I spoke earlier of the fact that in 1984, 12 years after I came to the school and five years after Derek Bok declined to accept my resignation, I did resign, and at that time I left to return to the Medical School.

Seven years later, Derek Bok wrote me a letter that I'd like to read from. Dear Howard, it's dated April 26th 1971 [sic]. Dear Howard, the Corporation chose to conduct yesterday's meeting - the Corporation is the governing... one of the governing boards of Harvard - chose to conduct yesterday's meeting at the School of Public Health in order to see at first-hand what the School was doing. As I sat there, I realized that it was just 20 years since Jack Sneyder - Jack Sneyder was my predecessor as Dean of the School of Public Health - since Jack Sneyder invited me, as a President Elect (this was Derek's first year at... as President of the university) since Jack Sneyder invited me to see the school for the first time. I cannot begin to describe how much better the School of Public Health is in every way from what it was in 1971. There is a sense of excitement, a student enthusiasm of high faculty morale that is quite palpable. All this, as we both know, could not have occurred without the enormous effort you devoted to shaking the faculty out of its complacency and lifting its aspirations and its standards. I realise how lonely and difficult your efforts were. At this point, however, when one can assess the results objectively after the elapse of several years, the verdict seems clear and you should feel extremely proud. For my part I am simply grateful.

I regarded... regard this as a... as a gratifying ending, but as perhaps is evident from the way in which I've told the story, this was not a particularly, not... not a gratifying period of my life, of my career. We did recruit many people from many parts of the university to programs in the... the public health fields, and those programs, I think, benefited enormously as a result. I think we changed really the attitudes of people in public health schools around the country, but I failed to convince a large number of my colleagues at the school, people who had been there for many years and, although none chose to leave, I found the experience not a particularly happy one, in... in retrospect than at the time.