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The Healer

by Richard Bradley
Winter 2007 , Page 80

Owen Smith

About the first thing Derek Bok did when he returned to Harvard as president was to get rid of Larry Summers's chauffeur, and the limousine, too, the black Lincoln Town Car that had often been seen parked in front of Massachusetts Hall, waiting for Summers to stroll out the door. Bok drove a VW Beetle when he was president the first time, and he drives a Toyota Prius now. Chauffeurs are not his style. Then Bok got rid of the presidential valet, the man who had helped pick out Summers’s clothing. And the cook at Elmwood—Bok wasn’t moving into the president’s mansion and didn’t need a personal chef. And the chief of staff, too, part of Summers’s coterie of twenty-something aides who had trailed the Washington-style president around campus like ducklings on Boston Common.

Then, last October, Harvard’s temporary president gave some advice to its incoming president, whoever that may be. Addressing 50 onlookers gathered in Boylston Hall, Bok recounted that when he first became president, in 1971, the mood on campus was volatile. The faculty was bitterly split between conservative and liberal caucuses, and the students seethed with anger and frustration over Vietnam and civil rights. “The only thing my wife and I talked about,” Bok joked, according to the Crimson, “was: ‘How long until I get out of this madhouse?’”

It took him five years to get a handle on the insanity, Bok told me in a 2003 interview for my book Harvard Rules, well before Lawrence Summers’s presidency died at, yes, the end of its fifth year. (Bok, who dislikes profiles of himself, declined to be interviewed for this one.) Only then did Bok start to feel comfortable in the office, to develop an intuitive sense of how the power of the presidency could be channeled and how it could be squandered. Its primary authority was the power of suasion. “You have to convince other people to focus on particular problems, to reach a consensus,” he said in Boylston Hall. “You can’t do that if you have a peremptory authoritarian style.”

Above all, the president must maintain his integrity. “If a president comes out and tells something that’s exposed as a clear lie . . . the moral authority just disappears, and the president isn’t effective,” Bok said. “When something like that happens, they always resign.”

The speech provoked murmurs of surprise throughout Harvard. Weren’t such provocative remarks out of character? White-haired, level-headed Derek Bok, his many friends and admirers will tell you, is a man of discretion. After his retirement in 1991, he broke with Harvard tradition by returning to the university and keeping an office in the Kennedy School. Ex-presidents don’t generally linger around campus; it would be awkward, like having a dinner guest who won’t leave. But during the 15 years he maintained an office at the Kennedy school, Bok meticulously avoided mucking around in the work of Neil Rudenstine and Larry Summers.

So it did not escape the audience that Bok’s description of what a president should not do was exactly what Larry Summers had done. Summers was no consensus-builder; he governed by vigorous exertion of the formal powers of his office, according to those who liked him, by fear and fiat, according to those who didn’t. And, thanks to incidents at two faculty meetings, many professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences believed that Summers had flat-out lied to them, and that those lies reflected a chronic truth deficit. That belief eviscerated his presidency.

So it certainly looked as if, while ostensibly giving advice to the next president, Bok was really offering a critique of the previous one. As one of his friends puts it, “Derek didn’t work for 20 years to see Harvard fall apart once he was gone.” If Larry Summers was chosen by the Corporation to embody a modern approach to the Harvard presidency—an aggressive, activist approach—Derek Bok stands as a reproof of that model. For the moment, Bok seems able to do no wrong, but whether his old-school style can or should endure beyond his interim presidency is less obvious.

This is a curious year for Harvard, and in some ways a precarious one. The university has never before had a president serving a second term, or one whose tenure will be a mere 12 months. The legacy of Summers’s presidency is an abundance of question marks. Foremost among them is the identity of the next president. Other vital jobs also require filling, including the deanships of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the medical school, and the design school. And there are broader questions: How will fundraising be affected by the recent turmoil? What will happen to Summers’s unfinished agenda, including curricular reform and the new campus in Allston? How will the university soothe the bitter feelings left in the wake of Summers’s ouster?

Perhaps no one is better suited to address such uncertainty than Derek Bok. From 1971 to 1991, Bok deftly presided over a university emerging bruised and battered from the most fractious period in its history. Elevated to the presidency after just three years as dean of the law school, he tamped down the emotions racing across campus, restoring Harvard to stability and a focus on education rather than politics—and, for the most part, he made it look easy. After a couple of years in office, Neil Rudenstine suffered a breakdown and took an abrupt leave of absence. But Bok entered Massachusetts Hall looking relaxed, confident, and young for his age—40—and when he left office 20 years later, he looked pretty much the same.

Last February, Bok only reluctantly accepted that Larry Summers’s presidency was imploding. He sympathized with Summers in the way that, say, former presidents of the United States feel a special bond with each other regardless of party. It didn’t hurt that Summers had courted Bok, asking his advice on issues such as plagiarism at the law school. Bok had also served the Summers presidency by agreeing to try to mediate a dispute between Harvard and star economist Andrei Shleifer, a friend of Summers’s who had been accused by the U.S. government of committing fraud. Summers “didn’t have a lot of respect for Neil Rudenstine,” says an administrator who knows all three presidents. But, according to one professor, “Derek was useful to Larry, so Larry treated him very respectfully, and Derek appreciated that.”

By mid-February of last year, though, Bok could no longer deny that Harvard was about to lose a president. So when Corporation fellows Jamie Houghton and Nan Keohane asked him to return as interim president, Bok didn’t hesitate. He did, however, dictate some terms. If he came back, he would not socialize at night, because he had to pace himself—he is 76, after all—and Sissela, his wife, had never cared for the hostessing duties of a presidential spouse. And he would not fundraise, because he doubted that the financial pleas of a temporary president would fall on receptive ears. The big-money guys want a long-term relationship.

Still, there was never any real doubt that Bok would say yes. “There is no institution I care about more deeply,” he said of Harvard at the time. And everyone knew that if Bok said no, Harvard’s options quickly became unattractive. His appointment brought instant relief to the campus, and in his first faculty meeting last fall, the assembled professors gave Bok a standing ovation.

He is surrounded—protected, really—by clichés: That he is patrician, aristocratic, Waspy. That he comes from old money. That, with his square jaw and ski-jump nose and Gregory Peck haircut, he looks like a movie star. The stereotypes obscure what is most intriguing about Bok—the nuanced ways in which his family shaped the leader he would become.

Derek Curtis Bok was born on March 22, 1930, and yes, his family was rich. But it was also spirited, outspoken, and quirky. His grandfather, Edward Bok, was the second editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, then one of the world’s most profitable magazines. Edward Bok was an enterprising editor: In the pages of his magazine he dared broach the taboo of venereal disease, and he stopped accepting advertisements for patent medicines, a censure that galvanized support for the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. His autobiography, The Americanization of Edward Bok, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.

Edward Bok was not only smart enough to edit his magazine vigorously but to marry the daughter of its owner, one of the richest men in America, Cyrus H.K. Curtis. The union helped ensure Edward professional longevity (he held his position from 1889 to 1919) and access to a substantial fortune. In 1930, when Edward himself died, he left a fortune of some $16 million—$187 million in today’s dollars—to his wife and two sons, one of whom was Derek Bok’s father, William Curtis Bok.

A Philadelphia lawyer and judge, Curtis Bok refused to be categorized solely by his profession. He gardened, played the piano and bassoon, and sailed across the Atlantic in a 42-foot ketch. He wrote novels about the law, depicting “judges whose reputations stemmed from their ability to make prisoners and witnesses say ‘ouch’ at regular intervals, but back of it lay the palisades of prejudice and fear and before it the glorious green pastures of the public press.”

In addition to quite a lot of money, Curtis Bok inherited from his father a streak of progressive optimism so robust it verged on utopianism. Edward Bok had founded a $100,000 prize for the most viable plan “under which the United States may co-operate in bringing about and maintaining the peace of the world,” as the New York Times put it in 1923. In 1932, Curtis, determined to learn about the great promise he believed was contained within the Bolshevik Revolution, spent several months laboring at a machine in a Russian factory. Upon his return to the United States, he would become an outspoken advocate for American diplomatic recognition of the new nation.

Curtis Bok had married Margaret Adams Plummer of Ardmore, Pa., in 1924. They had three children, including Derek, but the marriage foundered, perhaps because of Bok’s idiosyncratic pursuits. During his time in the Russian factory he had dispatched Margaret and the children home to the United States to live on their own. In 1933, Margaret filed for divorce on grounds of cruelty, a move reported in the society column of Time magazine. Derek was just three.

One year later, Curtis Bok would marry Nellie Lee Holt, a Nebraska-raised Quaker who had studied European youth movements in preparation for work as a women’s educator. He died in 1962, leaving a fortune the New York Times put at $1 million. If the Times was right, Derek Bok may have felt the effects of that quintessential Wasp trait, the ability to dramatically shrink a fortune in the course of a single generation.

But Bok may also have inherited money from other family members. Margo Howard, a writer and social acquaintance of the Boks’, remembers a story she heard from one of Derek’s law-school classmates. While the two were studying together, an uncashed check fell out of one of Bok’s books. The clearly visible amount: $10,000. According to Howard’s memory of the story, an embarrassed Bok explained, “Oh, God, they just keep sending me money.” Bok has never been one for conspicuous consumption. To this day, friends joke that Bok is loath to pull out his wallet; he’d rather carry his luggage into a hotel than tip a doorman. When it comes to Harvard, however, Bok has been generous: In 1985, according to two sources familiar with the gift, he gave $1 million to support public service initiatives at Harvard.

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winter07 features bok6 The details of Margaret Bok’s life are murky; Derek Bok rarely discusses them, and his closest friends know little about Bok’s youth except the occasional anecdote or throwaway line. Margaret moved to Los Angeles, bringing the boys with her, and remarried several times. Hers was not exactly a Quaker lifestyle; she kept glamorous company, mingling with Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley and becoming close friends with Georgia O’Keefe. “Derek’s mother was a remarkable woman,” remembers Harvard law professor Charles Fried, a friend of Bok’s since the 1960s. “She was artistic, engaged, and vivacious.” Nonetheless, the social mores of the 1930s would have meant raised eyebrows over just one divorce. Several would have been highly unusual—even in Los Angeles.

Young Derek grew up surrounded by brilliant and creative adults. When he was 13, for example, he was corresponding with Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and husband of Georgia O’Keefe. Bok, who would tell friends that he attended “a dozen” schools before college, spent time at an Episcopalian boys’ military school named Harvard (which decades later would merge with Westlake School to form Harvard-Westlake). Bok also boarded at Putney, a Vermont school. In college at Stanford, he played varsity basketball and was a member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity. He would graduate from Harvard Law School in 1954.

Out of this family crucible of Eastern establishment and West Coast social entrepreneurship, the personality of Derek Bok was emerging. Bok was calm and confident, what people would later describe as “a born leader,” though this said more about the ease of his personality than its origins. While his looks came genetically, Bok was also a product of his experiences, and their diversity kept the serious young man from becoming self-important or boring. One constant appears to have been a deep-rooted desire for stability—perhaps to be expected from a child of divorce—and in 1954, while on a Fulbright scholarship to the École des Sciences Politique in Paris, Bok found it.

Her name was Sissela Myrdal, and she too came from a storied background. Her parents were the famed Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and his equally impressive wife, Alva, a scholar and peace activist. In 1974, Gunnar would win the Nobel Prize in economics; Alva would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 for her work promoting nuclear disarmament. “I sensed immediately . . . that this was something indescribably new and wonderful in my life,” Sissela would later write in her book Alva Myrdal: A Daughter’s Memoir. Before meeting Derek, Sissela had felt like “a chaotic shadow.” Now, “a miracle had happened.” The two were married within a year.

By all accounts, Sissela Bok has been the anchor of Derek’s life. Like him, she is serious, intellectual, and interested in morality and public policy; probably the best known of her writings in applied ethics is a book called Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. She is more introspective than her husband; one could never imagine him writing a family memoir.

Bok had been encouraged to consider teaching law by one of his law professors, Kingman Brewster—later the president of Yale—and in 1958, he joined the faculty of the Harvard Law School. There he developed a specialty in labor law, cowriting a textbook with the much-respected Archibald Cox, who would one day be the Watergate special prosecutor. The two grew close, and Cox’s influence upon Bok, explains Charles Fried, meant “a certain kind of sparse New England austerity, no belief in dazzle or bling, an incredible devotion to the public good.”

After Cox joined the Kennedy administration as solicitor general, Bok longed to go to Washington as well—he felt the call of Kennedy’s New Frontier powerfully—but he and Sissela had moved repeatedly since they’d been married, and he did not want to put his family through more upheaval. That missed opportunity would be one of Bok’s great disappointments; he would never again get the chance to work for a White House. Kennedy was shot, Vietnam consumed LBJ, and Richard Nixon was hardly Bok’s type. And, always, Harvard called him.

There were bumps in Bok’s road to the Harvard presidency, but only small ones. Like Larry Summers almost half a century later, Bok would give offense by espousing his views on women. In 1960, Bok spoke to a group of law students’ wives, encouraging them to prepare for careers because waiting could damage their job prospects. “To his amazement,” Sissela recalled, “this mild message was received as practically a declaration of war on motherhood itself. . . . How could he so downgrade their family responsibilities?” The outrage soon faded, but the incident provided Bok an early lesson in how easily the public airing of opinions could spark division.

In 1968, Harvard president nathan pusey appointed Bok dean of the law school. According to Phyllis and Morton Keller in their history Making Harvard Modern, one law professor had warned Pusey that “Bok’s thoughtful skepticism and caution [were] a possible sign that he might not be a bold and vigorous leader in matters of public concern.” Pusey, however, considered such traits desirable in a dean. And though Bok’s father-in-law, Gunnar Myrdal, warned him that administrators were “nothing but failed scholars,” Bok accepted.

He was good at the job and popular—Bok has always been popular. He pushed law professors to pay more attention to scholarship and labored to increase the enrollment of minorities and women. But one incident would define Bok’s tenure as dean and infuse his subsequent persona. In the spring of 1968, several dozen students staged a sit-in at the law-school library to demand that they be graded on a pass-fail basis. (Grades were oppressive.) Bok walked into the library carrying coffee and donuts for the students, then climbed onto a table and announced, “I want to thank you all for coming here to show your concern about the Law School.” As the Times would report, Bok “took off his tweed coat and ‘rapped’ in shirt sleeves into the wee hours.”

As Bok finally dismounted the table, blood rushed to his head and he fainted. “When I woke up,” he told me in our 2003 interview, “I was surrounded not by angry student radicals but by anxious student radicals who thought they might have given me a heart attack or something. They drove me home, and for the rest of the term, I got treated pretty well. Then, after the summer, they felt free to be cranky again.”

Though Bok downplayed the episode to me, others at Harvard took note at the time; many such confrontations between students and campus authority figures did not end so happily. In 1969, the campus would be devastated by the student takeover of University Hall and Nathan Pusey’s decision to call in riot police. The resulting brutality led to a campus strike and psychological scars that would take decades to fade. So when Pusey announced that, after 18 years as president, he would step down in 1971, Bok was a natural candidate to replace him.

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winter07 features bok5 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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winter07 features bok3 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.

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).