried to stay away from corporate boards because my children were growing up."

It is, indeed, an irritating challenge to provoke Bok to reveal something else about himself. He seems genuinely entertained when a reporter attempts to poke about and explore his personal life, to see what makes Bok tick. The president is fully aware that the interviewer isn't going to get anywhere.

"Oh, I don't mean to be difficult," he says after the same question had been worded three ways without an adequate response. "But that's much too simplistic a question. People are much more complex than that. I just don't see an 'I-owe-it-all-to-my-mother' type answer to that one."

* * *

Bok's quiet demeanor certainly does not match his extraodinarily rapid and successful rise from scion of a rich Philadelphia family to president of Harvard, in 1971, at the young age of 40. Bok is the son of preeminent liberal Pennsylvania jurist, now an associate justice of the state supreme court, and the grandson of Edward W. Bok, the first editor of Ladies Home Journal.

Tall, good-looking, and athletic, Bok made good on the family roots right off the bat as an undergraduate at Stanford, earning plaudit as a veritable Big Man on Campus, a reputation he carried with him to Harvard Law School.

Law School classmate, John Kaplan, now visiting the Law School from Stanford, says that Bok "was considered the handsomest guy in the class, the best athlete, probably the richest, and he was among the smartest in the class. God, you could genuinely hate someone for all that, but you just couldn't hate Derek."

"What kept me from hating him?" Kaplan asks. "I could have you know. But what impressed me most about him, though, was that he was the most giving, and the most decent person that I had ever come into contact with. His integrity and fairness just made it impossible to dislike him."

After an initial uncertainty about his career plans--and a sojourn in Paris as in Fullbright scholar--Bok decided on a career in teaching, and embarked on scholarship in labor law, an endeavor that was sidetracked temporarily in 1968 when he was named Law School Dean. That administrative digression was virtually made permanent two-and-a-half years later, when, after more than a six-month search, the governing Corporation tapped the 40-year-old Bok as Harvard's 25th president.

From the beginning of the search, Bok was regarded by many as the clear-cut first choice. In what is known by long-time administrators as "the time of troubles," Bok had proven himself as an adept conciliator, no small accomplishment compared to the man he replaced, Nathan M. Pusey '28, who had summoned the police to evict the demonstrators who had taken over University Hall. One of Bok's most celebrated moments was when, as dean, he showed up to confront student occupants of Langdell Hall armed only with coffee and doughnuts.

While some who know him say privately that Bok has lost some of his earlier humility in his thirteen years on the job. Bok's tenure as president has basically borne out his reputation. He has gained a reputation as a good, albeit cautious, administrator who has effectively managed an institution confronted with increasingly limited means. His term has been marked by an overhaul of the undergraduate curriculum, a major fundraising drive, and a measured proclivity to speak out on ethical issues related to universities.

Bok's admirers say he has skillfully balanced the competing constituencies of Harvard University, a feat best characterized by his highly reasoned argument against the divestiture of Harvard's investments in companies doing business in South Africa. His critics charge that he allows himself to get overwhelmed by detail and procedure, and that he has been afraid to directly address moral issues--for instance, by his steadfast refusal to divest from companies operating in South Africa.

The sociologist David Riesman '31, a longtime observer of higher education, posits: "In order to understand the trajectory of Derek Bok, you must understand that he is trained as a lawyer. He came from an institution that is least like the arts and sciences. Law School is a pragmatic place, concerned with detail, procedure, and proof."

"One of his great traits is to set all the parts and people in working harmony," adds Archibald Cox '34, Loeb University Professor Emeritus and a friend of Bok's. "This University is made of a great number of different parts, and it is inescapable that these interests are going to conflict with one another. One of the great tasks that Derek does so well is to keep these interests working together, in harmony, in a progressive state."

To his critics, though, Bok's concern with process and procedure reflects a certain cowardice and unwillingness to attack the status quo.

Outspoken Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz has clashed publicly with Bok on numerous occasions, most recently last spring when he tried to persuade Bok to award an honorary degree in absentia to Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, an action which would have run counter to long-standing University policy that all its honorary degree recipients must attend Commencement exercises in Cambridge.

Commenting on Bok's attitude, Dershowitz said. "Bok doesn't seriously consider things unless he feels not to do something would create more hassle than to do something.

* * *

"What drives me?" Bok asks, repeating the question.

"My incredible pomposity motivates all my important drives," he blurts out, with a guffaw. "And if you print that, I'll deny every word."

Close friend and Harvard Professor of Law Lloyd Weinreb says, "Believe it or not, he's a remarkably funny man. He really likes to clown around." Bok is well known in Massachusetts Hall for his propensity to make jokes.

But, like so much else of Bok's private personality, this sense of humor is largely hidden to the public behind the cool demeanor and clipped words that symbolize the public Bok. There is much else that is hidden as well--for instance the fact that he once had such a talent for the clarinet that he could have, according to a close friend, made a living from it.

"I'm amazed that you haven't heard about his clarinet," says John Simon, a fellow Harvard law student.

And Simon, now a law professor at Yale, adds: "I've never seen a better croquet player. We used to play on the lawns of Maine."

Bok's Rennaissance Man characteristics obscure what friends say is an intense sense of moral urgency that animates his approach to the presidency, a sharp contrast to the image of amorality which critics, especially those in the divestiture movement, paint of Bok. Simon, for instance, recalls the stint of military service Bok served in the Judge Advocate's Office in Washington in the early 1950s, when Bok fought the military's loyalty screening program, which ran a McCarthy-like board that investigated soldiers thought to be subversive.

"A person who didn't care about what this stuff was about would write a report and let it go at that," says Simon, who worked with Bok in the Army. "That's what most people in the Pentagon did. But he persevered with a moral passion and changed a lot of bad rules."

Another tennis partner and social companion, David A. Aloian '49, speculates that Bok's attitudes stem in part from the ethos cultivated in his family and his father, Curtis, who in a well-known book, argued vehemently against the death penalty.

"There's a moral passion in that book that had to rub off any children that sat around the Bok table," says Aloian, the director of the Harvard Alumni Association.

When asked to speak of the values he holds dear to heart, Bok speaks of the importance of community service, a dedication to helping cure society's ills, and the necessity to address ethical issues.

"It is my profound belief that we must ultilize our talents and obligations to help people who are less fortunate," says Bok. "Honesty also means a great deal to me. It's a value that I hold deeply and try to instill in my children."

Translated into his performance on the job, Bok's morality leads him eschew flag-waving in favor of carefully--some say sluggishly--thrashing out the major points on all issues, whether it be divestiture or deciding whether to grant tenure to a young scholar Bok, friends say feels constrained from fully putting into practice all his ethical beliefs by the institutional paramaters of his job.

The best example of this is probably his steadfast refusal to divest, a position which infuriates opponents but which he arrived at after long and careful deliberation.

"I'm sure that I've spent many more hours on South Africa than any of those people who are criticizing me for it," says Bok. "Symbolic gestures are quickly forgotten, but in the long run, Harvard's own academic freedom would be sacrificed if we divested."

"I think that Derek has to be realistic in all that he does," says Weinreb. "He's not an ideologue or a banner waver. In a University of ideologues, I guess he does look like a pragmatist."Three presidents: BOK, NATHAN M. PUSEY '28, and JAMES B. CONANT '14.