You couldn’t really call Bok’s 15-year interregnum a retirement. He spent half the year at the Kennedy School and half the year in Florida. He served on the board of an educational foundation andas chairman of Common Cause, the good-government group, just as Archibald Cox had once done. He wrote books about affirmative action, the state of the nation, and higher education. The books were quietly written and quietly received. All were respectfully reviewed, but only one—The Shape of the River, co-authored with William Bowen—could be called highly influential; Bok and Bowen used statistical data to argue that affirmative action helped its recipients, and opponents vehemently disagreed.

Most of Bok’s writing was too calm to generate heat. While people in the field of education read his books, none broke through to a larger audience like those Bok’s grandfather had reached with his magazine and autobiography. Meanwhile, the popular debates about higher education were shaped by political partisans standing figuratively and literally outside the academy—conservative critics such as Dinesh D’Souza, David Horowitz, Allan Bloom, and John Silber. A less dispassionate man might have mixed it up with them, because whatever you thought of their techniques, they affected the way people thought of universities. But Bok could not reply in kind; he could never be an outsider.

Bok’s friends insist that he never criticized Summers and sometimes defended the embattled president, noting that there were “a lot of stones that needed to be pulled up” at Harvard. Yet I keep thinking of that day in June 2003 when I met with Bok in his Kennedy School office and asked him to tell me about the job of Harvard president. He agreed to do so with the firm caveat that his words did not bear on any particular university president. He then proceeded to describe Larry Summers to a T.

“You can’t get good books written and classes taught well by issuing orders,” Bok told me. “There are presidents who try to [lead] with a certain amount of fear. They are very tough and they push their powers to the limit. And there are presidents who try to do it in other ways, by winning the respect or even the affection of their faculties. It’s a matter of personal style.” It was far easier, Bok continued, for a president to squander power than to wield it.

“The easiest task is to catalogue the ways in which you can lose any opportunity you might once have had by virtue of your position,” he said. “For example, if you were pretty conclusively shown to have failed to tell the truth in some statement about the university, your capacity to function would be ruined. It’s not that somebody’s going to try you formally and kick you out, although that could possibly happen. But it’s a subtler thing. It’s a realization that your intellectual standing will plummet to zero. Nobody will trust what you say, and your ability to get anything done will be minimized. It’s an impossible situation.”

And when the faculty loses faith in you, Bok concluded, “It just takes the guts out of you. [The job] isn’t fun anymore. ‘I’m not taken seriously by the constituency that I envisage myself primarily responsive to.’ And it just makes you feel futile and rejected in a way that makes it very hard to function.”

Bok’s remarks could have reflected his general feelings about the job of university president, or they could have indicated some just-beneath-the-surface concerns. Then again, it’s also possible that they were a warning.

And so Bok, the healer, is back in Massachusetts Hall. This time, the treatment will not take nearly as long as it did 35 years ago. By late summer, Bok told friends, he thought that Harvard’s recovery was well underway, and that the best way for the FAS to heal the scars of fighting over Summers was to move on. To get things done.

Bok admits, though, that the university has grown in size and complexity since his day, more than he expected. He has returned chemist Jeremy Knowles, FAS dean under Rudenstine, to that office, and the two are reportedly scurrying about like a young couple moving into a fixer-upper. Bok has made clear that he wants curricular reform passed this year—the fact of its passage mattering more than its contents, as long as they are credible—and that passage looks likely. (He has also pressed for an ethics requirement in the reformed curriculum.) He has reiterated his long-held conviction that athletics should have a narrowly defined role; in a speech to alumni the night before November’s Yale game, Bok suggested that he would rather see Harvard athletics decline than risk compromising academic standards. He is shepherding along the plans for Allston. And he and Knowles are restoring fiscal conservatism to FAS spending, which ballooned under Summers and is projected to reach an annual deficit of $75 to $100 million by the end of the decade. In keeping with his desire to move quickly, Summers had signed off on highly unusual FAS deficit spending. Rejecting Harvard’s conventional wisdom about dipping into endowment equity, Summers argued that deficits were a miniscule part of the endowment and could be easily eliminated in the future. Bok’s more traditional approach: Pay as you go.

Bok is also implementing his own agenda, such as the decision to end early admissions. Along with dean of admissions william fitzsimmons and educational policy adviser Clayton Spencer, Bok got the Corporation to approve the decision. Early admissions “advantage[s] the advantaged,” Bok explained in mid-September. The move was then implemented strategically; it was leaked to the Crimson with the instruction that the paper not call anyone at Yale for comment, lest Harvard’s rival be tipped off. The timing of the move—early in the school year—was chosen in the hope that other colleges, such as Princeton, would quickly join in, reducing any possible disadvantage in the competition for applicants.

Bok is older now, of course. He moves more slowly and works fewer hours than he did in the 1970s. But what he has lost in mobility he makes up in artfulness. Not long ago, there was loud talk that African-American studies professor Cornel West, who left Harvard for Princeton after a heated confrontation with Summers in 2001, wished to return and rejoin his old friend, the famous scholar and entrepreneur Henry Louis Gates Jr. West wanted to reoccupy his former—and then vacant—professorship, the chair of Alphonse Fletcher University Professor. (University Professor is Harvard’s highest faculty position.) The move would have given West sweet revenge on Summers, but it would also have sparked bad feelings and salacious press.

Bok wanted neither. He also worried about losing the restless Gates to Princeton, which is ramping up its own African-American studies program. So he made an exquisitely Machiavellian move: He offered West’s old professorship to Gates. When Gates said yes, West was not only blocked from returning but checked from criticizing Harvard. How could he fault the university for promoting one of his closest friends?

The matter showed again the differences between Larry Summers and Derek Bok. Summers seemed to turn every spark into a bonfire; Bok snuffs them out. A few months ago, for example, several professors met with Bok to express their concern that Summers was spinning his departure in a way that made Harvard look bad. Couldn’t Bok publicly articulate a more balanced version of the events leading to Summers’s ouster? “I’m not going to do that,” he said. Why not? “Because it isn’t done.” As Bok goes about his work, the Corporation is searching for Harvard’s next president. Bok’s role will be minimal but crucial. “Of course he will be asked his opinion,” says one person close to the search. “The Corporation would be crazy not to ask his advice. He will be scrupulous. He will say what he thinks, but he’s not going to press or push.”

It would be hard to provide a more succinct summation of the Bok style.

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Richard Bradley is the former executive editor of George magazine. He is the author of Harvard Rules (HarperCollins, 2005) and the New York Times bestseller American Son (Holt, 2002).

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