President Bollinger

It’s easy to harp on problems, but it’s much harder to creatively generate solutions from whole cloth. We need a vision. In this task, Columbia’s administration, and especially President Bollinger and Dean Quigley, must take the reins.

University President Lee Bollinger teamed up with professors to explore an issue at the heart of much recent campus debate titled “The Language of Race in America” on Wednesday night in Low Library.

Barely a couple of weeks ago—almost strategically coinciding with the climax of the hunger strike affair—some Columbia faculty members issued a “statement of concern” regarding what they saw as President Bollinger’s failure to defend academic freedom.

A group of faculty members in the Arts and Sciences has been circulating for signature a “statement of concern” to be presented to the Arts and Sciences Faculty meeting on November 13. The main accusation in the statement is that the university administration has failed to make a vigorous defense of academic freedom.

President Bollinger joined a panel of scholars to address university development in urban communities to an engaged crowd at Rockefeller University last night.

At times, situations arise on our campus that call for student leaders to issue a statement representing the views of their constituencies. What has concerned me recently is the failure of student leaders to recognize that there are also many situations where the opposite is true.