According to University President Lee Bollinger, the year’s events marked a flashpoint in the trajectory of his leadership.

In particular, the New York City Council’s approval of the new campus in Manhattanville forces him to face concerns ranging from space allocation and funding to eminent domain and architecture.

“I think that the framework for how this institution can evolve is now more sharply delineated than it was before,” Bollinger said. “If Manhattanville had fallen through, what it would mean to lead this institution would be fundamentally different.”

But to many faculty members, the most searing challenges that Bollinger faces are far from Manhattanville. Bollinger’s relationship with his faculty was put to the test mid-year when dueling factions of faculty members clashed over the controversies of the year.

Strong responses to certain highly scrutinized tenure cases and Bollinger’s controversial introduction of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad culminated in a heated November meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences where members of the Columbia University Faculty Action Committee revealed the contents of a “statement of concern” they had published in the New York Sun. The statement accused Bollinger of failing to provide “vigorous defense of the core principles on which the university is founded, especially academic freedom.”

The statement, signed by 109 professors, specifically criticized Bollinger for failing to rebuke outsiders’ criticism of and attempts to influence tenure decisions. The professors also condemned Bollinger for his public statements during the introduction of Ahmadinejad, which they said had conflated his personal political views with the official position of the University.

“The events of the past few years have created a crisis of confidence in the central administration’s willingness to defend these principles,” the letter read. The letter lamented the lack of power the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has in determining key University policies, such as how to expand abroad. Several signers previously found themselves embattled in controversy and had histories of lambasting Bollinger.

A group of Bollinger’s backers—consisting primarily of Medical Center and science professors—leapt to his defense and released a “faculty dissent” statement that garnered 62 signatures. The dissent statement specifically responded to three points, aside from the one concerning Arts and Sciences decision-making.

“I just thought that the professors who had circulated the original letter were trying to foment another coup d’etat against a University president, as was successfully done at Harvard [with former President Lawrence Summers],” said Neil S. Shachter, a CUMC professor who signed the dissenting letter. Answering the first letter’s claim about intervention, the dissenting statement disagreed that outside input into academic decisions endangers academic freedom, stating that no administration “has power to prevent such expression.” The letter noted that only one of five points Bollinger expressed in his Ahmadinejad introduction dealt explicitly with Iraq. The dissent letter responded to the claim that Bollinger frequently takes partisan positions by saying that only one public statement—his denouncement of the British University and College Union’s proposed boycott of Israeli academics—might be characterized as politicizing the situation in the Middle East.

In December, John Coatsworth, then acting dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, commented that based on his observations as Summers’ tenure ended at Harvard, the tensions he saw at the Arts and Sciences meeting did not run deeply enough to end Bollinger’s presidency.

Qais Al-Awqati, a CUMC professor who signed the anti-Bollinger letter, had said he hoped Bollinger would resign but doubted that enough people would apply pressure. His anger was directed most forcefully at Bollinger’s reception of Ahmadinejad, in which he used language which some felt was offensive or inhospitable.

Bollinger now says that these tensions have healed, and after another year of leadership, he feels more deeply rooted in Columbia. “I think there were a lot of very strongly held feelings about this [the Ahmadinejad event],” Bollinger said. “I really do respect that difference. It’s my responsibility to listen to that, and to engage with it, and then to find other ways in which to work together, all of which has happened. Most all of that is behind us.”

According to Bollinger, the fallout of the year’s controversies led to more positive than negative consequences. “You become closer to people in a way. You talk to them more. You learn more,” Bollinger said. “You change the way you do things in order to accommodate. All of that is true. If I were to do this again, I would be talking to people whom I wasn’t talking to last time.”

“A confluence of things centered, galvanized around the Ahmadinejad event and they were expressed in that charged context. My feeling is we’ve all moved on,” Bollinger added.

joy.resmovits@columbiaspectator.com