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July-August 2007
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Interim AccomplishmentsWhen he was summoned back to Massachusetts Hall in February 2006, interim president Derek Bok told a group of Harvard administrators last October, he found himself in the position of Rip van Winkle. Having been president from 1971 to 1991, he had thereafter kept out of Harvard affairs, “which is what I think a former president ought to do.” It appeared then that the chief aims of his second tour of duty would be to “calm the natives” and to restore “normalcy” after the resignations of President Lawrence H. Summers and Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) dean William C. Kirby. Instead, he reported during a conversation in early May, Harvard addressed a significant agenda during the academic year, making substantial progress on undergraduate education, the future of scientific research and teaching, and campus development in Allston—to name the most prominent examples. “Far from finding the faculty impossible to deal with,” Bok said, “they’ve been very loyal and hardworking” on every subject where he engaged with them. Among the highlights: 
Photograph by Stu Rosner President Derek Bok reviews the alumni procession • Undergraduate education. Bok said he and interim FAS dean Jeremy R. Knowles (see "Arts and Sciences Transitions") agreed that concluding the four-year “reform of undergraduate education” was a high priority. Much attention focused on a successor to the Core curriculum (the courses intended to ensure students’ general education outside their principal fields of study). The work of an eight-member task force established at Bok’s request and charged with devising a general-education curriculum “came out very well,” he said. As he observed in Our Underachieving Colleges—his book on course design and pedagogy, published just before he was asked to be president again—there is no perfect curriculum, but there are several plausible and coherent ones. The task-force recommendation brought to FAS for extensive discussion and legislation has “clear purposes and a thoughtful definition of the kind of work that would further each purpose” (see “General Education, Finally Defined,” March-April, page 68, and this issue, "College Curriculum Change Completed"). But general education was only one part of rethinking undergraduates’ academic experience. A separate task force, set up at Bok’s request, proposed measures to encourage and reward innovative and more effective teaching. The recommen-dations are a template for “a very effective body of reform,” he said (see “Toward Top-Tier Teaching,” March-April, page 63). Overall, he suggested briskly, if the proposals for change in courses, teaching, advising (now being phased in), and evaluation of student learning (his office paid for trial assessments of writing ability and critical-thinking skills) are implemented, the result will be “the most comprehensive effort we’ve had to improve undergraduate education in at least a century.” At the May 15 FAS meeting where the faculty voted for the curriculum changes, acting interim dean David Pilbeam saluted Bok, saying that in a year when he could have read, written, and played tennis, “He took up the plow again.” • Science. Creation of the Harvard University Science and Engineering Committee (HUSEC), Bok said, signals “completely different ways of organizing and thinking about science” here (see “For Science and Engineering, New Life,” March-April, page 65). The oversight committee—drawn from FAS, the medical and public-health faculties, affiliated hospitals, and new units based in future facilities in Allston—and funding of an interfaculty department (developmental and regenerative biology) for the first time take Harvard beyond individual faculties and their departments to facilitate inter- disciplinary science. Bok emphasized “how hard the faculty worked” to bring HUSEC into being, sorting out difficult issues and paving the way for “really first-rate, exciting science.” The result, he said, creates a “hugely important blueprint” not only for Allston, but for science investments across the University, with a structure and decanal involvement to steer those programs productively. Along the way, according to an informed observer, Bok worked to rationalize earlier science initiatives with ambiguous governance and unfunded financial needs—some of them potentially very large. 1 | 2 | continued >  
 
 
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