SINCE WORLD WAR II, the federal government has dramatically increased its financial support of private universities and colleges. Science departments and medical schools were the first to rely on Washington, but government support has extended to research in the social sciences and humanities, to construction of new facilities and to financial aid for students.

In his 1974-75 Annual Report, President Bok acknowledges that dipping into government coffers has been useful but the funds have also led to a dependency which Bok does not view as entirely benign. In the past decade, he writes, the government has assumed an increasingly active and direct role in the affairs of private universities. Because they could not survive a cutoff of funds, the institutions have had to tolerate "unwise" and "intrusive" regulations in such areas as privacy of student records, affirmative action, retirement pension plans and protection of human subjects in scientific research.

Such regulation, Bok says, threatens the diversity and autonomy that have made the American system of higher education "the best in the world." The burdens of compliance, he says, have become increasingly heavy: costs, institutional bureaucracies and administrative demands on faculty time have mushroomed along with government regulation.

Bok's warnings on the dangers of federal intervention are impressive. No one wants a system of higher education in which admissions policy, research goals and educational philosophy are rigidly controlled by a single dictatorial department in Washington, D.C.

Yet Bok's vision is more disturbing for what it leaves out than for what it depicts. His report displays no concern for the very real problems that have occasioned government intervention, and no sense of the historical failure of private institutions to confront those problems without external pressure. The implied message is clear: discrimination, invasion of students' privacy and abuse of human subjects may or may not go on at Harvard, but they are in any case less trouble some than the government's attempt to prevent them. Bok has vigorously attacked the symptoms and even the medicine, but he has ignored or belittled the disease.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION provides the most striking example of Bok's confused priorities. Regulations in that area have led to "the preparation of exquisitely detailed pieces of paper," Bok says, rather than to concrete improvements for minority and women faculty. Bok's discomfort with affirmative action is well-rooted in the Harvard tradition; Harvard took three years, from 1970 to 1973, to draw up a plan for improving its hiring record that would meet the government's minimum standards. Those three years of negotiation and revision, in fact, account for much of the paperwork and expense that Bok bemoans.

Harvard's faculty before affirmative action had been the preserve of white males. The information-gathering process triggered by federal requests in 1970 revealed a desolate situation: no female full professors, pitifully small number of blacks at all levels of the Faculty. Nor had Harvard done much to improve matters; as Bok's special assistant Walter Leonard has written, "Many male administrators and faculty members are inherently incapable of perceiving race and sex discrimination without the intervention of some external force." The federal government intervened in university hiring, not out of a perverse desire to upset the lives of college administrators, but because the administrators had shown themselves unable-or unwilling-to fight discrimination on their own initiative.

Bok shows little sensitivity to the historical situation:

There was also little evidence to show that minority faculty were victimized by systematic discrimination; careful studies suggest that these professors were already receiving larger salaries than white colleagues of comparable background and experience."

But salaries were never the central issue. The catch, obviously, was how few minority professors there were to enjoy the attractive wages. Bok indicates he understands the reason for the dearth of minority faculty members when he says that,

"The real difficulty lay in the acute shortage of black and Spanish surnamed Ph.D's . . .

But having acknowledged the fact, Bok passes on, as if the number of black and Spanish surname Ph.D.'s was an act of God beyond the control of the blameless universities. Affirmative action law recognizing that discrimination at one rung of the ladder affected hiring at all higher rungs applied rules to student admissions as well as to faculty hiring.

With one final shrug, Bok dismisses Harvard's history of prejudice against women:

As for women, a better case for discrimination could be made. But it was also apparent that women were handicapped because the critical years for promotion occur at the time in their lives when they are most burdened with competing family responsibilities.

When it comes to assessing the results of the past few years of affirmative action, Bok shifts deftly from the specific to the general, citing a Carnegie study that found little improvement for women or minority faculty across the nation. He might as well have stuck to Harvard, where the statistics are almost as gloomy. In a few areas there has been progress, but black admissions are down in some schools, most of Harvard's small number of female teachers perch tenuously on the lower rungs of the ladder, and blacks still comprise less than two per cent of the tenured faculty. Not impressive, assuredly, and one possible reaction would be to condemn all attempts to improve the situation. Just as plausible, however, would be to condemn the situation itself.