I reached out to Bollinger this week, as a third round of embattled university presidents was grilled on Capitol Hill about their handling of the protests and hate speech, for a couple of reasons.
He not only led Columbia through all manner of turmoil over 21 years, but before that spent six at the helm of the University of Michigan, where he successfully defended affirmative action at the Supreme Court. The son and grandson of newspapermen who grew up developing film and melting lead for linotypes, Bollinger does not just study free speech principles, he breathes them.
“Whenever you have people who strongly disagree, where people are saying outrageous things and very hurtful things and dangerous things, you really need to have a campaign to try to come to terms with that without using censorship,” he told me.
“It’s hard when people are angry and so passionate — and maybe wrong and misguided as well — to try to bring this to a better place,” Bollinger added. “But that is the true challenge of the First Amendment, or a democracy, or certainly a university.”
We met in Ann Arbor in 2001, when I was covering higher education for The New York Times and he was battling back challenges to Michigan’s push to diversify its student body. I described him then as an unpretentious Renaissance man who “easily mixes intellectual pronouncements with deadpan humor,” a runner of marathons, fan of Paul Simon, owner of a Labrador, driver of a Jeep.
Now 78, Bollinger is finishing up a sabbatical year at his summer home in Maine, and will be back at Columbia Law School teaching about the First Amendment this fall. He has not spoken out about the campus protests because he made a vow to himself long before Oct. 7 not to say anything that could be construed as critical of his successor for at least this first sabbatical year.
So I agreed not to ask about Columbia’s new president Minouche Shafik, who is under fire from all sides for her handling of the protests, in order to get his broader insights — especially about the role of the university president, over time and at this critical time.
For it seems to me that never have so many smart people bungled things as badly as university presidents have on Israel-Palestine this year. Watching their mealy-mouthed statements in the fall and overly aggressive crackdowns this spring, I’ve been disappointed by the lack of thought leadership and what seems like a tragic narrowing of the space for the truly difficult conversations that should be a hallmark of higher education.
And now, a staggering number of top schools — Yale, Harvard, U.Penn, Cornell, UCLA, Notre Dame, among others — are all on the hunt for new presidents, in some cases to replace folks forced to resign for mishandling this year’s madness.
I asked Bollinger what it takes to succeed in what he called “the greatest job in the world even though it’s among the most difficult.”
You have to come from within academia, he said, and understand its “very special culture and very distinct organizational characteristics.” You have to stay connected, by continuing to teach and do research. You cannot lose the faculty.
“A university is a bizarre organization,” Bollinger noted. “You would never in your wildest dreams design a university in the way a university is, and yet they are among if not the prime example of successful American institutions.
I gleaned another critical characteristic as he spoke — to retain some humility despite being the smartest person in most rooms. And: Take the long view.
“Right now universities are under the gun and they’re criticized,” he continued, “but the fact of the matter is, by any standard — student demand, contribution to the well-being of society, the creation of modern life — universities are among the most successful institutions in the United States. They are the envy of the world.”
