A Renaissance man at Columbia's helm

When Columbia University picked Lee Bollinger last month to be its new president, part of the appeal may have been that beneath his gentle voice and unassuming manner lies a powerful legal counterpuncher.

Mr. Bollinger is not a vociferous F. Lee Bailey-style defense attorney. The outgoing president of the University of Michigan is a First Amendment legal scholar.

Yet in choosing Bollinger, Columbia's trustees selected someone who not only cares deeply about undergraduate learning but has a track record of going to the mat to defend principles he believes undergird higher education, observers say.

During his four years leading the University of Michigan, Bollinger has fought an expensive and highly public court battle to defend affirmative action in college admissions, which is under attack by conservative legal advocates.

Now, as he prepares to take the helm at Columbia, his fight to keep from losing ethnic and racial diversity on campus is still a high priority - along with how universities allocate their resources and nurture undergraduate learning.

"This principle [of affirmative action] is a deep part of the educational philosophy of American higher education," Bollinger says in an interview in his Spartan transitional office at Columbia. "Without the diversity it provides, the character and the quality of our great public universities would decline."

Not all agree. White applicants cited Bollinger and the university as defendants in two reverse-discrimination lawsuits in 1997. Minorities who scored lower than they did on tests were admitted, the plaintiffs contend. Arguments will be heard by the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in December. If accepted for a hearing by the US Supreme Court, the Michigan cases would become the first such test of the issue since 1978.

"This is not just one university president's fight," Bollinger says. "All of higher education has something to lose." He points to big drops in minority admission at Boalt Law School at the University of California, Berkeley, where state laws prohibit race-based admission.

A one-time dean of the university's law school, and many years before that a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger, Bollinger began building the school's defense months before the suits were filed. He has continued as the driving force behind what some say may be higher education's best shot to keep "race conscious" admissions.

In a sense, his move to Columbia is a return home: After getting his undergraduate degree from the University of Oregon, he graduated from Columbia Law School. Moving back to New York "was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," he says. It is also a chance to reconnect with a school where his family has many ties: his wife, Jean, has a master's degree from the school, and his daughter, Carey, is currently studying at the law school. (His son, Lee, is a graduate of University of Michigan Law School.)

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