Certainly President Bok is no champion of discrimination, and his annual report does not attempt to justify Harvard's long history of prejudice. But with his attack on affirmative action regulation Bok allies himself with those who accept, or at least ignore racism and sexism at Harvard. Attacks on affirmative action have accelerated during the past two years and, while they have at times focused on legitimate issues, too often they have provided a thin veil for the feeling that integration has gone far enough. More than a few deans, department chairmen and professors could view the annual report as tacitly approving that feeling, as approving a go-slow policy on the hiring of women and minorities, as approving a policy of resistance to the spirit of affirmative action.

PUBLIC PRESSURE forced the government in 1966 to assume an active role in the protection of human subjects in scientific research. As in the case of discrimination, the government was reluctant to interfere in what had been a preserve of academia. A series of exposes however, on the unethical behavior of a few scientists-highlighted by the Tuskegee case, in which poor blacks with syphillis were left untreated, and the Willowbrook case, in which mentally retarded children were deliberately infected with hepatitis-demonstrated that scientists could not always be trusted to police themselves.

The National Institutes of Health responded with rules establishing research review committees at all institutions receiving NIH money. The committees were to include community representatives and members of non-medical professions. NIH also set up standards of "informed consent," specifying the kinds of information researchers had to provide their subjects before experimenting on them.

These rules were long overdue. At times they may have added new problems to the old; they certainly did not go far enough in providing protection to subjects and many universities were slow to comply. Yet the number of unethical experiments-of which Harvard has had its share-have diminished during the past decade. While the change is due in part to scientists' increased awareness of ethical guidelines in research, some of the credit belongs to regulation.

Bok ignores the history and simply lumps scientific regulation with the other undesirables. He comments specifically only once: "Decisions about the direction of research should be left to individual investigators rather than deans..." The phrase, "direction of research," is vague and in another context the statement might seem benign. But in the midst of Bok's complaints it could be interpreted as a slap at the NIH-mandated review process and as a boost to the misguided notion that "freedom of inquiry" guarantees to all scientists the right to do as they please with their experimental subjects. Not that Bok accepts that notion; but since he offers no evidence that he rejects it or that he appreciates the need for oversight, and since he includes rules for protecting subjects in his implied condemnation of regulation, some researchers will certainly welcome his report as ammunition in their battle against externally enforced ethical standards.

THE ISSUE OF government regulation relates to a host of complex problems surrounding the role of the university in society, and Bok is right to be concerned. Moreover, the effects of regulation have not all been positive. Some rules have certainly not been well thought out, while others have been too weakly framed to accomplish much of anything. There is room for improvement and, as Bok says, Harvard could contribute to the formation of wiser policies.

But that is only part of the story, and Bok unfortunately neglects the rest. Surely the most sensible approach to easing the burden of federal regulation would be to join with the government in attempting to remedy problems. America's system of higher education may be "the best in the world," but its faults are nonetheless serious. Lessening federal involvement will do nothing to remove those deep-rooted faults.

Bok's solution is to step up Harvard's lobbying effort in Washington, D.C. "This is not a congenial task for educators," he writes, "who dislike the thought of seeming to play the part of lobbyists. But it is wrong to conceive of the effort in such narrow terms." In one sense the idea is sound: any Harvard student knows that a pack of Harvard professors dispatched to lecture in Washington could easily lull to sleep whole departments of formerly alert government regulators. Yet Harvard might benefit more if, instead of lobbying in the capital to keep governmental regulations out of Harvard, Bok lobbied here in Cambridge to persuade Harvard to accept and even welcome those rules that, like affirmative action, promise improve the University