Two Old Men in a Hurry

On Commencement Day, sandwiched between the august statues of James Otis and Josiah Quincy, a twenty-first century provocateur gave his final address as Harvard president.

Lawrence H. Summers’ tenure, his opponents said, was one marked by impatience. He admitted as much.

“Yes, I have these last years been a man in a hurry,” the departing president told the Commencement crowd.

His exit and the return of two of Harvard’s old wise men should have been a respite from all the hurrying. But Derek C. Bok and Jeremy R. Knowles, the interim leaders of the University and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, did not slow down.

In fact, despite arriving at a broken University and simply being asked to pick up the pieces, they too were men in a hurry, bringing to fruition in one year what was not possible during Summers’ stormy reign.

At the same time, Bok and Knowles, colleagues of 34 years, had a rehabilitating effect on a fractured University.

Robert D. Putnam, a longtime friend of Bok and Knowles and a former dean of the Kennedy School of Government, said that the duo’s calming influence could be felt as far south as Princeton, where he was on sabbatical.

“Even at a distance, I very much sensed that there were adults in charge after the turmoil of the last five years,” Putnam said recently. “They’re both incredible institutional loyalists.”

Bok, who healed a campus bitterly divided over the Vietnam War during his first term in Mass. Hall, did more than facilitate a truce between opposing camps. With Knowles at his side, Bok charged a long-stalled curriculum review, helped open Harvard’s gates even wider by ending early action admissions, and helped restore order to University Hall.

“I don’t think they ever came in thinking of themselves as caretakers,” Vice Chair of the Board of Overseers William F. Lee ’72, a College senior when the then-aloof Law School dean first came to Mass. Hall. “He just said he was ‘going to get at ’em.’ ”

SWINGING GATES

On the morning of Feb. 21, 2006, Summers pulled into Johnston Gate in a chauffeured Town Car for the last time before publicly resigning as Harvard’s president.

Later that afternoon, outside Massachusetts Hall, Summers faced throngs of students chanting “Stay, Larry, Stay.” News arrived that Bok, president from 1971 to 1991, would be returning in four months time.

A hydrogen-powered silver Prius soon came to fill the president’s parking space. (Bok long ago traded in the red Volkswagen Beetle, his chariot of choice throughout his first presidency.)

Only days before, James R. Houghton ’58 and Nannerl O. Keohane, two of the seven Harvard Corporation members responsible for governing the University, had flown down to the Florida coast to convince the then-75-year-old tennis enthusiast to reprise the role he held 15 years before.

In 1971, when presented with the same question, Bok says that he did a great deal of soul searching. This time the choice was easy.

“If the institution that you have spent your whole life in is in trouble, do you turn your back on it? To me, that was very simple. Obviously, you don’t. You do what you can,” Bok said last week.

To do that, the patrician president tapped the British chemist who had once turned down his request for help because he could not part ways with his lab. Unlike in 1984, when Bok first asked Knowles to become dean of the Faculty, this time he said yes.

“It was an opportunity in miniature to try to experience what we weren’t able to experience before because he was so tied up in the sciences,” Bok said.

Knowles’ selection as interim dean was a last resort. Faculty members advising Bok wanted a permanent dean—a position that Knowles could not fulfill as the then-71-year-old battled prostate cancer—but Bok found no suitable candidate for dean.

“There was nobody that was that obvious who we could get to do the job,” Bok said.

Bok turned to Knowles.

“The place wanted stability and competence after what it had been through,” Bok said. “Everybody knew Jeremy...and I think that’s what the times called for.”

Throughout his time at Harvard, Knowles remained a political operator. Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer professor of Christian morals, described Knowles—an amateur dancer—as having “a certain kind of nimbleness, both physical and intellectual.” From his perch in Memorial Church, Gomes, a 40-year veteran of the University, has watched the rise and fall of generations of Harvard leaders.

“I wouldn’t call him a trickster, but the nimbleness got ahead of others,” Gomes said.

Richard F. Thomas, a Classics professor active in Faculty affairs, praised the character of Knowles’ leadership.

“Knowles is the essence of Oxford wit and quickness, a pleasure to observe,” he said recently. “If you’re disagreeing with him, it can be quite a different matter.”

After Knowles left University Hall in the summer of 2001, the University lacked a counterweight to Summers’ ambition to control the Faculty, Gomes said.

“If he stayed, things would have been very different.”

But they weren’t. Relations between Mass. Hall and University Hall remained tense throughout the tenures of Summers and historian William C. Kirby, whom Summers had handpicked to forward his agenda in FAS. The strained relationship tore when Summers’ intention to fire Kirby became public, eventually leading to the departure of both leaders.

When Bok and Knowles took office in July, the situation took an obvious turn for the better.

“The Faculty had gotten pretty angry at Larry Summers. There was real tension, real distrust, dislike,” Professor of the History of Science Everett I. Mendelsohn, who is retiring this year after more than 50 years at Harvard, said. “Derek had to overcome that. In part he did it by being the father figure.”

Elizabeth Mora, the vice president for finance who came to Harvard in 1997, said the duo “masterfully bridged the gap.”

“The relationships between University Hall and Mass. Hall are better than I’ve seen them in a long time,” she said.

THE CATALYST

At the end of a dinner this May given in honor of 15 professors who helped guide the curricular review, Interim Dean of the Faculty David R. Pilbeam—who stepped in for Knowles in April as the dean struggled with complications related to the cancer—presented the president with a t-shirt. The back of the shirt read, “BOK,” the front, “168-14-11,” the tally of the Faculty’s votes on the new program of general education.

It was an appropriate gift for the man who turned out to be the catalyst for the program’s final conception.

Since its launch, the review of undergraduate education had stalled, suffering from an overabundance of administrators and professorial personalities. Two years earlier, Summers resigned from the committee shaping the College’s curricular review, following a vote of no confidence in his leadership.

Bok, whose book “Our Underachieving Colleges” had become required reading for professors and set the stage for the review, was dissatisfied with its progress. In March of last year, he sat down with a few of the review’s leaders, including English professor Louis Menand, philosophy professor Alison Simmons, and Pilbeam.

“He basically chewed us out,” Menand said recently.

“He basically let us have it.”

Bok was unhappy that the committee had settled on distribution requirements, criticizing it for its meekness.

Bok said he avoided imposing his own vision but stressed that the report needed a fresh start.

“You want to make clear to the Faculty that you’re not presuming to interfere or not presuming to ignore their prerogative,” Bok said in March. “I mean, they’re the ones who have to teach it.”

In May, Kirby informed his colleagues that he would create a summer committee to help resuscitate the review. But with Kirby set to resign, little power remained in the dean’s hands.

Squirelled away in Loeb House, the onetime president’s mansion now home to the University’s governing boards, Bok made the call, choosing the six professors that would shape the new face of undergraduate education. Though Kirby made the official appointment, it was Bok’s invisible hand—as the interim president acknowledged only recently—that shaped the review’s new beginning.

Over the year to come, the professors would do what many others could not accomplish in the years before: end the review.

The line to the end was not a straight one.

Knowles worked to keep the review on track, noting in March that the timing for the review’s completion “may be a little ambitious, but not seriously ambitious.”

Perhaps it was seriously ambitious. By May, Pilbeam was warning Faculty members that they were “very close to running this whole thing into the sand.”

Professors said Bok’s persistent support in private through arranged conversations between faculty members proved key to the program’s passage. But in public, Bok was patient with the Faculty, though he would occasionally grow visibly frustrated in the final Faculty meetings.

“He held himself very well,” Pilbeam said. “He said nothing, which was the perfect thing to say.”

EARLY ACTION

In the quiet a Cambridge July, Knowles swept up what he believed was a chaotic University Hall. The prodigious note-taker, who records nearly every interaction he has, had taken note of rifts within the College administration. As one of his first major acts in office, he and Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 fired Patricia O’Brien, Gross’ deputy and a central player in the growth of what some professors considered the corporate culture of University Hall. O’Brien had long been a leader of the attempt to market the College and create a brand name for it.

Problems in University Hall were not limited to O’Brien. Faculty clashes with Summers had lowered morale in the building and professors complained of a lack of communication and transparency. Two months before taking office, Bok brought in a former dean to conduct a review of academic administration in University Hall. O’Brien’s firing followed shortly thereafter.

In October, Knowles took steps to improve relations between FAS administrators and professors by sending an update on the Faculty’s finances and the details of its looming deficit.

Bok, too, spent little time settling back in. While freshmen moved into the Yard in September, Bok decided to change how all future first-years would find their way to Harvard by ending early action admissions.

Though Bok was initially reticent to implement such a drastic change in his interim position, admissions dean William R. Fitzsimmons ’67, with the help of Vice President for Policy A. Clayton Spencer, convinced him of its benefits.

“Who would be in a better position to think about and understand what it means?” Fitzsimmons asked in an interview last week.

During a Sept. 11 meeting, the Corporation approved the decision to end the more than 30-year-old program, announcing the change the next day.

The move echoed the boldness of Bok’s bullish predecessor, who never avoided the spotlight and knew how to make Harvard’s actions resound throughout academia.

Observers waited to see if a stampede of anxious institutions would follow Bok’s lead, but after public declarations by Yale’s Richard C. Levin and Stanford’s John W. Etchemendy, only two prominent schools followed: Princeton and the University of Virginia.

The admissions season wasn’t the only calendar item under reconsideration.

With the future of general education still uncertain and multiple deanships vacant, Bok took on another consequential project when he reopened a University-wide debate on calendar reform. With just a month left in his tenure, Bok said last week that he would decide whether to overhaul the calendar this week. As this story went to press, a decision had not yet been announced, but the idea of changing the calendar had gained the support of President-elect Drew G. Faust, the University’s deans, and many students.

COME AND GONE

Branded as a healer by alumni publications, Bok did little to mend Harvard’s relationships with alienated Summers supporters, a significant segment of Harvard’s base of donors.

During his time in office, Bok did little to add to the University’s coffers. From the outset, the Corporation “made it clear that they didn’t expect me to engage in major fundraising,” Bok said.

“He didn’t spend time with donors,” Mora, the finance vice president, said.

Bok did help make one significant financial contribution this year. He agreed to work for free. Had Bok settled on a typical administrator’s compensation, his salary would have been in the range of $580,115, Summers’ pay last year.

Paul J. Zofnass ’69, a member of Harvard’s most elite body of fundraisers, the Committee on University Resources, said that though Bok did not attend many fundraising events, his presence at the helm of the University was reassuring for alumni.

“Even if President Bok was not proactively involved in the fundraising, he played I think a very, very important role in making people feel comfortable. The world isn’t coming to an end,” Zofnass said.

Without the hassle of fundraising, Bok had more time to spend at home with his wife Sissela.

“I’m not sure I really could have made it through the year if I had to do all the travel and everything in addition,” Bok said.

But from the beginning, Bok and Knowles made it clear that they would only be away from the library and lab table for 12 months.

“I remember Jeremy, a number of times, quipping and saying that there were only so many months and so many days left until he went back to civilian life,” Fitzsimmons recalled.

During their reunion tour this year, the public exchanges between Bok and Knowles reached the level of high theater.

“Your moment in the sun has already come and gone,” Bok said to his fellow septuagenarian at a February Faculty meeting.

“We are not alone,” Knowles shot back, a few months before Harvard’s gray-haired men would, together, give way to greener hands.

—Staff writer Claire M. Guehenno can be reached at guehenno@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Samuel P. Jacobs can be reached at jacobs@fas.harvard.edu.