‘We need to address intolerance’

Lee Bollinger, who has led Columbia University since 2002, is an expert on legal and constitutional issues involving free speech and a free press, and a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

He was among a group of representatives from 30 American universities who recently visited Greece to explore new partnerships with local institutions. During his visit, he announced the establishment of a Columbia Global Center in Athens. It will be one of 10 centers around the world aiming to enrich the scientific and research work in the country it is based in. 

Starting off with Columbia’s planned initiative, the conversation veered off to other topics, including former US president Donald Trump, political correctness at universities and the contemporary challenges facing democracy.

The first thing I want to ask is about the Global Center. When do you think it’s going to open its doors and what exactly is it going to do? 

We are still looking for a physical place in which to lodge the Global Center and I am positive we will find that very shortly. We will need a director and staff, and we already have plans for an interim director and staff to do this. And then the question will be programs that we will develop. This will be the 10th Global Center of Columbia. It’s a network around the world, not branch campuses. We don’t have faculty and students who are there. We really try to facilitate the work of Columbia faculty and students in New York by working around the world with the people and institutions.

So, to give an example or two. We have fantastic work on climate at Columbia. We have a new School of Climate Change. We have projects at the university level that try to take that work and help societies around the world. A specific example is a group within Colombia that is able to model very effectively – bets in the world – short-term climate change. So they can predict, in a very small region like a valley or whatever, what are the probabilities of a drought within the next five years? What are the probabilities of excessive rain? And then people can adjust, farmers can adjust what they plant, the governments can adjust. That’s something that a Global Center will help facilitate happening. Another example is teacher training and education.

There are many things I could say, but this is just Colombia, as one institution trying to be out in the world and working on problems and issues, and also helping students learn about the world. The Global Center in Athens will continue this work and expand it. We already have many faculty and students doing things in Greece and in Athens. All that will be a base and then we’ll just build from there. 

One thing I read recently which concerned me was that enrollments at colleges in the US have dropped. Why do you think this is? Is it the quality or that people don’t find going to college useful? 

Of course it’s not true at Columbia. Our applications are up 25 percent this year. But I think there is an issue broadly in America about accessibility of higher education, financially. In a university like Colombia, if you apply to the undergraduate programs in college or to the engineering school, it’s need-blind. Your wealth does not determine whether you get in and if you do get in and need financial aid and your family makes 60,000 dollars or less, you come free. We pay for everything. An institution like Colombia, and a few other very selective institutions, do try to make sure that it is affordable for students. But I know public universities, because I was part of the University of Michigan for 25 years, and during my time, including as president, the state support declined every single year and decade, and that meant an increase in tuition in order for the universities to do what they were supposed to do: research, teaching. And I think that’s also true at every state school across the country. I view the decline as being significantly about the cost of education.

Since you’re an expert on freedom of speech, I wonder whether sometimes you feel that this trend of political correctness is a threat to freedom of speech in American academia.

I don’t think that political correctness, which definitely exists, is threatening American universities. I think that is a criticism that is out of proportion to any sense of reality that I know. I do think that universities have intolerance within them, but so does every part of society. At universities that may seem more problematic because our whole point is to be open-minded and incredibly objective and I certainly share that. I do think it’s present and I’m not shocked by it because I live a life where intolerance and censorship are the things that I study and expect and see, and so on, and it should be addressed. It’s difficult to address sometimes but it really should be and I’ve tried to do that. Every student who enters Columbia hears me speak on the importance of open-mindedness and freedom of speech and tolerance, and every student who graduates hears me say it and we have many ways of making sure that speakers from all points of view are protected when they come in and faculty are protected for their work. So, we absolutely work on this. Every university does. And it is a problem, but I think it’s just overstated as a critique of American universities that they are on the cusp of falling apart because of political correctness. It is often a criticism of the right that is really made to discredit universities rather than based on the facts.

Trump vs democracy

I was astonished to hear you say that the United States is on the verge of becoming an authoritarian state. Do you really believe that? And what do you mean by authoritarian?

It’s a very complicated matter, but if you look at the culture of American politics in the last six years and the willingness of major political figures, led by Donald Trump, to engage in willful and obvious falsehoods as a standard political campaigning and governance technique, that’s a breach of a kind of civic discourse you need. I think of the shocking fact and events of January 6, not only in itself a real threat, but what it represented, in a way of not living by the fundamental tenets of democracy. Everybody always refers to the peaceful transfer of power and all of those things. I could go on, but I think those are signal facts that elevate the risk of moving towards a more authoritarian system of government. 

I think the US went through a very extremist and populist period in the 60s, with assassinations, riots and so on. Have you lost your faith in the system reinventing itself in America? 

I absolutely have not lost my faith in that. I think the optimistic side of this is right. As I have said before, if you’re a scholar of the First Amendment, you’ve seen multiple periods where there has been a rise of authoritarian-style behavior. And even though we are in another period like that, I remain confident that the system still has institutions and core values that allow the society to work through these things.

Take social media platforms, which I think are great in the sense of expanding opportunities for speech and extremely dangerous in expanding opportunities for counter-democratic expression. There are ways, if we’re smart about this, that we can have the first without having the second quite so much. My feeling is America just seems to always go through problems. They get to the verge of them getting really, really serious, but then something will work it out. I expect that to happen here, including social media. 

One of the astonishing things you said is that the military played a critical role in protecting democracy during the storming of the Capitol? What do you mean by that? 

I am just a consumer of the news. I have no inside information but as I watched what was unfolding over the past year or two at the end of the Trump presidency, I knew, like any student of the Constitution or of democracy, that the the institution that is perhaps the most dangerous is the military and if the military can be compromised and turned to political ends, then then you have the full power of force. And so everything I know about the military leadership was just very positive in the ways in which they were determined to live according to that principle of not becoming a political weapon. I’m sort of out of my league and I don’t study the military – I interact with some people in the military – but that was just my observation.

The other institutions that really are critically important and did their job was the rule of law and the courts – almost every court but one, I think, [responded] immediately and throughout the challenges to the election and to me this is a really significant sign of health – and then journalism. I think we have an incredible tradition and I think journalists performed their function, as did public health and medicine in the pandemic. We have many institutions that have not been compromised, quite the opposite, and really perform brilliantly.