NEW YORK
Columbia University President Lee Bollinger keeps finding himself in the middle of campus turmoil.
He enrolled at Columbia’s law school in 1968, when the campus was convulsed by anti-war protests. He was a dean at the University of Michigan during a struggle over the school’s speech code. Later, as the university’s president, he defended its affirmative action policies all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Now, as president of Columbia University, he is on the hot seat again — both for allowing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus and for insulting him when he arrived.
Even Bollinger has wondered lately whether he could have done without all the grief over hosting a man who has said that Israel should be wiped off the map and questioned the existence of the Holocaust — especially in a heavily Jewish city.
“Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Wouldn’t it have been nicer if this didn’t happen?’ And I have to say, ‘Yes,”’ he said in a telephone interview from Paris, where he was attending an international alumnae event. “It would have been a nicer September.”
But, he added: “I regard this as a playing out of ideas that I’ve thought about for my entire professional career.”
