Bok Looks Back, and Offers Words of Advice

While the Presidential Search Committee dangles digital cameras and iPods as rewards for filling out a survey probing student sentiment about Harvard’s next chief, Interim President Derek C. Bok offered his own advice that could be used by his as-yet-unnamed successor yesterday.

Don’t devote all your time to fundraising. Don’t try to micromanage. And, whatever you do, don’t lie.

When Bok became Harvard’s 25th president in 1971, he faced hardships ranging from a torn Faculty to a torn tendon.

“I didn’t start out wanting to serve 20 years,” said Bok, who stepped down in 1991—only to be summoned back to Mass. Hall 15 years later. In 1971, “the University was in a state of enormous turmoil,” Bok told a Boylston Hall audience of 50 undergraduate and graduate students, who have witnessed Faculty in-fighting and administrative turnover themselves.

Back then, Bok said, members of the Faculty were pitted in rival camps and “united only by their common distrust against the administration.”

It didn’t help that, around the same time, he tore a tendon playing a basketball game with students, Bok said, as he reenacted for a moment what it was like to hobble around on one foot.

“The only thing my wife and I talked about,” Bok recalled, “was: How long until I get out of this madhouse?”

But Bok said he learned that interpersonal skills could resolve conflicts, if not physical injuries.

“You have to convince other people to focus on particular problems, to reach a consensus,” he said. “You can’t do that if you have a peremptory authoritarian style.”

VERITAS

Bok said that a president’s moral authority is an invaluable asset.

“If a president comes out and tells something that’s exposed as a clear lie, or engages in some other obviously indefensible behavior, the moral authority just disappears, and the president isn’t effective,” he said. “And when something like that happens, they always resign.”

Bok said that although Harvard presidents could learn from businessmen, University leaders are not exactly like CEOs.

“Universities are simply not a business,” he said. “Their central focus is not profit and loss. Their goals are much more intangible.”

Bok added that the president must inspire and lead—but not direct—his subordinates.

“Most universities who have appointed business leaders as president have had a bad experience because there are many subtleties to the process of educating students,” he said.

BEYOND THE GATES

Bok said that, over the years, the president has had to deal more with governmental regulations on topics such as federal financial aid or affirmative action. The president has also undertaken more fundraising responsibilities.

These duties, while important for the office, should not be the main focus of the job, according to Bok.

“What you’re moving toward is a model in which the president is really an outside person and other people, maybe a provost, or associate provost, begins to take up more of the internal responsibilities,” he said.

“If we go on the way we’re going, the president is going to be a fundraiser and a speechmaker and not an educator. I think we will begin to lose our way and lose a sense of direction that presidents of the past have been able to give to the institution.”

The event was sponsored by the search committee’s Student Advisory Group. Afterwards, the group’s chair, law school student Matthew J. Murray, said after that more than 1,000 Harvard students—including 140 undergraduates—had filled out the search committee’s online survey at www.studentinput.harvard.edu. The poll closes Friday.

—Staff writer Katherine M. Gray can be reached at kmgray@fas.harvard.edu.