If only Lee Bollinger

If only Lee Bollinger, the former president of Columbia University, hadn’t already tarnished his reputation with his weak responses to the medical school sexual assaulter and the fake U.S. news numbers. If it hadn’t been for that, he would’ve been a perfect person to stand up to the government’s attack on universities. He’s an expert on the first amendment, he’s had a long and distinguished career, and he had the full confidence of the board of trustees.

I see an analogy to Tony Blair, who had so much political authority, all destroyed by his terrible decisions on the Iraq War. As with Bollinger at Columbia, but on a much larger scale, the problem was not just that Blair made a bad call but that he made no effort to get to the bottom of the problem. Bollinger’s association with the Columbia sexual assaulter and the Columbia fake data are magnified by his apparent lack of interest in making things right, in both these cases.

Other examples are Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal, and Lyndon Johnson and the expansion of the U.S.-Vietnam War. As with Bollinger and as with Blair, it all seems tragic, in that these presidents squandered immense power, authority, and popularity—and you could easily imagine a world in which these events didn’t happen.

A few months ago, Bollinger gave an interview on universities in the current political climate. He had some reasonable things to say, but he doesn’t have so much moral authority to say it. I’m sure that Tony Blair has some reasonable things to say about foreign policy, too. It’s too bad it had to be this way.