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

National Review, Oct 14, 2002 by Matthew Continetti

The new president's response was to mount one of the most aggressive defenses of affirmative action yet. Bollinger argued that affirmative action was not just one way to make sure minority students get an education, but also the only way to achieve the true end of education: diversity. "This principle of [affirmative action] is a deep part of the educational philosophy of American higher education," Bollinger told the Christian Science Monitor last year. "Without the diversity it provides, the character and the quality of our great public universities would decline."

It is on this point that Bollinger has staked the life of affirmative action: that education without a racially diverse student body isn't education at all, and, further, that a system of discrimination based on racial preferences is the only means to achieving a racially diverse student body. And it isn't intellectual diversity that the president is talking about, nor is it religious diversity, nor even political. It is simple, unalterable, banal skin color that Bollinger says must be diversified in order to provide students with a worthy education.

A poll conducted by the Michigan Daily, the university's student-run paper, found that a majority of students there opposed affirmative action. But elite opinion continues to dominate discussion of racial preferences, and Bollinger's man-of-the-people dealings with undergraduates inoculate him from criticism. In 1997, for example, just a few months after he became president, a large crowd of revelers formed outside his mansion, celebrating Michigan's football victory over Penn State. Bollinger opened his doors and invited the students -- all of them -- inside to celebrate.

Bollinger must have a love of strangers who occupy his personal space, because after 30 anti-sweatshop activists stormed his office in 1999 he told the New York Times that the activists were "terrific students . . . They're just the kind of students you want on your campus. They were interested in a serious problem, they were knowledgeable about the problem, and they really wanted to do something about it."

The problem with Bollinger's approach to education is that because its focus is on political activity, there's a decline in basic academic seriousness. The Ann Arbor News reported that Bollinger's convocation at the University of Michigan last year was significant for such helpful advice as "Be comfortable with your ignorance," "Don't let yourself be trapped by the natural wish for the answer," and "Don't underestimate the benefits of putting things off until the last moment." And when the New York Times education supplement recently asked Bollinger what students should get out of college, he replied, "The university is about being able to move intellectually within a whole array of views. . . . It's actually a quite frightening experience. The world will always be for you a more difficult and complicated place than perhaps you would like it to be."

That must have been the message that Bollinger was trying to send when he refused to condemn the heckling and catcalling that greeted Ward Connerly when the anti-preferences activist addressed Michigan students in 1998. Indeed, Bollinger's intellectual and administrative stance capitulates to the Left whenever it is politically expedient. "University presidents should be strong," says Matthew Schwartz, a former editor of the Michigan Review who was once a student of Bollinger's. "And Bollinger wasn't." If Lee Bollinger is indeed the future of American higher education, then college students face a future bereft of important principles like freedom of speech and equality under the law.