On ROTC, Who Does Columbia Speak For?

In June 2007, University President Lee Bollinger made one of the most controversial decisions of his presidency by stating, in ironically unsparing language, why he wouldn’t make controversial decisions in the University’s name. Although superficially spurred by an attempted British boycott of Israeli universities and academics, Bollinger treated the matter as a politically motivated attack on open inquiry and intellectual exchange. So he replied to the proposed boycott in the comfortable language of institutional rights and responsibilities. “If the British [University and College Union] is intent on pursuing its deeply misguided policy,” Bollinger wrote, “then it should add Columbia to its boycott list, for we do not intend to draw distinctions between our mission and that of the universities you are seeking to punish.”

For Bollinger, an institution remains true to its “mission” when it radically de-politicizes inquiry and exchange, when it rejects the heavy-handed responsibilities of public conscience-setting whenever they conflict with the larger goals of academia. Bollinger wrote, “We gladly stand together with our many colleagues in British, American and Israeli universities against such intellectually shoddy and politically biased attempts to hijack the central mission of higher education.”

Ironically, the idea that this “central mission” is only to provide a venue—and not to provide moral or social guidance from the institutional level—is what enabled Bollinger to OK the Ahmadinejad invitation a few months later. The invite arguably stretched the idea of institutional neutrality to the point of moral abdication. But Bollinger was careful to dispel the notion that the University was standing up for anything other than its institutional neutrality in allowing Ahmadinejad to speak. Said Bollinger, “It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices.” With the boycott and with the Ahmadinejad invitation, Bollinger was consistent in arguing that the University would never use its institutional weight to dictate policy to its students or to the broader, non-academic world.

But the recent ROTC controversy has revealed just how malleable this deeply held institutional value can be. If you follow Bollinger’s logic, the very purpose of the University is confirmed by its ability to remain strictly impartial on two of the most divisive countries on earth (Israel and Iran) and jeopardized by its silence on a comparatively smaller matter: the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on homosexuals in uniform. “Under the current ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy of the Defense Department,” Bollinger wrote in a campus-wide e-mail on Sept. 25, “openly gay and lesbian students could or would be excluded from participating in ROTC activities. That is inconsistent with the fundamental values of the University.”

Of course one of the fundamental values of any university is freedom of conscience, which the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education defines as the right of students “to make up their own minds on the issues of the day—without administrative coercion.” In 2005, when several law schools sued the government over federal funding withheld from programs that would not allow military recruiters on campus—on the basis that this would coerce them into supporting the military’s homophobic policies—it was the expectation of freedom of conscience that convinced the Supreme Court to dismiss the case. Finding that “students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the [school] chooses to communicate,” the court decided that a pompous, pseudo-parental sense of responsibility didn’t equate with institutional first amendment rights.

Granted, law schools still have the right to effectively co-opt the marketplace of ideas—to take the more than slightly paternalistic tack that students have to be actively protected from that which the administration finds disagreeable. But in the 2005 decision, the Court determined that the government could take this sudden moral heroism into account when deciding just how much money an institution would receive.

The significance of this is apparently lost on Bollinger, who sees no conflict between a legislated morality and a vibrant public sphere. Yet every time a university acts on principle, there’s the very real potential that the intellectual space it governs will shrink—after all, which IGB-sponsored student groups are “inconsistent with the fundamental values of the university?” Or which on-campus job recruiters? Or which professors or classes, or Spectator columns, for that matter?

In 2005, the Supreme Court decided that these questions were better left unasked—and that if a university wanted to forfeit its institutional neutrality and begin speaking on behalf of others, it would do so at the expense of its federal funding.

This isn’t to suggest that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is anything other than a national disgrace. But as Bollinger himself so eloquently argued in June 2007, at a university, freedom of inquiry and conscience are the only values that matter. In essentially banning the military from campus, Bollinger is doing more than dictating policy on a wide swath of issues: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the place of the military in civilian public life chief among them. He’s also imploding those ideals that he once adamantly defended.

The author is a List College junior majoring in English and Judaic studies. He is editor of the Commentariat, the blog of the Spectator opinion section.