Faculty disdain at Columbia University appears to threaten limiting actual expressive freedom to the restricted and partisan views that pass as academic openness, as professors take an unnecessarily aggressive approach to President Lee Bollinger’s public statements on Middle Eastern politics.
While Bollinger has expressed his personal views during his tenure as Columbia president, he has not assumed the role of sole university representative nor ruined the reputation of one of the best schools in the country by making strong statements against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. College presidents should not be required to remain silent on political stances that are unpopular to faculty members. By invoking partisan arguments, Bollinger’s critics are taking aim at the First Amendment scholar by hypocritically calling for silence on certain issues with an invocation of academic freedom.
The 70 professors who have signed a letter, obtained by The New York Sun, expressed disapproval for the president’s academic policies, and also for his stances on Middle Eastern politics, by mistaking non-conformity to the academic standard of anti-Bush dogma for lack of enthusiasm for “core principles on which the university is founded, especially academic freedom.”
In the letter, the faculty members criticize Bollinger’s introductory remarks to Ahmadinejad’s address to Columbia students in September as having “sullied the reputation of the University with its strident tone.” By calling the puppet leader of Iran a “cruel and petty dictator,” Bollinger made a strong statement against the policies of the unreasonable leader, indicating his personal views and garnering both praise and criticism from the public at large. He hardly sullied the school’s reputation, but certainly stoked conversation at the university and in society — a commendable act for an intellectual leader.
Faculty allegations that Bollinger’s comments “allied the University with the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, a position anathema to many in the University community” are unreasonable. The professors’ claims show a greater commitment to a doctrinaire position against a political party than to a reasonable condemnation of an Iranian figure who is hugely unpopular for reasons that go beyond America’s partisan divide and involve the serious violation of civil rights in the Middle East and political goals that include the destruction of Israel and the execution of gays.
Perhaps faculty members forget that Bollinger’s politics hardly follow the party line of those in the White House and that as former president of the University of Michigan, Bollinger vigorously defended the school’s affirmative action admissions practices in cases that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Faculty members made a call to action, writing “the time has come for the faculty to reassert its commitment to academic freedom and University autonomy.” However, academic freedom does not, and should not, mean freedom only within the bounds of what is acceptable to an isolated community.