President Bollinger Builds On Butler’s Global Foundation

Columbia made national headlines when its University President invited the representative of an oppressive anti-Semitic regime to speak at its Morningside Heights campus. As students decried the event, saying that it would elevate his “principles on the same level as other viewpoints,” the president stood firm in his commitment to free speech. “Columbia University ... [is] a home and centre of academic freedom,” he said.

“There is no subject which a company of scholars such as that assembled on Morningside Heights, is not prepared to have presented to it ... and to hear fully discussed and debated.”

The year was 1933, the president was Nicholas Murray Butler, and the invited guest was Hans Luther, Nazi Germany’s ambassador to America.

Lee Bollinger isn’t the first University President to try to make Columbia a “Global University.” Any discussion of Columbia’s embrace of the world must begin with former University President Nicholas Murray Butler.

As Bollinger sets about his mission to revolutionize Columbia as the prime example of a 21st century “Global University,” he is building off of Butler, who was the first to view the school in an international context.

Butler rose to power at Columbia at a time when the University was a local presence that lagged so far behind Harvard, Princeton, and Yale that trustees sent their children to those other schools. Seth Low, Butler’s predecessor, had begun making inroads against that—he looked inward and reinforced the University’s ties to New York City by creating Columbia’s new campus in Morningside Heights instead of outside the city limits, as many advocated, and by giving the school its current full name, “Columbia University in the City of New York.”

Butler, as depicted in the biography Nicholas Miraculous by Columbia English professor Michael Rosenthal, was an incredible self-promoter who considered himself an ambassador to the world. When Butler went about creating global ties, he did so first and foremost on a personal level, with the University’s standing as a secondary goal.

“Globalization, obviously, is a household term in a way that it wasn’t when Butler was coming to power,” said Rosenthal, who has been at Columbia for 48 years and served as associate dean of Columbia College for 17. “What Butler wanted was not an international university so much as a University that was world-renowned.”

“Butler thought he was acting at a diplomatic level, dealing with heads of state. ... Butler would close [meet privately] with [French president Nicolas] Sarkozy today and tell him what he’s doing wrong and tell him that he ought to shape up. ... I don’t see Bollinger operating at that level. ... I don’t get any sense that he sees his role as going over and giving advice to other statesmen.” history professor Robert McCaughey, author of the Columbia history Stand, Columbia and an expert on American universities.

“Butler would wake up in the morning and say, ‘What piece of European royalty can I shape up today?’”

McCaughey’s remark came before last week, when Bollinger did just that, introducing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by roundly denouncing his stances on human rights, his nation’s nuclear program, and his stances on Israel and the Holocaust.

In contrast to Bollinger, Butler defended Luther, saying he was “entitled to be received with the greatest courtesy and respect,” and even offering him baked goods after the speech.

No matter the motivation behind Butler’s actions, McCaughey said, “having looked at Columbia, Columbia’s presidential history and the presidential history of other great universities or other universities that have claims to globalizing ... Columbia’s claims to being the first of America’s transnational universities is at least as strong as anybody else.” He specifically cited Harvard as a school which has been less successful in this agenda than Columbia.

“I would argue that Columbia as a research institution was given its impetus and its international distinction by Butler’s efforts—Columbia was a small-time operation when Butler ... took over, but Butler clearly put it in and of the world and it’s been there ever since,” Rosenthal said.

Indeed, every University president since Butler has emphasized Columbia as an institution of the world, beginning with the internationally-renowned Columbia and U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, who said in his inaugural address at Columbia, “Since we cannot isolate ourselves as a nation from the world, citizenship must be concerned, too, with the ceaseless impact of the globe’s two billion humans upon one another.”

Proponents say that two points set Bollinger apart from his predecessors and his peers. The first is his ongoing dedication to the goal of globalization, whereas previous presidents used it as a convenient talking point.

“You get some choice [as president]—you’re going to make it in the neighborhood, you’re going to make it in the country, you’re going to make it in the world—and he [Bollinger] certainly took the global approach from the start,” McCaughey said. “It doesn’t exclude the others, but one can imagine a president coming on in 1968 and saying, ‘I’ve gotta mend fences in the neighborhood, that’s going to be my big deal,’ or coming on and saying, ‘I’m going to place Columbia back among the top American universities.’ Bollinger didn’t do either of those, in part because, I think, both those things had been attended to by previous presidents rather effectively.”

Rosenthal, though, questioned the need to address Columbia’s stance in the global community. “It [the Global University] is a Butlerian metaphor for making the university important,” he said. “The notion that somehow Columbia ... has failed to be in and of the world, I don’t understand. ... Almost by definition it would have to be.” He added that he felt insufficient attention was being paid to the moneymaking aspects which underlie the theme of the Global University.

This financial issue is the second one which sets Bollinger apart from other University presidents. Administrators are quick to note that Columbia, when compared to many of its peer institutions, is a relatively poor school, and that Bollinger is more constricted in what he can do than are Harvard, Princeton, and Yale presidents.

“We’ve operated as a first-tier University without a first-tier endowment, and that’s absolutely—it’s just factually true,” said Jerry Kisslinger, executive director of communications for the Office of University Development and Alumni Relations. “Now, in talking to people about raising endowment, they’re not always that sympathetic when you say, ‘Oh, you know, we only have six billion dollars,’ because they see that as a lot of money. ... [But] that doesn’t mean we can afford to fund every initiative the University wants.”

This is how Bollinger, spearheading a $4 billion capital campaign, differs from his predecessors. “Butler didn’t go around for financial support,” McCaughey said. “Bollinger, I think, has combined fundraising with waving the Columbia flag around the world. ... Bollinger certainly takes, as seriously as anything else in his sense of presidential responsibilities, the financial angle of the University.”

Bollinger’s vision both shapes fundraising—creating an image that can be promoted as a means of garnering donations—and is shaped by it, as he frames his goals within the context of what can be achieved. For example, the incredible expense of creating new campuses abroad may lead Columbia instead to create smaller research facilities, as administrators have said is their goal.

“Universities live on dreams, and it’s not like we have a pool of money just waiting for us to be tapped to do whatever we want to do. ... There’s very small powers that I hold, ... so it has to be a matter of figuring out in some kind of confidence what to do and then persuading people,” Bollinger said in an interview in April 2006. “You have to raise the funds.”

Josh Hirschland can be reached at josh.hirschland@columbiaspectator.com.

Read the full transcript of Robert McCaughey's interview.