Today's college presidents are ghosts in a machine. Less visible than their predecessors, they are nevertheless involved in nearly every aspect of life in their institutions. They must serve as chiefs-of-protocol to alumni and guests, and act as power brokers among various constituencies--graduates, donors, students, researchers, staff, and faculty.

Topalian: One of the primary aims of the university used to be instilling a shared body of knowledge in its students. But the current Harvard course catalog contains over 2,600 listings. What does holding a B.A. from Harvard mean today?

Bok: The problem now is that the volume of knowledge has increased so much--with all the emphasis on research and science in the last twenty-five years, with the huge increases in the number of faculty members and Ph.D.'s engaged in research--that you have a much larger, more highly specialized, more unruly body of information from which to extract a common core. And then, higher education, like society as a whole, has many more differences about what matters in life and what's happening in the world that quickly translate themselves into differences about what knowledge is really important. What is still possible, I think, and what we tried to capture in our Core Curriculum, is an agreement on certain fundamental modes of apprehending reality. By concentrating on these, we might equip students with the means to continue learning in a variety of dimensions, to be able to understand increasingly specialized bodies of human experience as they go through life.

You've been quoted as saying that you believe ethics courses should be taught on the undergraduate level. Why?

Well, for the first time in a very long time at Harvard, right in the Core Curriculum itself, we have set aside a category to deal precisely with moral reasoning. But I still feel we have a long way to go, especially in a number of the professional schools, which must cope with the ethical responsibilities of professional life in their respective spheres. Very few of them are making an effort that is equal to the task they have to perform. The principal limitation is that we do not have, in the United States today, a sufficient number of people who are adequately trained to teach such courses well. The kind of ethics I'm talking about, which is applied ethics--it's really ethical problems as they exist in particular fields of human experience--requires on the one had a very solid grounding in ethics and moral philosophy and on the other hand a very sound grasp of a particular field of human affairs. There isn't any place in the traditional university that combines these two.

Why do you feel that it's the university's responsibility to get into those areas?

It seems to me that problems in the category of ethical dilemmas have been for a very long time and should continue to be such integral parts of human experience as to be clearly important to the concept of liberal education. At the professional level, I look out and see a very widespread concern about level of professional ethics, but also about the importance of the professional dilemmas of themselves. For example, there's a vast social concern about ethical problems, in medicine, having to do, say, with abortion or euthanasia or fetal research. I don't see how you can equip people to be real leaders in their professions without acquainting them with these problems, in part so that they can have an opportunity to learn to think rigorously about them before they encounter them in their professional lives, when they may be under pressure and pushed to make rapid decisions they later regret. And also because, apart from their own lives, they should be the kinds of people who are worried about standards of behavior for the profession as a whole, who try to interpret the profession for the wider society, and the values of the wider society for the profession.

How about the university's responsibility as a role model for its students?

Oh, I think you're quiet right, I think we cannot merely go at the problem of moral education by teaching things in the classroom. I think the university has to reinforce that by trying as best it can to set an example when it is faced with ethical dilemmas. Otherwise, students will simply come away with a very cynical attitude. The problem is, what does setting an example entail? To some students, it entails agreeing with their particular ethical position, and if the university doesn't do that, it is unethical and that's an end to it. Obviously, that's not a viable principle. Since there are many ethical issues that invite disagreement, there will always be people who will take an opposite opinion.

The real question is whether the institution is making an obvious effort to identify ethical issues or simply recognizing them after students and others kick and push and scream and demonstrate. Number two, does the university make a serious effort to wrestle with those issues, to consider the arguments on all sides, and to come out with some thoughtful, reasoned position? And third, are they conscientious in living up to the principles they expound in actual practice? I think those are the standards that are the most important, and they aren't easy ones.

It takes a lot of time to think through how you should treat an ethical issue and communicate it to the community. We spend hundreds of hours every year on how to vote our stock. And I send open letters to the community--if I told you how many hours it took me to write one that must appear to be a simple ten or twelve page piece--but they are agonizingly difficult to work through. And then, we certainty try to live up to those principles, and sometimes it hurts. We took a great deal of pressure over our decision in the Citibank case--we voted for one corporation to do something against management and the corporation was owned by one of our half-dozen wealthiest alumni. Well, those are painful decisions, but principles don't mean much if you agree with them only when it's convenient to do so.

And how do students respond to your efforts?

We live in a very cynical age. You may have a situation, as we do, where the student newspaper is no ideologically all that close to the administration and is very prone to insist that the university is acting for political motives and that its rationalizations are cheap, self-interested, and politically inspired. You just have to hope that over time, by working hard enough and communicating about what you do, you will get some credit for trying and being serious about ethical issues.

Are these other ways that the university can serve as a role model?

Another way, historically, was to pick the faculty by putting a heavy emphasis on character. But character is no longer a very important criterion. Unless someone has done something really egregious, if they're wonderful teachers and scholars, then they're going to be appointed here. We don't go into their private lives or this, that, and the other thing. The reason we don't is, in part, because teaching and scholarship became more important. As the conventional ethic broke down, it became harder to achieve a consensus of what good character was, and frankly, people increasingly thought with, I suspect, a considerable degree of accuracy, that character was often a convenient code word to cover the screening out of people who were either eccentrics, or maybe they were Jews, or maybe they were people who seemed to utter uncomfortable and unsettling ideas. In short, character was such an elastic concept and lent itself so much to making very petty judgements and was potentially so very hurtful to academic freedom and to the academic progress of the institution, that the whole idea was dropped. But all teaching of ethics has to be in part through the classroom and in part by example. that's been clear at least since Aristotle.

Is it your rule of thumb that the university should remain as neutral politically as possible?

I think the university should remain neutral in the sense that the university shouldn't try to make corporate statements on the Vietnam War or on a lot of other things. And I don't think the university should try to use non-academic means like boycotts. I don't think the university should refuse to deal with any company that doesn't support the ERA. I think to that extent the university ought to be neutral.

But of course there are so many ways in which the university couldn't conceivably be neutral. The university is not at all neutral about academic freedom. It's not at all neutral about the desire to maintain academic standards. It's not at all neutral about the Bakke case--the Bakke case, among other things, represents the claim that the Supreme Court should set the standards for admission of minority students to Harvard College.

There are a lot of other issues coming up with the Reagan Administration, like student aid, that we're not at all neutral on, that we're perfectly happy to take a position on.

Topalian: You've said that you expect Wellesley to remain a single-sex school. What does the idea of "educating women" mean to you and how does an education at a women's school differ from that at a coed institution?

Keohane: I don't think it's so much that educating women is different, but more a matter of crucial decisions that get made differently or perhaps get faced differently. The old truth that women are more likely to take physics and mathematics at a women's college is borne out by the statistics over and over again. And when they do take these subjects, they are encourage to take them seriously and to major in them and to make them their own.

It's also often said--though I'm not so sure of this anymore--that women at women's colleges are more likely to become self-confident about their leadership, about their ability to do whatever they want to do. Women at Wellesley participate in a variety of governance activities within the college, right up through the budget committee and hiring and firing of faculty, and this gives them a sense of competence and efficacy and control.

And then finally, I think there's a sense in which it's easier to become flexible about addressing wome3n's issues at a women's college on a systematic and sustained basis, instead of having, for instance, to think of a symposium on women in literature as a very special and rarified event, as one might at a university.

Women have traditionally had a basic liberal arts education, but, as you say, now they're finally getting into fields like physics and math. Is that going to change your liberal arts education?

I think the crux of the issue is the definition of what a liberal arts curriculum is, and this is obviously something that has been transformed over the centuries. A liberal arts education is inevitably altered as the ways of gaining and using and transmitting knowledge are becoming altered all around us. So I don't think of physics and math as any less a part of the liberal arts than art history or English. That's not trouble. We have a whole new range of skills or approaches to understanding the world which had not been a part of the traditional arts curriculum because they didn't exist. I think especially of computer analysis. I think that's a very important part of what a liberal arts curriculum should offer today.

For women who have been educated at women's schools, don't you think it comes as something of a shock to go into the professional world and suddenly have to compete with me?

The only shock is the way in which some men treat them, because no one has ever treated them that way at Wellesley. The question is important because it's an argument I often hear from proponents of coeducation. But that's just not the way it happens. What happens is that women's backbones and their gumption stick. What surprise and what shocks them is the set of attitudes and stereotypes that they have to come up against, but far from causing them to crumple or to question their own abilities, it gets their fighting spirit up. And so everything I know indicates that this is a false worry and it's one I'd like to help stamp out.

You were settled at Stanford. Did you ever think you would be the president of a college?

It would be inaccurate to say I NEVER thought about it. I really love scholarship, and thought, "This is what I want to do, I'm a teacher, I'm a writer, I'm a scholar." Unit a couple of years ago, I expected to follow that path for the rest of my life and be very happy with it. But when I published my book and began to think about what I wanted to do next, it happened--and I'm sure you'll not be surprised by this--that because there are few women in academia today who are visibly possible targets for administration, that I was one of the people who was approached. "Would you be interested in being a dean of here or an X of there?" and I said, "No, I'm not interested," but it began to make me think about it. It began to make me think "Maybe this is something I should consider, maybe there are skills that I've not yet had a chance to develop." And so, I was at a juncture in my own life, as it happened, when the Wellesley search appeared. And the fact that it was Wellesley was what was decisive, because I really love this place. Coming back for the interview and coming onto campus for the first time in ten years and the firs sustained time in twenty, it hit me how much I care about this place and how may possibilities and memories and strengths and interesting things there are about it.

Who are your own role models?

The first answer I give, which I would have to come back to, is my predecessor Margaret Clapp, who was, I think, a very strong woman n authority whom I admired very much. And she was really the first woman I had ever SEEN in authority in any significant way. I would have to name her first and foremost.

Do you think that, in order to ensure that professors be good role models, character should be a consideration in the hiring of faculty?

Character is an interesting word there, because there are a lot of elements of character and I wouldn't want to say no. But as far as asking whether a person should have the specific capacity, by his or her own life pattern, to serve as a role model--I certainly don't think that ought to be a prerequisite of hiring. I don't even think it ought to be a concern in any overt way at all. I just think it happens that the men and the women who have worked at Wellesley, by choosing to come to teach at a women's college, have tended to be people who are sensitive to these issues.

Do you think it best that a university or a college remain as neutral politically as possible? Are there particular instances in which you think it would be beneficial or important for a college to take a political stand?

I think that's the most complicated question you've asked me, and it's one I've just begun to think about as a representative of an institution. So I'm going to give you a kind of first working sketch of an answer.

I think there is a sense in which anything I now say or do becomes a statement that someone will interpret as something the college has or has not done; in a way that's kind of frightening but I mustn't forget it. And therefore, when I make any decision about my own spokesmanship or spokespersonship or about anyone else speaking for the college, I must remember that the college is not only a large number of people who have diverse views on a great many things, but also an entity that transcends any of us who happen to be in place now. And that to be speaking for the college is a very weighty responsibility and not one you undertake lightly, because it would be an abuse of the duty and the privilege of the office. However, I can imagine that there might be instances in which a political situation or a national emergency situation was sufficiently grave that the moral and intellectual weight of an institution such as Wellesley or Harvard or whatever might become a very important factor to consider using. So I guess what I'm saying is that I wouldn't rule out someday deciding that it was important for me, as the president of Wellesley, to take a stand on behalf of Wellesley, but that I would have to do it very cautiously.

What are some of the major challenges you'll be facing over the next few years?

Well, I think this is a watershed time for We4llesley because it's just finished a successful fun-raising campaign--the centennial campaign--and a ten-year plan for financial arrangements that went with that. The next thing they need the president to do--SOON--is to begin to think about the next stage. What is Wellesley's long-range planning for the next six or ten years? What kinds of financial forecasts should we now make? What kinds of predictions are we going to be able to make about enrollment figures? What kinds of new programs do we want? That's the main challenge. It's a big one. It's basically, "Well, here we are now, the ball's in your court, what can you tell us about that Wellesley should be doing?" And that doesn't mean an individual sort of thing, of course. It means organizing a lot of people to think effectively and get some answers.

Topalian: For a university president, you're a very controversial figure. How do you define your role?

Silber: I think that a university president has a major role as an educator; he should be the chief academic officer of the university and not just the financial officer or the fun-raising officer or the PR man. In other words, the outside-inside division of authority in the presidency of American universities is a position I do not believe in. I don't think that a sensible man could be persuaded to do the outside job if he did not have the inspiration and the enjoyment and the stimulation of doing the inside job. You couldn't pay me enough to go out and o the fun-raising side of the presidency and the laborious, continuing responsibility of balancing the budget, if I did not have some involvement in the exciting role of the recruitment and advancement of the faculty and administrators, and in questions of curriculum, things of that sort.

How do you feel about the need for ethics courses? Derek Bok suggested that ethics courses be required, particularly in the professional schools.

I don't know what you would teach in a professional school that wouldn't be simply some applied version of a fundamental course in ethics. The ethics course that I would want to teach in a college of liberal arts would be precisely the same course that I would want a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or anyone else to take, and that is to address the extent to which one's ethical obligations derive from the nature of human beings. The purpose of the formal course in ethics is to become clear about the conceptual framework--the distinction between right and power, for example, the distinction between what is and what ought to be, the distinction between what is merely descriptive and what is normative--and to understand that ethics as it applies, say, to a scientist, is in part the special moral obligation of a scientist to be logical.

A lot of talk about values makes no sense at all. People treat values as if they were Good Housekeeping Gold Seals of Approval that we lick and paste on facts. That's not what values are, that's the stuff on which ethical nihilism is made, where you just pull values and norms out of the air from nothing and simply make them an expression of volition. This is the kind of nihilistic foundation from which something like Nazism developed, where you're dealing with value neutrality and a strong-willed person comes along and says, "No, I'll tell you what's good. This is what's good. It's what we WILL to be good." A sound ethical position is one in which one derives his sense of what is good from a complex analysis of the interrelationship of beings, of persons, of situations.

What is the university's responsibility in all this?

In better ordered societies than the one we're living in, this teaching was normally done at a much earlier age. But with the substantial deterioration of the family as an educational, stable center of the child's life, and with the virtual disappearance of religious institutions as teaching institutions, I think the university's got to do it or leave the job undone. Somebody has to teach the principle of non-parasitism. The "Me Generation," to use Tom Wolfe's very perceptive phrase, is the consequence of non-contextual thinking, where the individual is supported by all kinds of helpers--mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, friends, institutions--and then comes up with the incredible notion that they own it all to him. And that he owes nothing to anybody else. But if he understands the interdependence between himself and others and his abject dependence on other people, he will recognize that parasitism simply cannot be justified morally. That's a foundation principle of social ethics, of political ethics, developed very clearly in Plato's REPUBLIC. But who reads Plato's REPUBLIC? If the universities didn't require it, who would ever read it?

Would this responsibility affect the actual hiring of people as good role models for students? Should character be a consideration in the hiring of faculty?

Well, *I think it should be. I think it rarely is, these days. It went out of fashion about twenty-five years ago. If a faculty member has the bad habit of trying to seduce his students, well, this is regarded as a private matter between him and the student and something the university shouldn't be concerned with. I think that's a grave mistake. Intelligent people are a dime a dozen compared to people with good character.

In the political realm, would the university be a role model by taking stands on issues?

It's a matter of the university remembering what its function is. The university hasn't been elected to do anything. I mean, the people haven't come out and elected Boston University or elected Harvard University or the president of Boston University or the president of Harvard to do anything. If I want to become heavily involved in the political process, that's my right as a citizen, but not one of my rights as president of Boston University. And there are lots of issues that faculty members are simply incompetent to consider. Most faculty members don't have the remotest notion of the complex set of influence that must be taken into account by a moderately successful mayor of a city. So, I don't have the right to co-opt the university on a political issue. Neither does the faculty, neither do the students.

Instilling a shared body of knowledge used to be one of the primary aims of the university. In this age of rapidly expanding knowledge....

There's not really such a rapid expanse in knowledge. There's a huge expanse in publication, but no one should make the mistake of associating the increase in publication with the increase in knowledge. There's a hell of a lot of redundancy in what's being published, and a lot of what's being published is revisionist error. You know, there have been so many studies made that if you want to be original now, you've almost certainly got to be wrong. And we ought to face that fact, that some of the work being done in the social sciences is done with such strained methodology that one can't talk about knowledge.

There's no increase in knowledge, for example, in THE HITE REPORT. I am amazed that no group of psychologists, no group of sociologists, no group of medical practitioners have thought it worth their while to examine the grossly irrational, irresponsible methodology of THE HITE REPORT and say, "This is a worthless piece of gossip that's being fobbed off on a gullible public by an incompetent exponent." Instead, academic communities give her some credibility, publishers take her stuff... This is the biggest porn piece that's been published by a major publishing house in some time. Now that's where the university has an ethical obligation, it seems to me, to examine the defects in method and to pronounce on them.

Maybe we could call this the era of specialization rather than the era of rapidly expanding knowledge.

Yes, and I think that very often you lose a lot of understanding, which is also a part of knowledge, and a great deal of wisdom in the process of over-specialization. It gives you non-contextual results which are not knowledge at all but, in fact, a gross distortion of what is real.

So would it follow that you think the requirements for a good, basic liberal arts education haven't really changed all that much from, say, fifty years ago?

Well, they haven't changed all that much from, say, two thousand years ago. The human modalities haven't changed very much. Human beings are born, they suffer, they enjoy, they love, they fall into despair, they die. That's been going on for a long time, and understanding the distinction between them has been a responsibility of educated human beings for as long as people have written. You can find examples in Homer: the argument between Agamemmnon and Achilles at the opening of the Iliad is a statement of the difference between right and power. Agamemmnon has got the power and Achilles has the right in the matter. And power wins--for awhile. You have the same thing coming up in the Old Testament--the confrontation of King David by the prophet Nathan. Nathan points out to the kind that of course he has the POWER to take the wife of Uriah and to destroy Uriah, but he doesn't have the right. And there the consequence is very different--the kind recognizes his error, covers himself with sackcloth and ashes, and seeks some kind of forgiveness for having erred. This is an issue that mankind understood thousands of years ago, but the understanding has to be regained in every generation. These are elements that belong in a basic education and they haven't changed for a long time. The power of friendship, the important relations of responsibility between parent and child, and later between child and parent, the obligation of the citizen to the social group on which he is dependent--all of these are elements in basic education that men have known about for hundreds of years.

Do you miss teaching?

I still do some of it, but I miss doing more of it, yes. As you can probably tell from the didactic quality of this interview.

What do you see as your main challenges at Boston University over the next decade?

Well, we don't want to grow in the sense of getting larger. That's not been our intention at all. We have concentrated for the past decade primarily on personnel, primarily on the recruitment of faculty. And we need to give greater attention now to what the faculty is going to do--the development and refinement of curriculum. The development of physical facilities is also important. We are in the planning stages of a major science center that is badly overdue. But far better to have a first-rate scientist working in a relatively poor laboratory than to have an incompetent scientist working in the most modern facility imaginable. We've put our priority, I think, in the right place by saying, "get the faculty first." <