Readers seeking glimpses of the inner workings of Mass. Hall or commentary on current Harvard policies will be disappointed.Though Bok clearly draws on his 20-year term as Harvard’s president in his analysis, his first-person references are notably rare.
Where some authors might have chosen “I,” Bok simply says “Harvard.”
The choice, he says, is a conscious matter of style.
“Just telling war stories,” he says, distracts from the message at hand. “I wanted to really concentrate on the issues and take the spotlight off me in particular.”
The approach is not one Bok limits to the printed page. Even in “Current Problems of Higher Education,” the 30-person conference course he teaches at the Graduate School of Education, Bok says he deliberately steers clear of personal anecdotes in favor of more Socratic teaching methods.
“There’s no doubt there’s a temptation,” he says. “You see these rapt younger faces looking up, and you can get quite a kick out of that, and you can get deluded into thinking somehow you’re really doing something significant when all you’re doing is stroking your own ego.”
And as he sits in his modest third-floor office at the Kennedy School of Government, it is easy to forget that Bok is speaking from long experience in positions of authority.
Commercial Culture
While he shies away from detailing his own experiences, Bok’s book remains an unflinching indictment of increasingly common practices in higher education today.
The book, like Bok, is professorial in style. It begins with several chapters outlining areas of concern—athletics, education and scientific research—laying the foundation for sharp analytical criticism in the pages to come.
He acknowledges that commercialization in higher education is by no means a new phenomenon. As proof, he points to a 1909 statement from a disgruntled Harvard alum, John Jay Chapman: “The men who control Harvard today are very little else than businessmen, running a large department store which dispenses education to the millions.”
Bok points to intercollegiate athletics as a source of commercialization.
“Well over one hundred institutions,” he writes, “including almost all of the major public universities, do engage in high-pressure intercollegiate athletics to an extent that seriously conflicts with academic principles.”
One solution, he says, is closer regulation by university presidents to keep athletics in check and maintain standards across the university.
But other problems Bok addresses in the book are more complex, as increasing commercial opportunities, particularly in the sciences, threaten to blur the line between academic and corporate worlds. As venture capital and biotechnology opportunities increase, he writes, money-making moves closer to laboratories and classrooms.
“Closer ties between university science and industry create all sorts of risks for compromising the openness, objectivity, and independence of academic research,” he writes.
Whether today’s university presidents and other leaders in higher education are strong enough to withstand the pressures of balancing tight budgets and competing with other schools to recognize the primacy of academic values is a “gamble,” Bok says.
“I think it’s possible. I think it’s important. That’s why I wrote the book,” he says. “But I don’t think it’s probable, otherwise I don’t think the book would have been worth writing.”
—Staff writer Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at shoichet@fas.harvard.edu.