On January 11, 1971, Derek Bok was officially announced as the 25th president of Harvard. “He was movie-star handsome, and his wife was beautiful, and they had three beautiful children,” remembers Henry Rosovsky, then the chairman of the economics department and later Bok’s FAS dean. “The look was out of Hollywood central casting, but the substance was, in fact, deeply intellectual.”

Bok was not particularly well-known on campus, and many weren’t sure what to make of him. “He seems like another Kingman Brewster,” one student said. (The remark was meant as a compliment: Since 1963, Brewster had presided over Yale and kept the peace far more successfully than Pusey had.) But an anonymous law professor told the Times, “He’s really a very unexceptional man, but he has the personal charm that the technocratic society deems important for leadership.” The remark spoke volumes about the politics of the moment in which Bok took office and his primary mandate: to calm the campus.

Bok knew that this was not the time for provocative measures. Instead, he tried to change the subject away from politics, war, and race, and toward Harvard’s core mission of education. By promoting greater separation from a hyperpoliticized society, Bok believed, he might restore the university’s confidence in its purpose, establishing a common ground upon which Harvard’s unsettled constituencies could come together.

“The last several years should have taught us that universities should be rather modest in their capacity to solve a great many problems of the world,” he said. “Their major responsibility must be teaching and scholarship. That does not preclude social action, but we must understand our priorities.”

Under such circumstances, Bok’s achievements would be gradual and often subtle. But they would accumulate. Nathan Pusey had run his presidency with a secretary or two; Bok began to enlarge and centralize Harvard’s administration, recognizing that some elements of the sprawling organization needed to be run like a business. He oversaw the passage of the Core Curriculum, Harvard’s first curricular reform since 1945, and he used his bully pulpit to emphasize pedagogy at Harvard. (Without, it must be said, much impact.) He began the purchase of land in Allston and expanded and raised money for a new campus for the Kennedy School. And, most importantly, he brought peace to a fractured university.

Like his father and grandfather, Bok placed his faith in the written word. Every year he was president he authored a lengthy annual report, addressed to the Board of Overseers but intended for the campus and the world. These letters consumed an enormous amount of Bok’s time, and he was under no formal obligation to produce them. But to Bok, the letters were a nonconfrontational way to launch discussion about issues of import to Harvard and higher education—the need for better teaching, the obligation of public service, the role of the university in a political world, and so on.

“You didn’t have to agree with everything in these reports to appreciate that the president had taken the time to think through an issue deeply and thoroughly,” says computer scientist Harry Lewis, the author of a recent book about Harvard, Excellence Without a Soul. “I always finished reading one of those essays thinking that there was a lot of dappled gray that I hadn’t previously thought about, but there was also some black and white in his thinking with which it was hard to disagree.”

Yet the letters also suggested the limits of Bok’s leadership style. Written with a lawyer’s incrementalism, they are methodical to the point of aridity. Intellectually cautious in a way that parallels Bok’s personal reserve, their reticence softens their impact; as Bok thoughtfully touches upon all aspects of an issue, he soft-shoes away from advocacy, and sometimes even argument, so the suggestions he does make are diaphanous. If Vietnam swung the pendulum of self-expression too far in one direction, Bok swung it in the other.

“He’s a very principled man who wants to do the right thing and is earnest almost to the point of Boy Scout-ness,” says one professor who has worked with Bok. The downside, this observer believes, is that “he listens to cues from the powerful in his environment. He’s very lawyerly, and doesn’t really like conflict or difference of opinion.”

In effect, the president had fashioned a compromise: He would speak on public issues, but only in the most Olympian way, authoritative but, frankly, a little bland. The causes he threw his weight behind—public service, the importance of teaching—were so mild that no one could really disagree. Bok would not take sides on the socially controversial issues of the day unless forced to—as when, for example, he opposed divesting from South Africa. And when he did his arguments tended to be their least successful.

Appointed president to slow the pace of change and to channel its surge, Bok would never be the instigator of change. The trade-off: He preserved his viability as a mediator, a judge, a healer. For a while, this was exactly the kind of leadership that Harvard needed. And it ensured that one day Bok could return to the role he had carved for himself—that of guardian of the university.

The last five years of the Bok presidency were not its finest. Bok seemed weary. “He had grown more skillful in the office,” says one observer, “but he also came to feel, sometimes, that he had heard it all.” He was less and less interested in raising money—money did not interest Bok—and he was spending less time with undergraduates, who considered Bok a remote figure. “He was president for 20 years, and towards the end of those 20 years, he was a bit tired, and probably the community was a bit tired,” says one longtime Harvard professor. “There wasn’t any sense, when Derek left, that the university wasn’t doing well, but there was a sense that it was time for change.”

At his last commencement, Bok reminded the audience that universities occupy a privileged but precarious place in American life. “Unless society appreciates the contributions of its universities,” he argued, “it will eventually reduce them to the status of another special-interest group by gradually stripping away the protection and support they need.” Playing the political actor, he said, was neither the function of universities nor something they did well, and it could only invite the outside world to chisel away at their autonomy.

Ten years later, the Harvard Corporation would reject Bok’s advice when it chose former Treasury secretary Larry Summers as president. Perhaps it believed that modern Harvard needed someone who merged academia and politics; perhaps the Corporation did not realize the extent to which Summers, the former Harvard professor, had become a Washington animal. Summers was, through no fault of his own, a Trojan horse, embodying the exact political contagion—in his language, his connections, his attitudes, his mode of governing—that Bok had feared would infect Harvard. Perhaps that was why Bok spoke so bluntly in Boylston Hall last October—so that this time, his message would come through loud and clear.

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