Bok's vehicles for this role have been his annual reports, in which he has systematically--and in contrast to other university presidents--tried to take on the larger questions. Save one of the reports--which Bok takes a month every year to prepare--they have concentrated on issues of educational curricula and priorities. "The things that interest me most are intellectual and academic," he says. Although Bok long ago gave up his own intellectual pursuits--labor law was too complicated and ever-changing to keep up with, he explains--he and Rosovsky use the same words to describe Bok: "fundamentally an academic person."

When Bok reorganized the administrative structure, he rejected the suggestion that he appoint a provost--a kind of vice president for academic affairs. "If he had a provost," says Rosovsky, "he would cut himself off from what interests him most." John T. Dunlop, Bok's first dean of the Faculty, echoes Rosovsky. "More so than presidents of other universities." Dunlop says, "he is really seriously interested in the quality and policy directions of educational programs." Others, including one senior Faculty member, do not question Bok's commitment to education but feel that, despite the reports, "it's hard to see a consistent educational philosophy emerging."

For the first Harvard president not to spend his undergraduate years in Cambridge, Bok has shown what many consider an intense interest in undergraduate education. "A president of Harvard," Robert J. Kiely, the Bok-appointed former dean of undergraduate education, says, "could easily say, 'I'm not interested in undergraduate education' and not do anything about it. Bok didn't do that." The president's second annual report criticized the aimlessness of undergraduate education and, some say, provided the impetus for the Core Curriculum. "Bok wrote the will for General Education," says one Faculty member, "and Rosovsky was the executor." Others differ in their assessments, saying that Bok merely tagged along and lent support; they also criticize the president for his essentially conservative view of education.

In many areas, Bok's suggestions in the annual reports--the development of a smaller, well-defined graduate school, the construction of a school of government--have taken hold. In the arts, Bok was primarily responsible for saving the Visual and Environmental Studies program, creating the Office for the Arts, and bringing Robert S. Brustein from Yale to direct the Loeb Drama Center. In all his writings, Bok has stressed the need for interdisciplinary programs and worked actively--as he did as dean of the Law School--to link policy-oriented schools. Bok believes that while the each-tub-on-its-own-bottom philosophy works well for financial matters, the great "social problems" must be approached with the help of many disciplines and perspectives.

IN OTHER AREAS, however, Faculty members criticize Bok's performance. Although Bok admits that one of his failures as president has been not increasing student-faculty contact, he rejected the notion of more informal contact between the two groups in his 1978 report, saying the Faculty had little time. In the graduate schools, many severely doubt Bok's commitment to traditional, non-policy-oriented programs.

More recently, as Bok has made bolder moves, he has become more controversial than before. In his latest annual report, Bok took on the Business School's curriculum when he "publicly attacked," in the words of a B-School professor, the former dean and the school's narrow emphasis on the case method and the training of private enterprise managers. Five years earlier, Bok had flatly stated: "No president can ever claim the knowledge to pass judgment on the proper direction of faculties so diverse and specialized as Business, Law, Divinity and Public Health," but pass judgment he did. "Derek is okay when he stays in the territory he knows," one B-School professor concluded, "but at times, he gets into swamps where the gators are as big as him."