University: A Reckoning

by Lee C. Bollinger

From perhaps the most important university leader of the twenty-first century, an account of the university in the age of authoritarianism and a new case for its place in the American system.


The American university—one of the most successful institutions in human history—is facing an unprecedented assault from the president of the United States. Experts on authoritarianism have drawn comparisons to Turkey and Hungary, where strongmen subdued universities as part of their power grabs. Yet as former Columbia president Lee C. Bollinger points out in his powerful account of the university’s significance, in such dire times one has no choice but to state clearly and forcefully what one stands for.


Defenses of the university usually emphasize the practical benefits it offers to highly skilled graduates who can thrive in an information-saturated world; scientific research that leads to important advances in health; technological breakthroughs that contribute to the American economy being the envy of the world. Bollinger offers a more original, and more sweeping, account. He reveals how the structure of the university contributes to the success of the American system—because it provides those who study and work within it a degree of creative freedom hard to find elsewhere—and why that structure is both impossible to re-create and vulnerable to outside attack. The fundamental mission of the university is to enhance knowledge, but this is not merely a high-minded idea. It is, as Bollinger demonstrates, a notion rooted deeply in the Constitution, specifically the First Amendment, the basis of our political and social life. The university helps realize the First Amendment; the First Amendment helps make the university.


Bollinger argues that, in a challenging era for the business of journalism, the university remains an essential source of truth-seeking for those who still believe in democracy. The stakes are The university must be defended if the American experiment is to continue.

170 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 20, 2026

About the author

Lee C. Bollinger, J.D. (Columbia Law School), has served as the president of Columbia University since 2002 and is the longest serving Ivy League president. He is Columbia’s first Seth Low Professor of the University, a member of the Columbia Law School faculty, and one of the country’s foremost First Amendment scholars.

From 1996 to 2002, Bollinger was the president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He led the school’s litigation in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, resulting in Supreme Court decisions that upheld and clarified the importance of diversity as a compelling justification for affirmative action in higher education. He speaks and writes frequently about the value of racial, cultural, and socio-economic diversity to American society through opinion columns, media interviews, and public appearances.

Bollinger served as a law clerk to Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Chief Justice Warren Burger of the Supreme Court. He went on to join the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School in 1973, becoming dean of the school in 1987. He became provost of Dartmouth College in 1994 before returning to the University of Michigan in 1996 as president.