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.
Read more about this topic: Derek Bok
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or career:
“There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I long ago come to the conclusion that all life is six to five against.”
—Damon Runyon (1884–1946)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)