Life and Career
Bok was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and graduated from Stanford University (B.A., 1951), Harvard Law School (J.D., 1954), and George Washington University (A.M., 1958). He taught law at Harvard beginning in 1958 and served as dean of the law school there (1968–1971) and then as the university's 25th president (1971–1991). Bok currently serves as the faculty chair at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard and continues to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Bok was the recipient of the 2001 Grawemeyer Award in education.
After fifteen years away from the Harvard presidency, Bok led the University on an interim basis from Lawrence Summers's resignation on July 1, 2006, until the beginning of the tenure of Drew Gilpin Faust on July 1, 2007.
Bok's wife, the sociologist and philosopher Sissela Bok, née Myrdal (daughter of the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and the politician and diplomat Alva Myrdal, both Nobel laureates), is also affiliated with Harvard, where she received her doctorate in 1970. His daughter, Hilary Bok, is a philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins University.
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“If, then, we would indeed restore mankind ... let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.”
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