Derek Bok, who served as president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991, recalls that after he was named to the job but before he took office, he was taken aside by “an older man of wide experience who had held high posts in Washington, had served on boards of trustees, and now headed an academic institution of considerable reputation.” The sage had a suggestion for a bold move by Mr. Bok: “While you are still in your honeymoon period and people are reluctant to be critical, why not announce your intention to do away with Harvard College?” Doing so, the sage said, would “acknowledge that teaching undergraduates has become an anachronism in the modern university. Professors are equipped to do research and to train their graduate students to do research. Teaching introductory economics to freshmen or European history to sophomores is a waste of talented scholars who should have no responsibilities to divert them from what they do uniquely well.”

Had Mr. Bok taken that advice, Harry Lewis would have less to complain about. Mr. Lewis was dean of Harvard College from 1995 to 2003, and he has just unleashed a scathing critique of the institution at which he is still a professor of computer science. Harvard, he writes in “Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education” (Public Affairs, 305 pages, $26), is full of examples of “how things go wrong when a college gets lazy.” The college is, in important senses, a “failure.” It has lost its soul.

This will come as news to the parents paying $41,675 a year to send a child there. And to the 22,700 students who apply each year for admission to a freshman class of about 1,650. And to the alumni whose generous contributions have helped Harvard amass an endowment of more than $25 billion.

But Mr. Lewis, who has been either a student or a professor at Harvard nearly without interruption since 1964, has a deep knowledge of the institution, so it’s worth listening to his complaints. He reports, “Students are unhappy because too many faulty members are not interested in them, except as potential academics, and the curriculum is designed more around the interest of the faculty than around the desires of the students or their families.”

Mr. Lewis’s critique is strongest when he faults Harvard for hanging back in wartime. The university’s departing president, Lawrence Summers, “publicly voiced his support of ROTC, speaking at its commissioning ceremony annually, but he did not call for Harvard to welcome ROTC back to campus – and also did not use his presidential authority to meet the program’s financial needs.”

Mr. Lewis writes that “Human freedom, and the capacity of education to free the mind and ennoble the soul, have long been bedrock values of a Harvard education,” faulting other Harvard deans for their suggestion that Harvard students should now be educated as “citizens of a global society” instead of as “citizens of a free society.” He asks, “Will America be, in Harvard’s eyes, merely another country, one among many?” Mr. Lewis seems to hope the answer is no but seems to be warning that unless the alumni act to turn the institution around, the answer will be yes.

His argument is undermined at times, though, by internal contradictions, particularly regarding Mr. Lewis’s treatment of Mr. Summers. Mr. Lewis faults Mr. Summers, who announced in February that he would re sign, for his “lack of candor.” Mr. Summers has taken plenty of criticism, some of which led to his resignation, but most of his critics faulted him for an excess of candor, not a lack of it.

The former dean of the college is particularly wrong when he faults Mr. Summers for criticizing advocates of divestment from Israel as “advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect and not their intent.” He mocks the phrase – yet later in the book, arguing that Ivy League and NCAA rules should be changed to allow student athletes to be paid to play, he writes, “Especially as these universities strive to enroll more students of very modest means, the extremely rigid controls of athletes’ compensation have discriminatory effects.” So it’s okay, in Mr. Lewis’s book, to discuss and worry about discriminatory effects on athletes from poor families, but not about discriminatory effects on Israeli Jews?

Elsewhere in the book, Mr. Lewis dwells a bit creepily on the news that a Harvard economics professor, Andrei Shleifer, “was reported to have broken the fast with Summers on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, three months after Shleifer had been found to have defrauded the government in his Harvard role.”

Despite these significant flaws, Mr. Lewis offers interesting suggestions on a gamut of issues confronting contemporary college students. He suggests, reasonably, that Harvard professors should take a step down from their vision of “academic purity” and teach accounting to the students of the college – along with some other classes that might offer some useful knowledge for citizenship. He suggests, reasonably, that the college disciplinary process is not the place to deal with allegations of the crime of rape.

On Mr. Lewis’s broader, central plea – for “The restoration of a true core to undergraduate education, an approach to education that will turn dependent adolescents into wise adults” – he’s probably asking for too much from Harvard deans and professors. Turning adolescents into adults is a task too important to be left to Harvard professors, which Mr. Lewis, as a lifelong Harvard professor, seems unwilling to concede.

As it is, the Harvard admissions office does a pretty good job of admitting a group of young people who, whatever the failings of their deans or their curriculum and however self-absorbed their professors, manage to do okay for themselves, in good part by learning from each other. Mr. Lewis says the case of Bill Gates, who dozed off in the back of Mr. Lewis’s classroom and then dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft, taught him to be skeptical of claims of “value added” by universities. Or, as a Princeton professor put it to Mr. Lewis, “the more Harvard education you have, the less far you go in life.”

In any event, Mr. Bok’s “older man of wide experience” had identified the contradictions of undergraduate education at Harvard back in 1971, and Mr. Bok recounted the anecdote in his 1986 book “Higher Learning.” Now that Mr. Lewis is revisiting the problems in 2006, one gets the idea that they will be with us for some time. Or at least until the current generation of professors is replaced by their current students, who, as Mr. Lewis acknowledges, are “politically more balanced than the faculty.”