Bollinger Meets with Student Leaders to Discuss Noose Incident

Following the discovery of a noose hanging on the office door of Madonna Constantine, a black Teachers College professor, University President Lee Bollinger held a tense meeting with two dozen student leaders this afternoon.

Bollinger faced a deeply frustrated and often angry audience, as students accused the administration of being unresponsive and disconnected. At several points, the University President found himself attempting to defend and justify his record on issues such as diversifying the faculty and taking a proactive stance on racial issues.

“My mind keeps flooding with things that we have and are trying to do because I find myself wanting to persuade you that this is a University that I believe you can trust to respond to feelings that you have expressed and ideas that you have expressed,” Bollinger said. “I want you to feel and just to acknowledge in yourselves that this is a place that cares a lot about things that you have raised. … We really have tried, but I really think we have to talk about that more and do more.”

“Students are tired of hearing what’s been done in the past,” responded Sam Rennebohm, CC ’09 and a member of Students Promoting Empowerment and Knowledge.

One student told the President that it was time for the University to stop “placating us with statements or whatever silly things like that … [and to] re-evaluate these past initiatives because they clearly have not prevented the events of this month.”

Earlier in the day, Constantine made her first public statement since yesterday morning, addressing a rally in front of the Teacher College.

“I'm upset that our community was exposed to such an unbelievably blatant act of racism," Constantine said at the rally. "Hanging a noose on my door reeks of cowardice on many many levels. ... I would like the perpetrator to know that I will not be silent."

The Bollinger meeting occurred at the same time as both a Town Hall meeting with school administrators at Teachers College and a press conference at New York Police Department headquarters downtown. At the press conference, police officials said that this was one of two occurrences regarding a noose, with the other one occurring in Queens.

Police officials said that there were no suspects in the case, and noted this was the first occurrence of a noose case in many, many years.

They released a photo of the noose, saying that it had not been on the door as late as 11:30 p.m. Monday night. The task force is speaking to all professors in Constantine's department.

Again and again, students complained about the inaccessibility of top administrators last night, and particularly Bollinger’s decision to not send out a University-wide email, which they contrasted with TC President Susan Fuhrman’s visible presence. Bollinger responded by saying he did release a public statement to news media last night and sent an e-mail to the University today, but that he did not want to step on the toes of Teachers College.

“We may be two independent institutions, but we are one community; and we stand together in our commitment to oppose the frightening sentiments that lay behind this act,” Bollinger wrote in his email to the University. “Tolerance and mutual respect are among the core values of our diverse community, and all of us must confront acts of hate whenever they occur within it.”

Students also stressed the need for proactive, instead of reactive, leadership from the top.

“My mom used to tell me that water never flows uphill and I feel like we live in a pyramid society where if something begins at the bottom, it’s grassroots, and it has a tendency to stay there, but if something comes down from the top, it has a tendency to wash over everything beneath it,” Jonathan Walton, CC ’08, said. “The futility that the grass at the bottom feels about not being able to reach the top is a deeper and deeper problem."

“People are upset, people are working together, and yet these things keep happening,” Desiree Carver-Thomas, CC ’09, said. “We are working ourselves to the bone, we are working well together, and we need administrative support.”

Several student leaders said they were questioning their decision to come to Columbia and that they had heard similar comments from first-years who have seen racist graffiti, protests over a speech by controversial Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and an invitation to polarizing conservative writer David Horowitz in their short five weeks here. Students continually attacked the University and its President, at one point even raising the issue of Bollinger's salary.

The leaders in the room tied yesterday’s incident—which is being investigated by the New York Police Department’s Hate Crimes unit—to a broader campus environment.

“For me this event is not just a single isolated event, it is about a context, and it is about a culture, and it is about what is this institution, under your leadership, sir, really going to like step forward and to about changing that context,” Bryan Mercer, CC ’07 and a member of SPEaK and the Black Students Organization, said.

This meeting was markedly different from a similar one that Bollinger held with student leaders three weeks ago after Ahmadinejad was invited to speak on campus. At today's meeting, students were much more palpably angry at and less supportive of the way the University was conducting itself.

The array of students assembled was also substantially narrower, with the presidents of the Columbia College Student Council, Barnard’s Student Government Association, the Columbia University College Democrats and Republicans, the Columbia/Barnard Hillel, and the club funding boards absent.

Student leaders learned of the meeting less than 90 minutes before it began.

At the end of the meeting, Bollinger said that there should be further conversations and invited students to compile a specific list of concerns to be addressed in future meetings with administrators, a task which they set about immediately as he left to teach his class on Freedom of Speech and Press.

Tom Faure contributed to this article.