UNIVERSITY

No ivory tower.

Bollinger, the former president of the University of Michigan and Columbia University, has long argued for the power of diversity in higher education and for the autonomy of colleges and universities from political manipulation. Recent assaults on that autonomy provoke this brief, forceful book. Its “intellectual basis” is the First Amendment: Speech is free, and this freedom stands behind the unique status of American universities as sites of protected inquiry. Bollinger has, by his own admission, an idealist’s view of his home institutions. He writes, “Universities are intended to preserve and advance knowledge about the human condition, about life and the natural world, and to pass human knowledge and the capacities to pursue it on to succeeding generations.” Nothing about that sentence, he admits, is straightforward. What is knowledge? What is preservation and advancement? He shows that these are categories always up for debate, always contested and changing. The university must be open to the public, full of teachers with the temperament to share and listen, rich in research that can be, potentially, accessible to all. And yet, freedom is not unconstrained. Just because you have a Ph.D. and tenure does not mean that you can say anything you want at any time. Freedom comes with responsibility, and in the end this book is more a sermon on the latter than a call for the former. “Every single day, universities make judgments in accord with scholarly standards and scholarly temperament about what the nation and the world needs. We should embrace and acknowledge this role.” Those judgments may not always be right, but they should never be rash. Bollinger’s university emerges as a place of thoughtful conversation with a social mission and self-regulating financial independence. Would that it could last.

An idealistic vision of the American university as a place of free thought and socially responsible teaching.