Education: Harvard's Quiet Man

At 9:30 p.m. on the snowy night of Dec. 13, a taxi pulled up at Derek Bok's four-bedroom house in Belmont, Mass. Out stepped a well-tailored Boston lawyer wearing crimson socks. He was Francis Burr, Senior Fellow (chairman) of Harvard University's governing corporation. His mission: to offer the dean of Harvard's law school a new job as the university's 25th president. Bok, 40, recalls that he was "astounded."

With typical caution, Bok asked for ten days to think it over, then phoned Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr., once his favorite Harvard law professor and the man who later recruited Bok for the Harvard faculty. The two men and their wives met in New York City. Bok's fears that the job would be too wearing were eased by his discovery that the Brewsters "were quite exhilarated by what they do." On Christmas Eve, Burr again rode through a snowstorm, this time to hear Bok accept.

Not Unanimous. Last week Burr's corporation asked Harvard's 29 overseers to ratify its choice. They did—but not without hesitating. Several asked a nagging question: Who was Derek Bok?

"The dilemma and the appeal of the man all along," said one overseer, "is that he has the support of everyone from the corporation to the Harvard Crimson, and yet he has not revealed himself even to some of his closest friends." For two hours, the overseers debated whether Bok was really the man to handle Harvard's myriad problems, from troubled black students to finances and the demanding science faculties. The choice was not unanimous. Overseer Clifford Alexander, a black lawyer and former head of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, argued that the corporation had failed to query Bok sufficiently about his views on blacks, other minorities and women. When the vote came, Alexander abstained.

For all that. Harvard insiders are now convinced that Bok is a first-rate choice. His flaw, if it can be called that, is a record of such quiet accomplishment that his real mettle seems untested. A cheerful, flexible man, he grew up assured of financial security by his Philadelphia family's share in the Curtis publishing fortune. After his mother and lawyer father were divorced when Bok was five, his mother moved with him to Beverly Hills, Calif. She sent him —presciently—to a California Episcopal military academy named Harvard.

Gliding through Stanford University with distinguished grades which won him a Phi Beta Kappa key, Bok played freshman basketball, joined the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity, represented his junior class on the student council, and was sure only that he wanted to achieve something outside the family publishing business. He chose law because it gave him broad options. After his first year at Harvard Law School, he took a summer tour of India, striking up friendships with local people in Y.M.C.A.s by giving impromptu jazz clarinet concerts. In an interview with TIME Education Correspondent Gregory H. Wierzynski last week, he recalled that he had left Cambridge thinking that he had done badly on his first-year law exams. "One afternoon in Bombay when it rained eleven inches," he says, he learned that his first-year grades were good enough to put him on the Harvard Law Review. "So I came back to law school and finished."