‘We’re in the Midst of an Authoritarian Takeover’

Lee Bollinger retired as president of Columbia University in 2023 after 21 years in office. A First Amendment scholar, he is one of the most influential academic administrators in recent American history. As president of the University of Michigan from 1996 until 2002, he successfully defended affirmative action at Michigan’s law school in the landmark 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, which was the law of the land until 2023, when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

The nearly two years since Bollinger stepped down have been tumultuous at Columbia. Pro-Palestinian protests and police crackdowns ended the brief tenure of his successor, Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, who resigned in August. We wanted to hear from Bollinger about the extraordinary political events engulfing the university he led for so long — as well as about affirmative action, the question of campus antisemitism, the relationship between First Amendment jurisprudence and campus speech, and how college leaders should handle the Trump administration. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Len Gutkin: Before the interview, Evan and I were joking that if we were in your position, we’d want to be on an island somewhere, drinking mojitos and soaking up sun and ignoring the news as much as possible. You stepped down in 2023 after 25 years as a college president. Do you look at what’s happening now and think, I got out just in time?

Lee Bollinger: When I stepped down it took me several months to realize that I had lived with a kind of stress, a responsibility for a quarter century. It is a very difficult assignment. Not to have that has been a tremendous release, especially at my age.

This is an incredibly difficult time, not just for universities but for the country and the world. In many ways, university presidents just aren’t selected for the skills that you need when you confront these sorts of things, and universities aren’t set up to deal with them.

Gutkin: What are the skills required for the job at this moment?

Bollinger: Deans and provosts and presidents are pretty much selected for their academic distinction, for their understanding of the academic way of life. How do you recruit people? How do you decide who to give tenure to? What should be the areas of knowledge that should be emphasized? Those things are incredibly important to the leadership of a university. Universities are unique communities. They live by norms that nobody else on the planet does. There’s an emphasis on open-mindedness, skepticism, trying to expand knowledge, digging into areas that maybe very few people care about but that are important to humanity. They’re very special, unique communities. You want people who understand that.

And then you hit a crisis. Dealing with a crisis is just a different set of skills. How do you go on national TV and explain and answer well? I made big mistakes early on in that way.

Then there’s the political toughness. Right now, universities are asking themselves: Should we try to find ways to accommodate and be responsive? Or should we stand up for the rights that we think are being threatened? Those calculations are very complex. To any ordinary college president, they’re pretty new. They haven’t played hardball politics.

Gutkin: One of the calculations university leaders are having to make right now is whether to fight or whether to try and negotiate some compromise with the Trump administration, specifically with respect to antisemitism and its supposed ubiquity on campus. So far, they mostly seem to be agreeing with the administration that they are guilty of real lapses in protecting Jewish or Israeli students from discriminatory abuse. So they’ve done things to try and mitigate that. Just today, UCLA set up a new “Initiative to Combat Antisemitism.” Have universities conceded too much in advance?

Bollinger: I can’t comment specifically on current responses among universities, in part because they are facing an extremely difficult and, I would say, unprecedented political environment and, in part, because they are being put in a vise of dealing with an admittedly serious problem and being presented with an existential threat by forces unclear about what they really want. I can, however, make more general comments.

First, I believe universities must understand what their identity is, their role in the society, and then express and defend that identity. It is my view that the First Amendment should extend special protections to universities just as it arguably does for the press, as institutions of systemic importance serving the public’s interest in advancing understanding and knowledge and in informing the public about vital issues. Courts have afforded universities important protections because they are part of the bedrock of American values, reflected in the Constitution. Universities need to articulate that special role and defend it.

Second, I think that seeking shelter in the courts is most often the necessary path. I share the view of those who argue that the government cannot intrude into university decision-making without compelling reasons, whether directly or by placing unconstitutional conditions on funding. When I became president of the University of Michigan, I was immediately informed that we were the next target of the anti-affirmative action movement. This was an attack on a core value of the institution, and settlement or capitulation was not an option in my view. We ended up successfully making that case in the Supreme Court.

And, third, it is always important to take the long view, and we must make sure that when we emerge from whatever present crisis we are in, the choices we made will not make us ashamed. Universities last for centuries.

Gutkin: In the affirmative-action cases, including at Michigan under your leadership, the universities did fight hard. They won for a long time, and then they lost. Looking back, did defending affirmative action, which has often been unpopular, harm universities?

Bollinger: Here are the key themes. We come out of the civil-rights era and selective universities look at their student bodies and they say, We’re all white men. This is 20 years after Brown v. Board and 20 years after the society has gone through a tumultuous period of trying to come to terms with a couple of centuries of slavery and severe discrimination. And universities say to themselves, We really need to help society overcome this past which is also present. We need to take steps to try to integrate and expand groups within our student bodies and our faculties.

Other sectors of society do that too. It’s an admirable moral, legal, and ethical response. And then it’s challenged, because it’s also very controversial, and in 1978 Bakke v. California comes down. And Justice Lewis Powell says, in the deciding vote, Here’s how it’s going to be from now on. You can never talk about the past as the basis for affirmative action. But you can talk about diversity.

In many ways, that neutralized the effort that had been under way for several years. After that, every college dean and president was instructed by their general counsel not to justify affirmative action on the basis of dealing with invidious discrimination over centuries and continuing to this day. They were told to only talk about the benefits of having people from different groups together.

When the Grutter case came, I had to make a decision: Were we going to reintroduce the rationale of racial justice, or were we going to stay with the diversity rationale? We stayed with diversity, but we did argue that intellectually you can’t really think about the benefits of diversity with respect to African Americans without having some sense of the history of race in America. The two rationales are integrated in a sense.

We won. But society takes on a different kind of character as it moves along, and we end up with SFFA v. Harvard.

In all that time, society is moving more and more to the right. But we got a half century of these efforts by universities and by other sectors that were incredibly important in getting a more integrated society — the judiciary, the legal system, and so on. They were very successful. And in a way what Justice John Roberts found in SFFA was unfair. He said, You keep talking about the benefits of diversity, but you don’t give us any proof. And the answer in a practical sense is that that’s because the court told us 30 years ago that we had to use this vague, general kind of rationale.

So I’m not sympathetic to criticism of universities for pursuing affirmative action for so long. I am critical of the way that it unfolded because of the unfortunate opinion by Powell.

Goldstein: There’s a lot of talk of institutional neutrality these days. You were president during the George Floyd moment in 2020, and you released a statement about Floyd’s murder. But since 10/7, statements by college leaders have become very fraught. Any regrets?

Bollinger: I do not regret that I made those statements. The feeling that rose up at that moment was very powerful. The feeling that there is such unfairness in society, such injustice — and there is. So then the question is, Should a president of a university where this is palpable say anything about this?

In general, I agree with institutional neutrality. It’s not our business to take institutional positions on tax policy, or the war in Ukraine and how it should be settled, or how to deal with a two-state solution. But the idea that we don’t have any values in the university about racial discrimination, that we’re neutral on the whole area of discrimination — that I don’t think you can argue.

When people are extremely angry at you, and they believe you have done nothing or too little, or that you’ve done too much, it is very appealing to say, We’re retreating, we’re not going to speak about these things. That impulse, I think, is driving universities too much today.

Goldstein: You spoke about the value in that George Floyd moment of decrying injustice in our own society. But what do you say to the student who says, I totally agree, so why is the university not adequately standing up to injustice in Gaza?

Bollinger: In my view, every single president, no matter how committed they are to institutional neutrality, is going to end up taking a position on some controversial issue. It’s just inevitable. But there are ways to think of the lines here. One way: Because we are committed to trying to be nonpolitical, nonpartisan, when there is disagreement within the campus community you refrain from taking a position. I don’t think there is any debate within the academic community about whether there is ongoing racial discrimination against African Americans.

Gutkin: You’ve been an opponent of academic boycotts. The AAUP has recently revised its position on boycotts; they now say they can be compatible with academic freedom.

Bollinger: I haven’t studied the AAUP thing. But my feeling in general is that it’s a grave mistake to punish universities because of actions of their government.

Goldstein: I want to ask about a paper published by the American Enterprise Institute, by a senior fellow there named Max Eden. It’s a self-described “Comprehensive Guide to Overhauling Higher Education.” Have you seen this document?

Bollinger: I’ve seen parts of it.

Goldstein: Probably the parts I’m going to ask you about. It includes things like raising the endowment tax, the 15 percent indirect-costs cap — some of the things the Trump administration is trying to do. It also states: “destroy Columbia University,” another thing the Trump administration is arguably trying to do. And then it gets quite personal about you. It says that college presidents regard you as “perhaps the greatest college leader of the 21st century.” And then it says you should be arrested as a kind of warning shot to the rest of the sector. “Perhaps the college presidents could learn a valuable lesson from the sight of him in an orange jumpsuit.”

Bollinger: It’s deeply, deeply disturbing. I’m sure there are things in the document that you could have a serious conversation about, but to take it to this level is frightening for the United States. It’s frightening for all of us. It’s the kind of turn toward tyranny that needs to be condemned. Its animating spirit is destructive to values that any sane, reasonable society cares about.

Gutkin: As a First Amendment scholar, what do you make of the attempted deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student and leader of its pro-Palestinian protest movement?

Bollinger: There are lots of things we don’t know. I start from the standpoint of the First Amendment. The core principle is that we seek a vigorous, robust debate in society. We understand that that will result in views that are deeply offensive, even highly dangerous, but that is the commitment that the Supreme Court has made over many decades with the idea that excesses in the marketplace of ideas are worth tolerating.

And we value foreign students. The United States has benefited enormously by bringing people from all over the world to study and be part of our system of higher education. Given those two themes — a robust marketplace of ideas and the benefits of open immigration for higher education — it would be a tragedy to allow the immigration process to violate that core First Amendment principle.

Now there’s an argument about the powers of the federal government to control the immigration system broadly without judicial interventions, even with something as powerful as the First Amendment. I would hope at the end of the day the court would find a way to continue to give a reasonable amount of deference but to uphold the core First Amendment principle.

Gutkin: Do you think this case is going to end up in the Supreme Court?

Bollinger: I really don’t know.

Goldstein: So the Khalil case illuminates some unsettled aspects of the law?

Bollinger: That’s right. And the government hasn’t told us yet what the full facts are, which is problematic in itself because you expect with something so significant to hear what the government’s case is.

Goldstein: What are the potential implications of the Khalil case for university behavior? Leo Terrell, the head of the Justice Department’s antisemitism task force, described the arrest of Khalil as a “deterrent.” How should college leaders respond?

Bollinger: The response has to be very complex, under the circumstances. We have serious problems to deal with. I view what’s happened to many Jewish students and faculty and the antisemitism they’ve experienced as horrendous. Universities do need to attend to that. I think our systems of discipline for violations of that kind and many others are inadequate to the moment. We lack a rule of law at universities, and that rule of law is needed for there to be a robust free-speech commitment.

I also think that universities have not been sufficiently articulate about what free speech means on a campus. Public universities must abide by the First Amendment; private universities can choose. Almost every private university has chosen to live by the First Amendment. The First Amendment is not a simple jurisprudence; it’s very complex. People routinely think that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment in America. The fact is, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, over many decades. The Klan, the neo-Nazis — there are many examples.

I think it’s also reasonable for universities to say, If we’re a private university, maybe we should rethink what people are allowed to say on a campus. I’ve heard people say it, and I think it’s a very powerful argument, that for example advocating invidious discrimination against groups, or advocating physical violence, is so inconsistent with the humanistic values of the university that we should not respect it on a campus. That’s a reasonable debate and it should be had if people are so inclined.

But there’s no doubt that there will be very deep and lasting chilling effects on speech on campuses as a result of these actions.

Goldstein: You described what’s happened to Jewish students as “horrendous.” In some 2005 remarks, you said, “It is simply preposterous to characterize Columbia as antisemitic or as having a hostile climate for Jewish students and faculty.” Would you say that today?

Bollinger: I believe that was true then. It’s not that there wasn’t any antisemitism. But the general feeling on campus was that this was a small component. I think that’s changed over time, and I don’t know exactly why. I think it’s become much more serious today.

Goldstein: Is there anything we haven’t asked that you want to weigh in on?

Bollinger: We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orbán and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.

We’re beginning to see the effects on universities. It’s very, very frightening.