IT HAS BEEN ten years and one month since Derek Bok was named president of Harvard University, and nearly ten years since he assumed office. Over the past decade, Bok has managed to keep Harvard gliding across turbulent times on an even keel. He has made himself a man of open letters, suing that ingenious and forthright method to silence critics and divert the energies of a contentious community. When the issue of Harvard's holdings in companies doing business in South Africa and a proposal to name the Kennedy School library after an American entrepreneur in South Africa threatened to alienate large parts of the community, out came open letters. The nationwide Nestle boycott and the proposed appointment of conservative Chicago economist Arnold Harberger to head the Harvard Institute for International Development again led Bok to take up his pen.

If any unifying theme can be detected in Bok's series of letters, it is a desire to set down the ethical responsibilities of a university. Now he is preparing another open letter, this one on the status of minority faculty and students at Harvard. Massachusetts Hall sources confided recently that Bok plans to expand and refine his series of letters for a book. One source noted the irony of such a project, recalling Bok's initial reluctance to write the open letters and pointing out that Bok only came to grips with the issues he has addressed because of widespread protest.

THIS FALL HAS not been easy for President Bok, but it might've been tougher. The most vocal protest on campus from non-minority students has centered on rather parochial issues. In fact, a student group named GUERILLA achieved its most effective demonstration early in exam period, when it organized a "study-in" at Lamont, managing within a few days to gain an all-night study area--the Greenhouse Cafe.

One can imagine the delight of the administration if all student protests involved nothing more controversial than a desire to read books into the dawn hours. But one set of issues will not wither away for Harvard or for Bok: the quality of life for minority students here. Since Bok spoke on race relations and minority issues at Commencement last spring, a series of unsettling incidents has occurred.

A preliminary report on Harvard admissions prepared by Bok's special assistant Robert E. Klitgaard '68 suggested that high test scores for minority students and women often overpredict academic performance. To show their displeasure, more than 200 students marched through the Yard and demonstrated outside Massachusetts Hall, presenting Bok with eight demands and threatening to occupy the building. The president of the Black Students Association, Lydia P. Jackson '82, received a death threat and a rape threat for her "political activities." These events corresponded with a number of national racially motivated incidents, including a cross-burning at Williams College. In response to the death threat, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with the Justice Department, visited the campus to investigate. And sources said recently the Civil Rights Commission would soon come to Harvard to talk with Bok about taking a stronger public stand against the regrettable, frightening incident.

University spokesmen did, like State Department spokesmen, "condemn and abhor" the racial incident, but Bok, the supposed leader of the University, remained mute. Perhaps the strange confluence of the death threat with the Yale Game influenced his low-key posture. But it should not surprise Bok or any other administrator that minority students grew, and are growing, increasingly disenchanted with the president's failure to take even a cosmetic, symbolic stand. After national circulation of the Klitgaard study, Bok vigorously apologized for any hurt caused by its disclosure, but issued no disclaimer of the report's findings. And these local events took place against a national backdrop of a Ku Klux Klan revival, an increase in racial tension in the South, and the election of a president who stands as a potential threat to affirmative action and civil rights.

For the majority of white members of the vaunted Harvard community, these troubles seem far from affecting their everyday lives. Rather than rally around the cause of minority students, white students clamor for longer library hours. The present situation and the insensitivity of white students would be absurd if it weren't so sad and insidious: the signs of the times indicate that avowed liberals are more interested in their private good than in the good of the community. The prevalent attitude constitutes not so much racism as a disregard for minority issues. As long as the majority of students and faculty here is unconcerned with race relations in general and Third World students' needs in particular, little progress in either sphere seems possible.

ABOUT TEN DAYS ago, the Gomes Committee, formed by Bok last spring to investigate the possibility of a campus Third World center, recommended the establishment of a "foundation" to improve race relations at Harvard. The nine-member student-faculty committee's report represents a step in the right direction; it constitutes the first official acknowledgement that minority students have needs unmet by existing institutions. But the final proposal was clearly struck in compromise, intended to appease the students who called for a Third World center without conjuring the specters of separatism so many whites fear. The report implies a peculiar defeatism. In referring to Third World centers at other schools, it says. "It is clear to this Committee that there is significant opposition to anything at Harvard that suggests a concession to racial separatism," adding, "... the perception of separatism persists, and... the perception almost always assures the reality."

If Third World students at Harvard are 'separatist," as some "perceive," it is only because of a certain, necessarily biased, perspective. Harvard admits a conspicuously small number of minorities and hires an indiscernible number of minority faculty. Simply by virtue of their small numbers and accompanying assimilation pressures, most minority students understand more about whites than majority students do about Third World students. "Separatism" is an entirely normative term: if anyone at this University is "separatist," it is the whites. Whites seem to be able to harbor ill feelings toward Third World students or to remain ignorant of their plight at a predominantly white institution without perceiving themselves as "separatist."

Minority students have reacted by agreeing with the "material concessions" proposed in the Gomes Committee report and by drawing attention to the report's failure to deal with minority admissions and faculty. Committee members anticipate a struggle in implementing the report's proposed foundation, but express cautious optimism. White students have yet to make themselves heard.

Bok has remained reticent. He has decided not to comment on the details of the proposal until they are discussed by the Faculty, and accordingly has not publicly thrown his weight behind the foundation. To some, this amounts to yet another refusal to assume responsibility, to take a leadership role, or to demonstrate symbolically concern for the legitimate needs of minority students. Who besides Bok, they ask, can show that this University is genuinely concerned with the status of minorities at Harvard? Sometimes open letters do not act as an adequate substitution for concrete action.

Bok's silence seems all the more mystifying given his Commencement speech last June. Some selected passages:

On the subject of increased minority admissions, "We did not launch this effort from a sense of collective guilt or a desire to atone for our national history of exclusion and discrimination. We had more positive, forward-looking goals."

On the current status of minorities at Harvard: "For the moment, we must acknowledge that many of our Blacks and Hispanics feel much like alien guests in a strange house."

On whites' perceptions of minorities: "We can all understand how troubling it is to encounter evidence of racial separation or feel the chill of rejection or indifference on the part of those one wishes to befriend. But white undergraduates need to consider these encounters from both points of view."