Being Lee Bollinger: The very model of a modern college president

National Review, Oct 14, 2002 by Matthew Continetti

Lee Bollinger, the recently installed president of Columbia University, is used to praise. Newsweek labeled him an exemplar of a "new, visionary breed of college presidents." In The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann wrote that "if you were called upon to invent a perfect university president, you couldn't do better" than Bollinger. And in an article entitled "A Renaissance Man at Columbia's Helm," the Christian Science Monitor cooed that beneath the college president's "gentle voice and unassuming manner lies a powerful legal counterpuncher."

Why all the approbation? There are two reasons. The first is that Bollinger is a capable administrator. For example, when he served as president of the University of Michigan, he saw through the creation of a new Life Sciences Institute -- a project with a hefty price tag of $700 million. But the second, and more important, reason is political. He represents a new type of university president, one whose notoriety stems not from his work as a public intellectual or even his prowess as a fundraiser, but from the left-wing causes with which he is associated. If the Supreme Court decides to hear arguments in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger this fall, not only will the University of Michigan's affirmative-action policies be in the spotlight, but so will the chief defender of those policies -- Lee Bollinger. With his newly acquired prominence as the head of an Ivy League university, and with the upcoming zero-hour in a five-year court battle over the future of affirmative action, Bollinger is poised to become one of the most recognized university figures in the country.

All this should be enough to cause substantial heartache for conservatives, especially those who are familiar with Bollinger's record. The 56-year-old graduate of the University of Oregon and Columbia Law has a history of associating the good of his students with whatever leftish cause is currently garnering national attention. The typical result of this campus crusade for political correctness is a diminution of the idea of liberal education. Nicholas Lemann has it wrong: By any traditional standard, Lee Bollinger is the worst college president in America.

A clerk for Chief Justice Warren Burger in the 1970s, Bollinger made his debut on the national political scene during Robert Bork's Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1987. Having recently been appointed dean of the University of Michigan Law School, Bollinger -- the author of several books on free speech -- argued before the Senate that Bork's interpretation of the First Amendment could lead to an eventual rollback of legal precedent. Bollinger's testimony was one of the many blows that defeated Bork's nomination. And one thing became clear after Bollinger's testimony: He did not hold scholarship to be more sacred than politics.

You see, Bollinger himself knows a thing or two about restricting free speech. A year after his testimony against Bork, the University of Michigan became mired in controversy when its governing body adopted a stringent speech code, which stipulated that speech offensive to an individual on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, etc. was a punishable offense. The code was in effect for only 15 months -- it was struck down as unconstitutional by a federal court -- but a number of students were nonetheless penalized for offensive speech. As Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby has reported, one student was punished simply "for saying that 'he had heard that minorities had a difficult time in [a] course and . . . were not treated fairly.'"

Where was Bollinger during all this? As dean of the law school, he was in a perfect position to speak out against the code. But throughout the code's short, unhappy life, Bollinger said nary a word about it. "The failure of the dean of a law school, especially one with an expertise in the First Amendment, to speak up against a patently unconstitutional speech code is a blight on his record that should be mentioned until he explains himself," says William Rice of the American Academy for Liberal Education. "It does raise the question of what he's been willing to tolerate."

Bollinger has said that he always opposed the code, but in a 1989 interview with the Associated Press he sent mixed signals. When asked to predict how the circuit court would rule, Bollinger answered: "The case law on what speech can be restricted is quite unclear. . . . Should the university be the place in society where there is ultimate protection of free speech, or is it a place where you want to preserve civility and discourse? Those are two very different models, both with strong appeals."

Bollinger's ambivalence toward the speech code might not have made him any friends with the civil-liberties crowd, but it didn't hurt his career. After a brief sojourn as provost of Dartmouth, he was named president of the University of Michigan in 1996. Returning to Ann Arbor, he was greeted by the twin lawsuits known as Gratz (charging discrimination under the guise of affirmative action, at the university) and Grutter (ditto, at the law school).