An Interview With President Bok Or (Gulp), How to Run Harvard

(The following excerpts are from an interview with Harvard's new President, Derek C. Bok, conducted by Robert Decherd during the week of August 23-30.)

Q. Where will the major emphasis lie during your first year as President, and how will your Administration differ from that of President Pusey?

A. I think a lot of time will have to be taken during the first year in attempting to shake down the staff in Massachusetts Hall with a number of new people coming in. Especially now, with real financial stringency, a lot of time will have to be taken to try to make sure we don't spend more than we have to on the administrative side of the University so that we can allocate as many resources as possible for the essential programs of teaching and research. I have a feeling that there will be several other areas which will involve large amounts of my time. One will still be making key appointments. In some ways, that may be the most important thing a President does in this institution. In the course of this year, we have appointments to make of deans in the schools of Education and Public Health; a successor to Polly Bunting at Radcliffe; the possible appointment of a provost; a dean of the College; and, in all probability, there will be more than one House Master vacancy to be filled. Each one of these appointments takes an extraordinary amount of time. There are, of course, many other things we're interested in and are going to study actively. I have a number of interests in undergraduate education that I'll try to describe in detail when I speak to the Faculty on September 28. There are problems involving the extension of our educational facilities to a larger audience, to adult groups of various kinds both here and away from Harvard. There is, of course, the study of a three-year A.B. program. There are problems that we'll have to look at with respect to the admission and status of women and the educational opportunity for a variety of minority groups. There are problems involving Cambridge. I think there we will be taking a more active role in the community than was true in the past. We are conducting a review of our housing policies, not only the projects which we have underway for low-income and elderly housing, but also the prospects for housing more graduate students and even junior faculty. I hope to spend considerable time reviewing the problems, and prospects of several of the smaller graduate schools, such as Public Health. It is hard to know where to stop. I sometimes get the feeling there is almost no sector of the University's activities that isn't going to require some attention. What I've been able to give you is only a sample, and I'm sure there are a lot of problems which will appear more important midway through the year that are scarcely perceived at the present.

Q. What of these do you consider your major problem, the one which must be dealt with first?

A. I think my major immediate problem is to educate myself sufficiently about areas of the University in which I have to make key appointments, so that I will make those appointments well. To put it another way, if I fail to make those appointments well, I could do more permanent harm to the University than in almost any other way. The financial problems--not only the husbanding of our own resources but the effort to promote a healthy development of federal assistance to higher education--are also tremendously important.

Q. You said in January that you thought it important for a university president to speak out on certain national issues. Do you still consider this appropriate, and will you be taking more stands than the President has in the past few years?

A. I think it's likely that I will make more statements than have been made in the past, and I still think it is entirely appropriate for the President to speak out. But I think such influence as the President of the University may have really depends on two things: one, that he speak out on issues about which the public recognizes that he has some knowledge and experience. And that means, of course, primarily matters that affect in some way the educational process. The other thing that seems necessary if he's to have any influence and if he's to maintain the proper standards of the University is that he speak only when he has a very thorough command of the facts and the problems and the arguments involved. In short, it is important for the President to speak out, but if he is to husband his influence and exercise it properly, those occasions are going to be relatively infrequent.

Q. The problem of student voter registration presented itself in Cambridge this summer. Where do you stand on students's right to register to vote in the city or town where they go to school?

A. Well, I think the Cambridge community is probably faced with something of a dilemma. On the one hand, it is clear that 18 to 21-year-olds have been given the vote, and I think that in many ways it is more appropriate for them to exercise their vote in the university community, since they are likely to spend the bulk of their time there and therefore be more conversant with local issues and problems in that community than they would be in their hometown, where they may spend no more than two or three weeks a year. Balanced against that is the fear in the community of the implications of a large infusion of new voters who do not in any substantial way bear the financial obligation to fund the programs that they might vote for. Given this dilemma, my own opinion is the following. The state Attorney General has ruled that students ought to be allowed to register to vote in the college communities in which they reside. In addition, although it is true that the students don't bear financial responsibility for the programs that they might vote for that's true of a number of other blocks of voters as well and has always been true. Those of us who feel that socially concerned students should use the vote in the political system to try to achieve the things that they stand for cannot equivocate now on the right to vote. As a result, with the Attorney General's ruling and my own feeling about the part students should play in the political process, I feel that students should certainly vote and ought to make considerable efforts to register themselves to do just that.

Q. What do you feel are the most pressing problems between Harvard and Cambridge, and what role do you see for the University in future relations with the community?

A. There are immediate problems in the housing area, even though Harvard has done more in the past few years than it has in its history to try to improve the housing situation in Cambridge. The University has launched an unprecedented effort, which in some cases is nearing completion, to build housing developments for low-income and for elderly residents of Cambridge. It has cut down the size of its graduate student body and a few years back built Peabody Terrace, so its net effect on the housing situation has been positive--clearly positive--in the last few years. Nonetheless, when you get into the business of building housing projects, as everybody knows, it is almost impossible to proceed without creating serious frictions with some group in the community. In one area, there is considerable opposition from middleclass, residents because we are constructing housing, or planning to construct housing, for low-income families. There are other areas in which the feeling is that we are not constructing good enough facilities and well situated enough facilities for low-income families. Even more difficult is the problem of providing housing for graduate students. In many ways, the more housing we can provide for graduate students, the less pressure they will put on rents in Cambridge. And yet it is hard to find sites where you can proceed. Either community groups will feel you should be putting up housing for them rather than for your own students, or in other, higher income areas, some of the well-to-do residents are concerned that you are putting up too many residences for students and that it's going to have an adverse impact on traffic or something of that kind. I must say that after a few months of that, you get the feeling that it is very hard to do good in this world, through housing anyway. But we're obviously going to continue to work on housing and I think in the end we'll be successful. Beyond that, I don't see pressing problems--I see a large number of opportunities that will require a lot of attention that Harvard should give. I think there are opportunities for beautifying Cambridge. There are opportunities for helping the city develop its school system for the benefit of our own people who raise children here as well as for the community as a whole. There are considerable problems of crime--particularly larceny, house-breaking, things of that kind that make the community a more difficult place to live for many people than it has in the past. We must pay attention to these problems, for it is of great importance to us that this community become better and better instead of worse and worse, as has been true of some other university communities. Not only do we have a responsibility to the community but we realize that the sense of well-being and the emotional health of our whole student and faculty community depend on having an area around us in which they can live happily, work, and raise their children.

Q. Has Harvard expansion in the community come to an end, or will it continue past the projects currently underway?

A. Well. I think some more housing will have to be built. But I think the building can be done in ways that do not displace anybody and, quite the contrary, provide accommodations for students who otherwise would have to be competing for scarce space in Cambridge and driving up rents. There are various land areas around which are suitable for housing and which are not presently occupied by anyone who would have to be displaced. There is land in the Shady Hill Sacks Estate; there is a considerable area of land on the Boston side of the Business School. In time, if we get a subway extension out to Fresh Pond, there will be large, undeveloped areas in Western Cambridge around which some kind of community might be built. So I don't see, in the long run, any substantial reason why we cannot build more housing, with no displacement, and with a helpful effect on the housing situation in Cambridge.

Q. What do you think is the University's responsibility to build low-income and elderly housing in Cambridge?

A. It is hard to speak in broad principles, except to say that we wish to build at least as much community housing as we may displace. In a more practical vein, we are presently working on four projects--one of which is almost completed, another of which has recently broken ground. Still other projects are underway through the efforts of the Cambridge Corporation which was founded and is actively supported by MIT and Harvard. I would like to keep working on those projects and then review whether more should be done. I have no doubt that the University will want to make a continuing effort to improve the housing situation. But I would want to review very carefully whether the best way of doing that is to take our students off the housing market by building them housing, or by trying to build housing for the community, or both. And that seems to be a rather longe-range study that would require a lot of elaborate staff work which I haven't had time to make and which I think we have plenty of time to make. We have our hands full for the moment dealing with our projects in Cambridge and with a very large project in the Medical School area where several hundred units of community housing will be built.

Q. How would you describe the University's financial situation at present, and can you predict where cutbacks in spending, if any, will come?

A. As I understand it, the University once again ran a deficit this year for the third year in a row; the deficit will probably be slightly larger than the deficits in the two preceding years, although certainly not on the massive proportions of the Columbia deficit. But I think we are experiencing a process which has gone on at other universities and which was well described in great detail, with many graphs and figures, by the provost of Princeton, Bill Bowen, who appropriately enough is an economist.

What Bill Bowen suggested was that merely to maintain the program that you have--keep up the library, maintain the departments and the teaching programs that you have--requires a growth of expenditure every year which exceeds the likely growth in revenue which you will get from traditional sources, namely tuition, foundation giving, government grants of a traditional variety, alumni contributions and so forth. Now when you have such a divergence--even a divergence of only a couple of percentage points--you go through the following process if these tendencies persist over a large number of years. You begin by reviewing the non-academic parts of the operation and you find that you can make certain cuts in maintenance and upkeep, and you can effectuate various economies in purchasing and in computer services and so forth. As the process continues, however, these economies are one-time economies and cannot be relied upon again. You may then find yourself cheating a little bit by simply deferring things that you're going to have to do at some later point. You put off on repairs and so forth in order to keep the deficit in balance. Then you may get to a further stage, which various universities have been going through, in which you seek revisions in financial aid policy to put more emphasis on loans rather than grant. You may also begin to cut back on your faculty. Because of tenure, that has to be done either through attrition or through not making as many appointments of junior faculty. If the process is allowed to continue still further in a major university, you either have to start cutting out large academic programs--I think some of that has gone on at Columbia--or you have to be absorbed into the state system. That's the process that goes on, unless something happens to reverse the tendency for expenditures to outrun income.

The obvious way of curing that disparity is to seek funds from some new source, and that source is presumably the federal government. The federal government is not a new source because it has already supplied, on the research side, very substantial amounts of money. But what is going on now is a very critical drama in the Congress of the United States where several different points of view are contending over the form of new federal support. One point of view is expressed by those who would really like not to have new aid given to higher education, and they are hoping that the other two points of view kill one another off so that no action is taken in this session. The second point of view is the one that would provide unrestricted grants of money to institutions on the basis of some formula, which is usually expressed--as it has been by Edith Green of the House Committee--as a certain number of dollars per student enrolled.

The third approach would give aid to universities in the form of providing substantial grants to needy students who would then take them to whatever institution they wanted to attend. When they enrolled in the institution, they would not only bring their federal scholarship with them, they would also authorize the federal government to provide supplementary grants to the institution to reflect the fact that the cost of a student significantly exceeds the tuition he pays. Now if one of the latter two points of view prevails, then the current strain on our budget will be somewhat lessened. If not, and the odds are against any action this year, cutbacks will become increasingly severe.

Getting back to the University, as I said before, we operated at a slight deficit last year. There were several areas where we experienced substantial losses--the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Harvard University Press and the Computing Center. The Harvard Houses increased their cumulative deficit to approximately $700,000. On the other hand, the Education School, we were pleased to see, completely wiped out its prior deficit and operated in the black. So far as I know, the other graduate schools, with the exception of the Medical School, also operated in the black.

At this point, it is not clear just how much will have to be trimmed from the budget and where. We have to look at a long list of areas where careful spending will add up to considerable savings on a yearly basis. In this way we can hopefully avert a situation as drastic as that at Columbia. By instituting cost consciousness throughout the administrative organization of the University--at the Computing Center, the Press, in central services and so forth--we can partially offset increases in operating expenses and higher wages. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is another matter. John Dunlop is, of course, much better aquainted than I am with the particular aspects of the Faculty's budget, but the deficit has been steadily growing, and it may be greatly augmented by the expected deficit of more than $750,000 at Radcliffe resulting from the new merger agreement.

Q. Would you cutback funding for special programs or study groups before you would want to cut the size of the Faculty?

A. I think it is very hard to generalize. Many programs, special institutions and projects are independently funded or even endowed so that they do not cause a burden on the University's unrestricted resources. As for faculty, much depends on whether one is talking about cutting down on visiting professors, reducing the number of new appointments of junior faculty, or allowing tenure vacancies to remain unfilled. In the end, the deans must arrive at decisions based on the particular facts of each case.

Q. Although you have had only limited contact with undergraduates to this point, how would you judge the tenor of the student population following Harvard's first quiet spring since 1968?

A. I think it would be very hard for me to make any judgement at this time. We know extraordinarily little about the psychology of large groups. Moreover, some of the most recent data from universities have shown that problems which upset students the most are related to issues over which the universities have very little control. I can't even begin to say what the fall will bring, though I try, through personal contact and conversation with students, to keep myself informed of what students are3