The Innovative University

Chapter 11The Weight of the DNA

When Nathan Pusey stepped down hastily from Harvard University's presidency in 1970, the university had an able successor in the wings, a captain capable of riding out sea change. Derek Bok had been dean of the law school for just three years, but he had already distinguished himself as a thoughtful scholar and steady leader. Like Pusey he was a non-Bostonian, born near Philadelphia. Unlike Pusey—and any president in the preceding three hundred years—he had graduated from a college other than Harvard; Bok was a Stanford undergraduate. But he was tailor-made for Harvard in the 1970s, in many ways Pusey's personality foil: worldly, forward looking, invariably diplomatic. Trained in the adversarial system and ...