In New Book, Bok Links Universities, Commercialization

When former Harvard President Derek C. Bok stepped up to the lectern at Harvard’s Commencement ceremony in 1988, the audience was in for a surprise.

Straying from the traditional graduation rhetoric urging students to be true to themselves and convincing alumni to fork over cash donations, Bok decided to teach lessons of a different sort.

He described his recent dreams of a university plagued by commercialization, beginning with the acceptance of a $2 billion loan from an alum and listing a series of schemes—including placement of corporate logos on syllabi and an auction giving 100 spots in Harvard College to the highest bidders.

Though he delivered the speech in Tercentenary Theater nearly 15 years ago, the recollection still makes Bok—who now serves as the 300th Anniversary University Professor—chuckle.

“People wondered, ‘wow, what is this guy doing?’” he says.

But he tempers his laughter with words of caution. What were fantastic dreams then, he says, are now much closer to reality.

Then, his listeners were a captive group of diploma-hungry students. But, now, with a condensed version of the speech leading the preface of his recently published Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education, Bok predicts that his audience will include professors, administrators and government officials from around the world.

“But who knows,” he muses. “Writing a book is like scribbling a message and putting it in a bottle and throwing it overboard. You never know on what distant shore it will wash up.”

The book, published this month by Princeton University Press, is Bok’s eighth.

Even while he governed the University from the southeast corner of Mass. Hall, Bok was a vocal voice in debates on the role of higher education in society. During his tenure as Harvard’s 25th president, Bok penned numerous essays and three books on the matter.

And his 1998 book The Shape of the River, co-authored with former Princeton president William G. Bowen, is frequently cited as a seminal work on the benefits of using race in admissions decisions.

Now, more than a decade after leaving his presidential post, Bok combines his seasoned understanding with astute analysis of contemporary problems in higher education.

While his time at the top tiers of Harvard certainly provided ample encounters with “money-making schemes,” Bok says reading about more partnerships between universities, venture capitalists and pharmaceutical companies motivated him to write the book.

“It made me feel that this process that I had experienced was really growing and perhaps threatening to move into very central areas of the university, and therefore represented a subject that deserved careful thought before we get so deeply into it that we cannot extricate ourselves from it,” he explains.

Beyond Mass. Hall

Readers seeking glimpses of the inner workings of Mass. Hall or commentary on current Harvard policies will be disappointed.Though Bok clearly draws on his 20-year term as Harvard’s president in his analysis, his first-person references are notably rare.

Where some authors might have chosen “I,” Bok simply says “Harvard.”

The choice, he says, is a conscious matter of style.

“Just telling war stories,” he says, distracts from the message at hand. “I wanted to really concentrate on the issues and take the spotlight off me in particular.”

The approach is not one Bok limits to the printed page. Even in “Current Problems of Higher Education,” the 30-person conference course he teaches at the Graduate School of Education, Bok says he deliberately steers clear of personal anecdotes in favor of more Socratic teaching methods.

“There’s no doubt there’s a temptation,” he says. “You see these rapt younger faces looking up, and you can get quite a kick out of that, and you can get deluded into thinking somehow you’re really doing something significant when all you’re doing is stroking your own ego.”

And as he sits in his modest third-floor office at the Kennedy School of Government, it is easy to forget that Bok is speaking from long experience in positions of authority.

Commercial Culture

While he shies away from detailing his own experiences, Bok’s book remains an unflinching indictment of increasingly common practices in higher education today.

The book, like Bok, is professorial in style. It begins with several chapters outlining areas of concern—athletics, education and scientific research—laying the foundation for sharp analytical criticism in the pages to come.

He acknowledges that commercialization in higher education is by no means a new phenomenon. As proof, he points to a 1909 statement from a disgruntled Harvard alum, John Jay Chapman: “The men who control Harvard today are very little else than businessmen, running a large department store which dispenses education to the millions.”

Bok points to intercollegiate athletics as a source of commercialization.

“Well over one hundred institutions,” he writes, “including almost all of the major public universities, do engage in high-pressure intercollegiate athletics to an extent that seriously conflicts with academic principles.”

One solution, he says, is closer regulation by university presidents to keep athletics in check and maintain standards across the university.

But other problems Bok addresses in the book are more complex, as increasing commercial opportunities, particularly in the sciences, threaten to blur the line between academic and corporate worlds. As venture capital and biotechnology opportunities increase, he writes, money-making moves closer to laboratories and classrooms.

“Closer ties between university science and industry create all sorts of risks for compromising the openness, objectivity, and independence of academic research,” he writes.

Whether today’s university presidents and other leaders in higher education are strong enough to withstand the pressures of balancing tight budgets and competing with other schools to recognize the primacy of academic values is a “gamble,” Bok says.

“I think it’s possible. I think it’s important. That’s why I wrote the book,” he says. “But I don’t think it’s probable, otherwise I don’t think the book would have been worth writing.”

—Staff writer Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at shoichet@fas.harvard.edu.