One spring evening in 2003, University President Lee Bollinger entered a Chinese restaurant with a professor. He exited with a provost in the making.
“It was the biggest shock of my life,” Provost and Allan Nevins Professor of American History Alan Brinkley said about his boss’s abrupt proposal. “I had no idea that it had even crossed his mind to get me to be provost.”
That’s because Brinkley came into the job with an enormous academic record but little administrative experience. Despite the University’s formal administrative search processes, Bollinger bypassed much of the ceremony and spontaneously snatched Brinkley, who had been at Columbia for 12 years, from the history department.
Bollinger was new to Columbia at the time, and met Brinkley on his task force to revamp the School of Journalism. “I was impressed by him, and I just knew in the end that I wanted to work with him as provost,” Bollinger said.
“It took me a few seconds to get over it,” Brinkley said of the offer.
As provost, Brinkley, a prominent historian, was known for being even-handed and diplomatic in the face of controversy. But after his five-year tenure, Brinkley announced Wednesday that he would step down at the end of the academic year, take a year of leave, and return to Columbia’s history department.
During his five-year term as provost, Brinkley oversaw controversial tenure cases, the unionization of graduate students, a new faculty housing program, and the facilitation of Columbia’s middle school. And he completed these tasks, which could have entrenched him in politics, without losing the respect of his core constituents: the faculty.
Faculty members were just as shocked as Brinkley about his promotion, but not displeased. “It was pretty surprising that Lee Bollinger had the smarts to tap Alan Brinkley to be provost,” said history professor David Eisenbach. As a Ph.D. student at Columbia, Brinkley advised Eisenbach’s dissertation. Eisenbach also TA’ed for Brinkley’s lecture.
DeWitt Clinton Professor of History Eric Foner calls Brinkley his “good friend.” They were neighbors in Fayerweather, and ended up with the same subscription to the Metropolitan Opera (though Foner says Brinkley doesn’t enjoy Wagner the way he does).
“He [Brinkley] was chosen as provost because President Bollinger realized that one of the key qualifications for the provost is to have someone who really has the respect of the faculty,” Foner said. “Brinkley certainly met that qualification very strongly. All through his term, he’s maintained the respect of the faculty, and that’s critical to doing that job.”
Especially critical, Foner said, in terms of weathering “unexpected crises” with eloquence. “He quickly had to deal with things that one would not have necessarily anticipated—debates over the Middle Eastern program, the physical expansion of the University, the Ahmadinejad controversy—a lot of faculty took very strong positions on one side or the other on these issues,” Foner said. “One of his key jobs was to make sure that these differences of opinion didn’t become so intense or divisive that they caused problems with the academic function of the University.”
Eisenbach noted that throughout these harder points, “Alan was on the side of free speech. Even though it wasn’t easy, he fought the good fight and won that, in my opinion.”
Brinkley rose in academia over several decades, beginning as an undergraduate at Princeton in the 1960s. After working on a campaign, he earned his history Ph.D. at Harvard. His teaching career began with a three-year stint at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before he returned to Harvard as a professor.
Brinkley moved to Columbia when Harvard did not offer him tenure—at that point, Harvard was mostly recruiting tenured professors. But once he landed at Columbia, his popularity soared.
“Everyone thinks that he’s a resource for them,” said Tiffany Dockery, University senator and CC ’09. “He did make a point of making himself available.”
Foner has extensive experience with provosts—aside from being Brinkley’s friend and opera buddy, Foner went to college with Columbia’s last provost, University professor and sociologist Jonathan Cole. Cole served for a longer tenure, from 1989 to 2003, and under several University presidents.
Foner said that since Bollinger was more of an “activist president” than his predecessors, Cole had more independence, and former University president George Rupp was widely perceived as leaving most academic decisions up to Cole. “The leadership under Provost Brinkley was more collective.”
Foner said Brinkley’s legacy lies in the growth of the provost’s office. Under Brinkley, Columbia created the Office of the Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives, and has worked on recruiting professors from different backgrounds.
Dockery said she hoped that there would be student involvement in the search for Brinkley’s successor.
“We knew that we always had somebody who was a teacher in his heart in the provost’s office,” Eisenbach said. “Hopefully we’ll have that again.”
For his part, Bollinger hopes to announce the makeup of the search committee within the next few weeks. But, depending on his dinner guests, Bollinger could end up with a few candidates from outside the official search process. “Anything’s possible,” Bollinger said.
Maybe this time, he’ll go for Mexican.
Shane Ferro and Mary Kohlmann contributed reporting to this article.
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