It's not clear to us what the job and responsibilities are of a University president, but somehow we fail to see how the actions of Columbia University's Lee C. Bollinger are benefiting the campus and the campus community.

Bollinger is certainly drawing a lot of attention to himself and to Columbia with his push, for example, to expand the physical boundaries of the campus into the surrounding community.  And no doubt, few will soon forget both his invitation to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus followed by his dressing down of same.

As a result of Bollinger's actions, do more students wish to attend Columbia?  Are alumni inclined to reach deeper into their pockets to endow the school?  Are professors clamoring to leave their existing institutions and sign on at Columbia?  Will students leave the campus better prepared to deal with the world at large?

Just who, other than himself, is Lee C. Bollinger serving?  It is a question we hope the Columbia University Board of Trustees is asking itself.

Here is what others have to say on the subject:

Excuse the lack of politic, but there’s a lot of bad [deleted] going down at Columbia University on President Lee Bollinger’s watch. From nooses and swastikas to student loan scandals to the rape and torture of a graduate student, from rowdy lefties to university-sanctioned visits by Holocaust denying heads of state to Columbia’s impending imperial Ivy sprawl, the CUNY Grad Center’s genteel neighbor to the north has become the center of a maelstrom as events snowball under their own momentum and Bollinger struggles to appear effective. What sense of it at all, if any, perhaps may be made by teasing out the threads of free speech, green speech, and hate speech, accompanied by a collective sigh of relief across from the Empire State Building that we at CUNY aren’t shelling out $40,000-plus a year to be embroiled in this tomfoolery?

Tony Monchinski
CUNY Graduate Center Advocate
November 2007