Lee Bollinger

As the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology, a professor of history, and the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Nicholas Dirks has a massive job description. But his post, he says, allows him to “realize as many of the aspirations that the University is invested in, because the realities are always more difficult, messy, expensive, and contested than the idea would suggest.”

On Tuesday night, as part of the World Leaders Forum, Rothkopf discussed his book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making with an audience that filled Low Rotunda. Wall Street Journal online executive editor Alan Murray moderated the ensuing discussion of 21st-century-style power, which included University President Lee Bollinger, Professors Merit Janow and Saskia Sassen, and President of the Inter-American Development Bank Luis Alberto Moreno.

For President Lee Bollinger, a lifelong academic, Monday’s fireside chat was a change of pace. He colored his explanations of University policy with stories from his past in a strikingly personal discussion with 50 students and administrators at his home at 116th Street and Morningside Drive.

The problem, unfortunately, is that the hate-filled incidents of last semester gradually dropped this free-flowing intellectual academy to its knees, to the point that a rather innocuous incident, like Monday’s discovery in Hewitt, can be blown so far out of proportion as to risk harming the great free speech experiment that is the American university.

After heated debate over Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appearance, rumors that a group of Columbia faculty would visit Iran to apologize for University President Lee Bollinger’s remarks incited confusion both on and off campus.

Columbia’s physical and economic growth dominated discussion at the final University Senate meeting Thursday in Schermerhorn, where about 40 senators received reports on the progress of Manhattanville plans and the University’s endowment.

This week the Pakistani dictator, Pervez Musharraf, declared emergency rule in his troubled country. Emergency rule is one of the more heinous euphemisms that proliferate in political discourse.

Columbia made national headlines when its University President invited the representative of an oppressive anti-Semitic regime to speak at its Morningside Heights campus.