The desire "to get involved, to be relevant, may undermine the work we do in the humanities and general education," Bok said. "The great danger is that for some of the best people, the temptation of a full life will be better fulfilled by going into applied fields rather than learning for the sake of learning."

Intense, Federally-funded cancer research is fine, for instance, but it is no more important than general biomedical research.

These remarks are symptomatic, it seems, of a desire on Bok's part to leave behind the tumult of the 1960s and to re-examine the basic teaching and learning relationships at Harvard. He has previously hit on this theme, addressing himself to curriculum reform in his annual report to the Board of Overseers and in countless speeches. Seldom, though, has he couched his educational interests in the rhetoric of "pure learning," or what people refer to with varying degrees of seriousness as The Life of the Mind.

"Harvard ought to be able to take the long view," Bok told alumni in Texas. "Looking far back, the events that have had the greatest impact are works of the mind, works of the imagination ... the work of standing alone."

What Bok seeks is "how to develop a sense of balance," to "struggle not to give up independence, pure learning and abstraction." This represents the same challenge faced by President Eliot of how to avoid choosing between the highest type of academic endeavor. Only now the challenge is "more subtle and pervasive," Bok said.

Thus concluded, the president of Harvard braced himself for the hard questions from the audience about co-residency, and sundry other topics. But only after Bok observed that "no one will believe me if I go back to Cambridge and say a large audience in Dallas, Texas had no questions," did five listeners conjure up a few unrelated queries.

Perhaps everyone was too busy reaching for their checkbooks, or else yearning for the Good Old Days when Charles William Eliot held forth in the intellectual purity of Harvard Yard.