Universities have been organized and run in essentially the same way since the end of World War II, despite an onslaught of new technology, new teaching methods, and increased human mobility. President of Columbia University Lee Bollinger discussed how universities might best evolve in his lecture "Universities and Global Societies" on Nov. 7 at CEU.
Bollinger, the longest-serving president in the Ivy League, began by outlining the major changes that have and continue to affect our world – from the opening of economic markets to the pervasive reach of the Internet. "You combine these two things and you add into that the ease of travel and the number of people who are leaving their country of origin, the number of students moving around – put all these things together and it's something entirely new in human history."
Continued globalization, although unarguably beneficial in many ways, also has its drawbacks, Bollinger noted. A First Amendment scholar, he pointed out that companies like Google want to spread information far and wide but many people "believe human beings have a right to be forgotten, a right to greater levels of privacy...You have a confrontation of values- that's how extensive international commerce has become. We need a way of developing an understanding of what's happening. What are our shared norms?"
As a member of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Bollinger had a front-row seat as the financial crisis unfolded. Many people did not comprehend the widespread effects that the Wall Street meltdown would have outside of New York. "As Ben Bernanke (former chairman of the Federal Reserve) said, people did not realize that if Lehman Brothers went bankrupt there would be major effects on Ford, and other major companies in the U.S. and in Europe."
Real-world issues such as the financial crisis, climate change, and income equality should be dealt with in the academic realm, Bollinger thinks. "My view is that a great university needs to attend to these things, to focus on them. Just like the world we have now was set up after World War II, so was academic life – the way we organize expertise, the subjects, etc. It's not necessarily right for this world."
As CEU President and Rector John Shattuck pointed out in his introduction, Bollinger believes in bringing the world into the classroom and the classroom into the world. Columbia boasts eight global centers but, importantly, these are not Columbia campuses but institutions that engage with the communities in which they exist.

Overall, Bollinger advocates university systems that directly engage in today's global issues and emphasize life experience and interdisciplinary research. "In many ways, we don't even have the basic human experiences on which to build the kind of expertise we need," he said. "For example, how many American academics have traveled to China? How do you think about the modern world without setting foot in China? You have to help people have the most basic life experiences to prepare them to deal with these modern problems."
Solving these problems cannot happen in isolation either, Bollinger says. The "single investigative model" where academics research and publish on their own is not feasible anymore. He gave the example of the CERN lab, where teams of hundreds of scientists collaborate to research the origins of our universe.
"If we are going to forgo our specializations, we're going to have to go back and take baby steps," he said. "You have to go out in the world and talk to people. We have to give up the specialization that allows us to be 'comfortable' in our lives."
Bollinger has served as Columbia's president since 2002. In keeping with Columbia's goal to be a truly global institution, he is currently engaged in a web project to compile worldwide freedom of expression cases. American law textbooks still only cover freedom of expression cases from the U.S., when 15-20 cases per month are filed globally.






