As in the case with so many presidential appointments, Bok's selection became the focus for two different questions-what is an ideal president? and who is an ideal president? By speaking publicly to the first, the Corporation members remained free to discuss the second amongst themselves.

They entered the month of December with a list of 23 finalists for the job, but even as that list was creeping into national print after the CRIMSON broke it, three of the five Corporation members had already decided on Bok and the other two were just days away from coming around. Burr said later that, by that time, there was nothing new to be said on the subject, and most of his colleagues agreed. The only question by mid-December was timing, and peripherally, how the hell to keep the newspapers from blowing the story before the formalities were concluded.

The month lag between the decision and the announcement had a curious effect on the eventual reception Bok received. After such a long, complicated, and often boring search procedure (The Atlantic Magazine appropriately called it "a model" for presidential searches on other campuses) oriented publicly toward finding the ideal man, people did indeed begin to believe that whoever was chosen must necessarily be ideal. The final list of 23 was greeted with a sigh of relief for the number of names which had been dropped from the previous larger list, and the impression of conciliation lingered for a month as people waited for the final announcement. Among the 23, there were two obvious front-runners-Bok and Dunlop-and a third "outside candidate" (as media men put it when they chit-chatted over the latest.) The outside candidate was Donald Kennedy, professor of Biology at Stanford and member of the Board of Overseers, who had all of the requisite credentials, a small following among selected Overseers, but did not come from inside Harvard-a fact which, because Harvard rather provincially thinks itself a special breed of animal, worked against his choice. For many the Bok-Dunlop choice was a matter of individual taste, largely dependant on the age differential of some 15 years. For others, it was a crucial testof Harvard's willingness to choose now blood (Bok) over old administrative types (Dunlop now sits on every important committee in the Faculty and numerous unimportant ones.)

Having defined the post abstractly, the Corporation had managed to out line its conception of the answer to all of Harvard's problems. Their selection of Bok simply gave a flesh and blood example of what they had been talking about for nine months. Both Bok and Dunlop fit exactly the abstract definitions of ideal. Only the tone of that definition was lacking. Harvard had changed, and the post needed a man who represented change. Dunlop did not.

And so, without making any commitments, Bok has become the personification of The Answer. "What next?" they will ask, and Derek Bok will emerge next year from his corner, doff his hat, and rather apologetically admit "me." He has no choice. He's Derek Bok, The Answer.