Derek Bok has served as president of Harvard twice, from 1971 to 1991 and again from 2006-07. He has written much about higher education and is by no means a reflexive defender of the status quo—see, for example, his The Struggle to Reform Our Colleges, which I reviewed here. Bok’s latest book is Attacking the Elites: What Critics Get Wrong—and Right—About America’s Leading Universities. He explains that his motivation for it was the absence of response from our “elite” higher-education institutions to the surge in criticism from both sides of our political divide. As his subtitle suggests, he thinks that...