After his first year of Law School, Bok went to India for the summer to travel and study. It was a steamy afternoon in Bombay when Bok--who thought he'd done miserably in first year--learned that he had made the Law Review. He came back to Harvard refreshed and renewed, and divided his last two years between his studies and editing the Review.

While the rest of his classmates rushed into the world of corporate law, Bok traveled to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at the Institute of Political Science. Still unsure of his career plans, Bok spent the year studying. There he met a young Swedish student named Sissela Myrdal--daughter of sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. The two were married later that year.

Faced with the choice of a career in the foreign service or the law, Bok returned to the United States to do military service with the Judge Advocate General's office in Washington D.C. It was, funnily enough, not at Stanford or Harvard, but at George Washington University--where Bok was studying part time to get his masters in economics--that he decided on the directions his life would take. "I started getting things together in my mind," he told a reporter 20 years later, "and decided that I wanted to teach." Interested in returning to the West Coast, Bok consulted friends at Harvard Law. Under the influence of longtime friend Kingman Brewster Jr., later to become President of Yale and the man many compared to Bok, he found himself lured back to Cambridge. Now, Bok says that although he has been forced to let labor law go, he retains a particular interest in intellectual and academic questions. "Without knowing it," he says "I had always had an interest in academic things."

Today, ten years after Bok sacrificed academics for administration, his friends say he has changed little. Bok and his wife of 25 years have an unusually close marriage in a community where good relationships do not come easily. "Derek wants to have a family life that is not pro forma," friend and colleague Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University, says. In a position where many would be consumed by their work, Bok tries hard to spend time with his wife--and three children--Hilary, Victoria and Thomas.

Bok is generally described by members of the community as a quiet or private person. While some, including one high University official, complain that he is a plastic politician--an impression easily etched as one watches Bok walk, through the Faculty Club and say "Nice to see you" to the people in the hall-others say he is simply shy. "When Derek and Sissela walk into a party," says one friend, "you've got to ply them away from the people they know." Bok is not sensitive about his private affairs, says Lloyd E. Weinreb, a professor of Law and close friend of the president, "so much as he is a genuinely private person."

Underneath the dignified and suited exterior, however, lurks a man who some say has a quick sense of humor. Bok does not enjoy standing on a platform of dignity, says Weinreb. "We have a very good time together because we can clown around," he adds. And Bok is well known in Massachusetts Hall for joking around. Steiner sees something deeper. "He has an ability to step back from a situation and laugh at the position he finds himself in," Steiner notes. Perhaps that sense of humor is what prompted Bok, in a beige three-piece suit and surrounded by 75 screaming protesters demanding that he divest Harvard holdings in corporations operating in South Africa, to smile demurely and whisper to a reporter: "It's just another day in the life of a university president."