Meanwhile, Down South at Columbia
Lee Bollinger undergoes a trip to the dentist's office, in the form of a New York Times profile that posits significant discontent with his leadership at Columbia.
"In one of many telling moments, Ann Douglas, an English professor, described a recent book party attended by many faculty members, where 'everyone was saying disparaging things about Bollinger and no one was rising to his defense.'"
Sound familiar?
In fact, much of the article does sound eerily similar to events at Harvard this past semester. Which makes me draw a few conclusions:
1) Academics are cranky and don't like change.
2) Presidents hired with a mandate to change will provoke friction, inevitably.
3) Professors in the humanities, whether they realize it or not, are experiencing a profound sense of alienation and, possibly, irrelevance, as new university presidents shift the focus of their universities to the sciences and to solving the problems of the world.
4) If Columbia professors have problems with Lee Bollinger, they'd have Larry Summers' head on a spike by now.
Because there are big differences between Bollinger and Summers, too. First, the level of discontent is not nearly as high at Columbia as at Harvard. Second, Bollinger had to deal with an extremely tricky controversy in the Middle Eastern studies department that was not of his own making, and he navigated through it reasonably well.
And perhaps most important is Bollinger's attitude towards dissent.
"'I'm just not troubled by the level of disagreement and debate,' he said recently, during an interview in his expansive office on the second floor of Low Library, adorned with bright geometric paintings by Josef Albers. 'It's debate and it's healthy.'"
He's also pretty self-deprecatory. "'It would be nice if I was smarter, and in 48 hours could have grasped everything,' added Mr. Bollinger, who was a clerk for Warren E. Burger, the chief justice of the United States. 'But I'm not. And I still don't grasp everything.'"
It's impossible to judge from outside just how sincere Bollinger is about these remarks, of course. But can one imagine Larry Summers saying something as modest as "It would be nice if I were smarter and could grasp everything"?
Part of what caused the women-in-science controversy is that Summers does believe that in 48 hours he can grasp everything....
