Lee Bollinger on the Hot Seat
At Columbia,
100 professors have presented Lee Bollinger with a "statement of concern" about his leadership.
They are most angry about the introduction he gave to Iranian president, A-jad, apparently seeing it as a concession to pressure from conservative critics of the invitation.
Afterward, several faculty members stressed that there had been no call for Mr. Bollinger to step down and nothing like the anger that led to the resignation last year of Lawrence Summers, Harvard University’s president.
“I didn’t get the sense that this is the final call for Bollinger,” said Peter Bearman, a professor of sociology. “Rather, the prevailing mood was one in which faculty eloquently modeled how to disagree, without insult or ad hominem charges.”
Take that, FAS.
Nonetheless, the Columbia faculty looks absurd. (Full disclosure: I advise students at the Columbia Journalism School, so marginally, I'm on the faculty. Really, really marginally.)
Eric Foner, an American history professor who was one of the most outspoken professors at yesterday’s meeting, read aloud some of Mr. Bollinger’s remarks to Mr. Ahmadinejad, and added, “This is the language of warfare at a time when the administration of our country is trying to whip up Iran, and to my mind is completely inaccurate.”
As a political agitator, Eric Foner makes a great historian....
And does this sound familiar to anyone?
Mr. Bollinger, who likened his experience at the faculty meeting to watching open-heart surgery on himself....
Of course, I'm not privy to internal sentiments; maybe there are things going on that I don't know about which are contributing to this outpouring of discontent. I just think that if the Columbia faculty can't get along with Lee Bollinger, who's about as liberal as you can get and still hope to run an organization, it needs a serious reality check.....
