History

The Bok Center was established in 1975 to enhance the quality of undergraduate education at Harvard College. Originally named the Harvard-Danforth Center in recognition of the Danforth Foundation grant that funded the Center at the outset, it was renamed in 1991 to honor Derek Bok, who served as Harvard’s President from 1971-1991.

From the outset, the Harvard Danforth Center for Teaching and Learning was focused on two primary goals: providing forums for faculty to exchange ideas about teaching, and support for graduate students through Teaching Fellow training programs. The Danforth Center Video Library was an early adopter of incorporating new technology into teaching practice, and by the third year of its operation, it had recorded over 800 classes to provide feedback for instructors. Today, the Bok Center’s Learning Lab continues the tradition of incorporating technologies and teaching through experiments and training in technical skills for multimodal activities and generative AI. The Bok Center’s current programming on Civil Discourse builds on a 50 year history of addressing difficult conversations as a necessary component of a liberal arts education, inaugurated by a 1978 faculty-led discussion on “handling controversial issues in the classroom.”

In February 2013, Professor Robert Lue was named the inaugural Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Bok Center. A Professor of the Practice of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Lue served as Faculty Director until his passing in November 2020. 

In July 2024, Professor Karen Thornber was appointed the second Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director. Professor Thornber is Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, as well as President of Phi Beta Kappa Alpha Iota of Massachusetts. As reported in the Harvard Gazette, Thornber is currently leading a major transformation of the Bok Center to meet the needs of a wide range of students and instructors, necessary given rapid changes in higher education, technology, and society.