When former Harvard President Derek C. Bok stepped up to the lectern at Harvard’s Commencement ceremony in 1988, the audience was in for a surprise.

Straying from the traditional graduation rhetoric urging students to be true to themselves and convincing alumni to fork over cash donations, Bok decided to teach lessons of a different sort.

He described his recent dreams of a university plagued by commercialization, beginning with the acceptance of a $2 billion loan from an alum and listing a series of schemes—including placement of corporate logos on syllabi and an auction giving 100 spots in Harvard College to the highest bidders.

Though he delivered the speech in Tercentenary Theater nearly 15 years ago, the recollection still makes Bok—who now serves as the 300th Anniversary University Professor—chuckle.

“People wondered, ‘wow, what is this guy doing?’” he says.

But he tempers his laughter with words of caution. What were fantastic dreams then, he says, are now much closer to reality.

Then, his listeners were a captive group of diploma-hungry students. But, now, with a condensed version of the speech leading the preface of his recently published Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education, Bok predicts that his audience will include professors, administrators and government officials from around the world.

“But who knows,” he muses. “Writing a book is like scribbling a message and putting it in a bottle and throwing it overboard. You never know on what distant shore it will wash up.”

The book, published this month by Princeton University Press, is Bok’s eighth.

Even while he governed the University from the southeast corner of Mass. Hall, Bok was a vocal voice in debates on the role of higher education in society. During his tenure as Harvard’s 25th president, Bok penned numerous essays and three books on the matter.

And his 1998 book The Shape of the River, co-authored with former Princeton president William G. Bowen, is frequently cited as a seminal work on the benefits of using race in admissions decisions.

Now, more than a decade after leaving his presidential post, Bok combines his seasoned understanding with astute analysis of contemporary problems in higher education.

While his time at the top tiers of Harvard certainly provided ample encounters with “money-making schemes,” Bok says reading about more partnerships between universities, venture capitalists and pharmaceutical companies motivated him to write the book.

“It made me feel that this process that I had experienced was really growing and perhaps threatening to move into very central areas of the university, and therefore represented a subject that deserved careful thought before we get so deeply into it that we cannot extricate ourselves from it,” he explains.

Beyond Mass. Hall