Bok, the last of that new breed still in academic harness announced last week that he would step down next June. He is widely regarded as successful–a nice guy who has presided over one of the most tranquil periods in the modern history of the nation’s oldest and most famous University. The endowment quintupled from a healthy $1 billion to a stupefying $5 billion. The undergraduate college instituted a core curriculum that has been a beacon to colleges across the country. And the university celebrated its 350th anniversary with an awesome series of scholarly symposiums and public celebrations, the last of which brought the Prince of Wales flying across the ocean.
But in some respects, recent years have not been good to higher education. even at Harvard. When he was secretary of Education, William Bennett ridiculed curricula and seemed personally insulted because students took a week of spring vacation in the sun. Tax reform threatened the institutions by reducing the deductibility value of charitable contributions. While the Reagan administration was debilitating student scholarship and loan programs. middle-class parents were choking on costs that increased at twice the rate of inflation. Then colleges and universities became the targets of popular books that attacked their most fundamental characteristics; most devastating, because of its commercial success, was Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.” Bloom’s book may be the least-finished best seller of modern times, but it was one of the most talked about. The universities had sold out their traditional birthright, Bloom argued, for a mess of trendy, left-wing potage like women’s studies or introductions to the Third World.
Then this spring, into the fray marched Henry Rosovsky, who was Bok’s inspired choice as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the most important academic position at Harvard. A no-nonsense economist who had once turned down the presidency of Yale (A. Bartlett Giamatti got the job instead), Rosovsky was the principal architect of Harvard’s tough-minded new core curriculum. He has now published a disarming academic memoir about his 11 years as dean, “The University: An Owner’s Manual,” and unappreciated academics have clutched it to their battered breasts here, finally, was a book about higher education by someone who knew what he was talking about. True, perhaps, but to read Rosovsky’s judgment is to think of how Voltaire might have paraphrased it: “The best of all possible systems of higher education in the best of all possible worlds.”
Rosovsky on American higher education: “Fully two thirds to three quarters of the best universities in the world are located in the United States . . . What sector of our economy and society can make a similar statement?” On entering Harvard Yard in the morning: “It is an oasis; it pleases the eye and the mind in all seasons, it is a refreshing start to any working day.” On tenure: “The notion that tenure fosters deadwood is false–especially at top-rank universities.” On fund raising: “It is much more than a necessary evil. I grew to like it, and never ceased to be amazed by the loyalty and generosity of our alumni, or by the intelligence … of many foundation officials.” Rosovsky also appears to suggest that, when in doubt, Harvard’s way of doing things–its odd governance structure, its unusual tenure procedures-are probably the best of the best. In short, he proves once again that you can always tell a Harvard man, but not very much.
Rosovsky is too smart to contend that American higher education is perfect; it’s just a great deal better than its critics understand. Setting aside his self-proclaimed optimism, this is the most useful book about higher education in recent times. For sophisticated laymen, he actually explains research universities. Far more thoughtfully than college-rating guides–and admittedly biased in favor of big universities–he advises good students on how to choose good colleges; he describes the nuances of the admissions process. And if he is not totally persuasive about tenure, Rosovsky elucidates both its strengths and weaknesses admirably.
In Harvard’s institutional memory, Rosovsky will be linked forever with Bok, the man who appointed him. Indeed, Rosovsky’s core curriculum could be Bok’s single most important contribution to Harvard. Bok’s tenure, notable for its longevity, was mainly a stewardship, which is not bad, just not great. The times did not cry out for heroics. Reminiscing one evening a couple of years ago, Yale’s Bart Giamatti said that his presidency during the 1980s was devoted to balancing the budget and deferred maintenance of the campus. “I will he remembered,” Giamatti said with a wry smile, “as the president of Yale who made the pipes work.”
The new president of Harvard will probably be named around the turn of the year, and there is no obvious successor (box). Rosovsky is a long-shot contender, though at 62 he’d be an interim replacement. Bok, as dean of law school, was an “inside” candidate, but he was the first president in the school’s modern history not to have attended Harvard College. His predecessor Nathan M. Pusey had been president of Lawrence University, so was an “outside” candidate.
Bok’s presidency began in an aura of apprehension about student unrest. No one much worries about protest nowadays. Instead, authorities see three particular challenges facing any new president of a research university. First, the quality of undergraduate education: better and more attentive teaching, even at the expense of research. Second, the rebuilding of the faculty: more than half of all tenured faculty in American universities will retire in the next 10 years. Third, diversification of the student body and faculty: more women and minorities as teachers, more blacks, Latinos and Asians as undergraduates. The crisis manager as president is likely to give way to the scholar/teacher; greatness awaits the master of that agenda.
American higher education gets bigger and more expensive every year.
Tuition costs have more than tripled at private colleges since 1977. Last year’s average bill was about $8,700. At public schools, tuition more than doubled, up to about $1,700 last year.
Two thirds of the students at private institutions receive some form of financial aid, at public schools 47 percent get some aid.
Enrollment continues to grow. Last year an estimated 8.4 million students attended four-year colleges and universities, an increase of 1.1 million since 1977. During that period, more older students returned to college; by 1987, the median age of undergraduates was above 22.
Only about half of each freshman class eventually graduate.
SOURCES: U.S. DEPT. OF EDUCATION: THE COLLEGE BOARD
With the search for Harvard’s 26th president about to begin, no adage was more apt than “those who are talking don’t know, and those who know aren’t talking.” “We’re several months away from even any substantive scuttlebutt,” says one Harvard man. That didn’t stop folks inside and outside Harvard Yard from rounding up suspects. Those include:
The caretaker: Henry Rosovsky, the respected acting dean of the faculty of arts and science, who, at 62, is considered a bit old for the post.
The dearly departed: A. Michael Spence, 46, the former heir apparent who apparently took himself out of contention by resigning in March to become dean of Stanford’s business school.
The Kennedy Yankee: Robert Putnam, 49, currently the new dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School.
The top gun: Joseph Nye, 53, the prominent defense and foreign-policy expert and a Harvard associate dean.
Harvard will certainly launch a nationwide search, but with the school planning a critical, $2 billion-plus capital campaign for the fall of 1991, as well as having to fill its number-two post, insiders may have an advantage. Still, the candidate pool is likely to be broader than 20 years ago when Derek Bok was selected and only male Wasps needed apply. “There are no constraints on whom Harvard can select,” says sociology professor emeritus David Riesman, who just coauthored a book about selecting university presidents. Law professor Alan Dershowitz agrees and warns, “Unless the school considers non-Wasp candidates, Harvard’s greatness is at an end.”
Regardless, the selection process doesn’t figure to be easy. It took almost a year to choose Bok. And at Harvard’s prestigious neighbor, t he Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there is still no successor to Paul Gray, who announced his resignation in March 1989.
