(FORTUNE Magazine) – What means the news from Harvard? We allude of course to the titanic struggle over union representation for the university's mostly female technical and clerical workers. Prexy Derek Bok was widely hypothesized to be feeling grief if not gastritis when the figures showed a narrow (1,530 to 1,486) win for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Bok's point person on the issue, Anne Taylor, asked the NLRB to toss out the results and call a new election. But about the deeper meaning of it all. We begin our analysis with the instantly immortal mixed metaphor composed by union leader Kristine Rondeau in the course of arguing with Bok. ''He spends his entire life on one side of the fence,'' observed Kristine, ''and now . . . he's forced to wear a different hat.'' Great line, eh? Its authoress was alluding to the fact that Derek is a professional labor economist and co-author of Labor and the American Community, a work totally committed to the view that unionism is great stuff. He has called unions ''a good thing for America and for working people.'' In a 1971 law review article, he gurgled that only in America could one find ''such efflorescence of collectively bargained experiments providing imaginative benefits for workers.'' So how could old Derek turn around and come out against efflorescence? His rationale will be of special interest to businesspersons. In a letter to Harvard employees, Bok said that he still believes in unionism but feels it is inappropriate in a university committed to excellence and high standards. Casting a cold eye on AFSCME, he complained, ''Unions have typically resisted efforts to reward superior achievement with greater compensation or to allow supervisors and employees to vary the way they work in response to their special needs and capabilities.'' Obvious implication: Worker incentives and management flexibility are not all that important in the dumb old profit- seeking sector. Maddening, eh?

That's not the worst of it. In the months before the union vote, Bok was casting himself as a critic of American competitiveness. In a speech at Duke University, he asked why the U.S. had fallen so far behind Japan and other countries, and suggested that, among other things, America has badly trained workers, ineffective management, and business schools that neglect such problems as the motivation of workers. It's enough to make a fellow vote for AFSCME.