A Renaissance man at Columbia's helm

Now, Bollinger's thoughts are moving on to a range of challenges facing higher education. What he will confront, he says, are subtle, corrosive problems that go directly to the substance of a university education. Drinking on campus, tuition increases, and other hot-button issues are not the central long-term threats.

Across the US, every major research university can point to hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the sciences. It's easy to get swept up in hiring top scientists and dumping dollars on equipment. Meanwhile, English departments and the rest of the humanities languish.

"What is happening to classics, to literary criticism, to poetry?" he asks. "Are we making the right choices in the allocation of resources?"

Even though Bollinger himself has spearheaded huge investments in life sciences at the University of Michigan, he is wary about the implications. His perspective is that of a self-styled Renaissance man. He rereads Shakespearian works like "Richard III" for new meaning, and was a competitive sprinter until five years ago.

"How will we succeed or fail in educating people both with our faculty and our students, in the various areas of knowledge? This goes right to the core of what we're supposed to be about - broadly understanding the world."

Bollinger worries that the "lack of integration of knowledge" is a pitfall for society.

"The fact that we educate people and they know little or nothing about astrophysics, or quantum mechanics, or have no basic ideas of biology - or that there are scientists who know very little about Virginia Woolf or Robert Frost - is a profound failure on our part," he says.

Opening the disciplines for a cross-fertilization of learning would help. Just deepening knowledge within a major doesn't necessarily broaden the minds of undergraduates - or of faculty. Strong core curricula that require learning across disciplines - something Columbia has but many have dropped - would give undergraduates the underpinnings they need, he suggests.

Perhaps his greatest concern, however, is that universities not become preoccupied with the research side of their mission to the detriment of undergraduate education. There is, he says, "a quality of caring about student learning, that cannot be feigned but which some are letting go.

"It's not just a matter of a university faculty and administration saying it is 'our responsibility' or 'our duty' to provide an education and all that goes with it," Bollinger says. "It must arise naturally from the desires of the place. Encouraging that and keeping that deep upwelling going is the next major challenge."

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