Bok Visit Assuages Faculty Angst

In the middle of his meeting with department chairs last Wednesday, Derek C. Bok joked that he felt a bit like Rip van Winkle.

Winkle, the hero of an early 19th-century folk tale, sleeps under a shady tree in the Catskill Mountains for 20 years before returning to his village, which had been turned upside down during the Revolutionary War.

On July 1, after a 15-year absence from Mass. Hall, Bok will retake Harvard’s reins as the university recovers from its own revolution this winter.

Bok last week paid his first known visit to campus since being appointed interim president. In meetings with professors, he encountered a faculty still shaken by the resignations of University President Lawrence H. Summers and Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby, and still uncertain about how the search for Kirby’s successor will work.

During two meetings last Wednesday—one with the Faculty Council and one with department chairs—the incoming interim president sought, with apparent success, to dispel the Faculty’s angst about the dean search.

According to professors at the meetings, Bok reassured them that he—not Summers—would pick the next dean in a timely fashion, and that he would consult broadly with professors in doing so.

Much of the faculty’s anxiety about the search “has just vaporized with the sense of calm brought to this discussion by President Bok,” said James J. McCarthy, the chair of the environmental studies and public policy committee and one of two coordinators of an informal group of department chairs.

Professor of the History of Science Everett I. Mendelsohn, who attended Bok’s meeting with the Faculty Council, called the session “a kind of decompression.”

“There was a renewed confidence that the kinds of issues that brought the Faculty to this point of tension are in view of the central administration,” Mendelsohn said.

By all accounts, Bok is already tackling the most urgent of those issues—the search for someone to fill Kirby’s post, which opens up on July 1. “He told us that he is starting right now to work on the search,” McCarthy said.

But Bok has yet to decide whether or not Kirby’s successor will serve as only an interim dean who would be replaced by a new dean appointed by the next University president. Bok, as interim president, will only hold the post until Harvard’s governing boards select a permanent successor to Summers.

Bok told department chairs on Wednesday that he would consider appointing a permanent dean if a strong consensus emerged for a particular candidate, according to McCarthy.

“But if, for a variety of reasons, it looks like we don’t reach that point and need someone to tide us over,” Bok said he would choose an interim dean, McCarthy said.

In the course of the crisis of governance that led up to Summers’ resignation, professors voiced strong concerns about how the dean search would be handled. But Bok appears to have largely alleviated the Faculty’s worries.

At the Faculty meeting on Feb. 7, McCarthy and Andrew D. Gordon ’74, chair of the history department, read a statement calling for a “candid, forthright, and confidential” dean search.

But in an interview Thursday, the two professors, who both coordinate the informal group of department chairs, said they saw no need to reiterate a similar set of concerns to Bok.

“We felt quite clear from the way that he presented his approach for choosing the dean that he was going to consult broadly and deeply with the Faculty,” Gordon said. “And although in the end he would make the decision—as he should—he would do it in a way that everybody felt comfortable with.”

Bok will be ready to assume a strong presence on campus when he returns around the beginning of next month. David B. Fithian, the secretary of the Faculty, said he that the incoming interim president would have a new office in the Yard.

“My understanding is that President Bok will have an office in Loeb House, 17 Quincy St., as of late March/early April,” David B. Fithian, the secretary of the Faculty, wrote in an e-mail.

The newly-renovated Loeb House, between Lamont Library and Emerson Hall, is the home of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, Harvard’s top two governing boards.

—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.