University: A Reckoning by Lee C. Bollinger |
My years at Columbia University from 2013 to 2017 remain the most significant accomplishment of my life and among my most cherished memories. To be accepted was not simply an academic milestone, but a formative experience that shaped how I think about education, civic life, the responsibilities of institutions in a free society, and the place where I learned to back up my beliefs with academic rigor. Most notably, Columbia was the place where I became a conservative after a lifetime of liberal thought and voting patterns. For these reasons, it has been especially painful to watch Columbia in recent years come under scrutiny as a symbol of the radicalism, activism, and antisemitism that many believe now plague American higher education. Whatever the precise causes, something is clearly wrong in academia, in America, and in the institutions upon which it is built.
When I learned that American attorney and former president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, had written University: A Reckoning, I was eager to read it. Bollinger’s deep attachment to Columbia and to the university system seemed to mirror my own. Because I remembered him speaking at orientation about the virtues of Aristotle, I expected a thoughtful and balanced account of the crisis facing American colleges. However, after reading only the introduction, it became clear that Bollinger and I could not disagree more, not only about the turmoil on today’s college campuses and who is responsible, but also about the broader condition of America itself and how to remedy it. I found it best for my purposes to skip the book introduction, as President Trump was, as in every liberal treatise about all that ails America and the world, presented as the central threat. I knew at page two where the book was going, but I pressed on.
Bollinger is at his best when he talks about the true purpose of a university, how it actually works, and why universities are important. He initially offers a simple definition: “Universities are intended to preserve and advance human knowledge about the human condition, about life and about the natural world, and to pass human knowledge and the capacities to pursue it on to succeeding generations.” Bollinger portrays a proper university as a place where professors, experts in their respective fields, possess a
“scholarly temperament,” and are so engaged with their students after lectures, they need hours of recovery.
Tenure, the guarantee of lifetime employment, is the reward for professors who choose to pursue truth and academic freedom rather than more lucrative employment. Although he admits that, in his former role as nineteenth president of Columbia University, he often felt compelled to resist this phenomenon, universities work because “true power or authority over its core functions resides at the base of the institution, with the faculty first and with the school secondarily.” It sounds counterintuitive, but according to Bollinger,........