Nearly four years after leaving the presidency of the University of Michigan, Lee C. Bollinger is again under fire from critics of its race-conscious admissions policies.
What has put him once more in the cross hairs of conservatives is a decision by the law school at the institution he now leads, Columbia University, to offer a faculty appointment to Olatunde C.A. (Olati) Johnson, who appears to have played a behind-the-scenes role in the landmark legal battle over the admissions policy on Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus.
When Ms. Johnson was an aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she wrote a memorandum in April 2002 urging the committee to put off confirming a fairly conservative nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit until after the full court had ruled in two lawsuits challenging Michigan’s policies.
After her memo was leaked, in 2003, the Center for Individual Freedom, an advocacy group, filed an ethics complaint against her with the state bar in New York State, where she is licensed. A bar official dismissed the complaint, saying the memo amounted to permissible political advice.
After the memo was written — and before the judicial nominee cited in it was confirmed — the Sixth Circuit ruled in Michigan’s favor in one of the two cases involving its law school. The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently upheld that decision. The Supreme Court took up the other case, involving undergraduate admissions, before the Sixth Circuit could rule on it, and struck down the policy at issue, ruling that it gave too much weight to race.
The controversy over the memo was revived last month in an op-ed article in the “New York Sun” that was cited in several conservative blogs.
The writer of the piece was Curt A. Levey, a former director of legal and public affairs for the Center for Individual Rights, which represented the white students who sued Michigan. Noting that Mr. Bollinger was a defendant in the Michigan cases and is a member of the Columbia law school’s faculty, he argued that Columbia could not have made an impartial decision in hiring Ms. Johnson “even if it tried.”
Conceding that Ms. Johnson appears qualified for the job, Mr. Levey wrote that “it is entirely possible that Mr. Bollinger is guilty of poor judgment rather than anything more malfeasant.” But, Mr. Levey said, her appointment “raises questions about a conflict of interest and a possible payoff for services rendered.”
Columbia officials have responded by circulating a letter that their law school’s dean, David M. Schizer, sent to the Sun. It says that Mr. Bollinger “was not personally involved in the law school’s decision to hire Professor Johnson,” and that “she brings a wealth of knowledge to her scholarship and teaching.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 52, Issue 33, Page A27
