I

WHEN HARVARD PRESIDENT Nathan M. Pusey '28 called in the police to evict demonstrators occupying University Hall on April 10, 1969, then-dean of the Law School Derek C. Bok called the occasion "the saddest day of my life." The students' decisions to seize the offices of Harvard's deans as a means of protesting the war in Vietnam had met general disapproval from moderates, but the nightmare of brutality inflicted by police in the core of the Yard forced a painful reappraisal of the University's relations with its students and its role in society.

In the wake of the bust, students went on strike, the governance of the College was radically reformed, and the campus ROTC chapter was abolished. Perhaps for reasons of prudence, perhaps for reasons of principle, and probably for reasons of both, the Faculty voted 255-81 to support a resolution condemning the Vietnam war on October 7, 1969.

According to Beyond the Ivory Tower, collective political statements issued by university officials or faculty members should be avoided unless the matter bears directly on the principle of academic freedom or the preservation of a democratic society on which free universities depend. President Bok derives his rationale from the doctrine of institutional neutrality. He means not neutrality in the pejorative sense of collaboration with evil through passivity, but neutrality in the strict sense of refraining from the use of "non-academic methods such as divesting stock, boycotting suppliers, or issuing formal political statements on political issues."

The university, Bok argues, has entered into an anomalous kind of contract with the rest of society, an arrangement which has grown increasingly enigmatic as the scope and influence of the "multiversity" has spread. Society must seek to guarantee what Justice Felix Frankfurter described as "the 'four essential freedoms' of a university--to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it should be taught, and who may be admitted to study." In return for this autonomy, the university must abide by "the basic obligations required of every participant in a civilized society" the fulfillment of contractual commitments, the avoidance of deceptive acts, the observation of the law, and the principle of not inflicting unjustified harm on others.

The assumption of certain duties in exchange for certain inalienable rights is a simple enough idea in theory. The application of this principle however, provides university administrators with endless moral and practical dilemmas. Would President Bok, for instance, call in the police to evict students occupying University Hall? Judging by his reaction to the 1969 upheaval and his patience when students protesting Harvard holdings in Gulf in April 1972 occupied his own office for a week, he would not have. Legally speaking, though, Bok might be obliged to arrest and press charges against student trespassers. The fact that he didn't attests to his personal morality. It also testifies to his pragmatism; he had learned the lessons of 1969 well. To Bok, the university's virtue is inevitably bound up with Machiavelli's concept of virtu: the employment of prudence in the service of all specific ends. His ethics and ethos are relativist.

The question serves to illustrate that Beyond the Ivory Tower operates on-two levels. The first concerns the sanctity of the Ivory Tower itself, which Bok skillfully goes to great lengths to defend. His discussion of the ideal of the university's "four essential freedoms" is stirring and convincing, if not refreshing. The second level focuses on the methods the university should employ to both safeguard those values and exert positive influence on society. This dominates most of the book and can summed up by the words "cost-benefit analysis." The interplay between the two levels proves far from satisfying and raises several disturbing questions.

Life in the Ivory Tower is far from placid--the vigor Bok shows in addressing difficult issues deserves praise. The continued use of phrases like "notwithstanding" notwithstanding, the book is clearly written and provocative, which will come as a welcome surprise to those who have slogged through his open letters.

Last spring, Bok gave three reasons for his decision to write his six open letters and they probably explain his reasons for expanding them into a book. "First," he said in an interview, "the letters provided a way to outline my position clearly, consistently and systematically." Second, Bok "was distressed at the level of discourse about moral issues--it was being diminished to the level of slogans, chants and picket signs. I write the letters not so much to persuade as to establish a level of discourse." Finally--and "this is a subtler point, and while I may not have succeeded in this respect, I have no regrets"--he wanted to combat what he considered "an excessive amount of cynicism toward established institutions. Of course, there are many grounds for disappointment, but I believe it exceeds the proper level."

While Bok rightfully debunks simple-minded slogans such as "you are either part of the solution or you are part of the problem," Beyond the Ivory Tower, like the open letters, was conceived as a reaction to "activist" protest. Derek Bok acknowledges that he and his colleagues throughout the country were evicted from their Ivory Towers in the late '60s and forced to come to grips with difficult problems. The fact that many members of the academy acquiesced in the activities of a certain senator from Wisconsin a decade earlier, and failed to reassess their roles in society when faced with a frontal assault on academic freedom, shows that the "multiversity" had to be shaken from below to lessen its rigidity. The university-as-fortress had bred a state-of-siege mentality; thus Nathan Pusey called in the police.

II

IN THE FALL of 1980, The Crimson disclosed a preliminary report prepared by one of Bok's special assistants which purported to show that high test scores for Blacks and women tend to overpredict their academic performance while in college. The Klitgaard report caused much controversy, for many Blacks argued that the study's premises threatened their right to be at Harvard. Bok refused to disavow the report, instead planing the blame for the upset on the study's disclosure.

Readers of Beyond the Ivory Tower will find that chapter four, "Access to the University and Racial Inequality," functions as an effective rebuttal to the Klitgaard report, although it is never mentioned by name. Bok questions the merits of the assumptions underlying meritocracy, contending that there exist "reasons for preferring minority applicants quite apart from a desire to stone for past discrimination." The rationale for preferential admissions policy, gives a large pool of qualified applicants, entails the contributions minority students can make in later life, the value of increasing racial understanding among students at a college level, and the reaping of benefits of education by those good students.

Here as elsewhere, Bok seeks to lay down an ethical line. The practice of hiring minority professors preferentially, he writes, "threatens to diminish the academic enterprise by lowering the quality of teaching and research." Rather than promoting justice, he says, preferential hiring practices "unfairly penalizes candidates of superior ability while holding little promise of achieving greater equality in the society as a whole."

When it comes to the thorny issue of technology transfer, Bok advocates lucrative research agreements with particular companies where the university gets money and the company gets favored treatment on patents emerging from the funded research, as long as the strings attached do not pull too tightly on academic freedom. On the other hand, he sees too many dangers inherent in the university assisting its own professors in commercial ventures by investing in the company.