Ex-Columbia president ‘regrets not anticipating Trump attacks’

US universities left themselves open to “authoritarian” assaults by not doing enough to secure financial independence from the federal purse, according to the former president of Columbia University.

Lee Bollinger, who stepped down as president in 2023 after more than two decades in charge of the Ivy League institution, said he wished he had done more to insulate the university from potential attacks.

Soon after Bollinger left Columbia, it was plunged into chaos amid huge scrutiny over its handling of student protests in the wake of the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel, and subsequent bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

Having previously boasted the longest-serving Ivy League president of modern times, Columbia will soon welcome its fifth leader in the past four years, after Bollinger’s successor, Minouche Shafik, was forced to step down after a disastrous Congressional hearing on antisemitism, leading to a series of interim appointments.

Speaking with Times Higher Education, Bollinger, who has remained at Columbia as a law professor, said antisemitism was a “serious and genuine issue” during his presidential tenure, which intensified after the 7 October attacks.

But he warned that the White House has used the issue as a pretext to destroy the independence of universities like Columbia.

“The crisis in higher education right now is the authoritarian moves by the Trump administration to use levers…to try to intimidate and get control of certain parts of the university that traditionally have been within academic control.”

Columbia eventually signed a controversial $221 million (£162 million) settlement with the federal government, which provoked heavy criticism.

In his new book University: A Reckoning, Bollinger argues that there has been a “tectonic shift in America toward the use of authoritarian tactics” under the Trump administration and that “one of the most successful institutions in American and perhaps human history” is under threat.

He makes the case that universities are the unofficial “fifth branch” of the American constitutional system – one as essential as the press is to its collective life and success – and should be protected as such.

“I think universities need to embrace the identity that they are part of the constitutional framework of America and have this critical role to play in securing and advancing a key value of the society, and that is something of really noble importance,” he said.

Bollinger said university leaders could never have imagined that their relationship with the federal government could deteriorate so quickly, and that the government would seek to “lawlessly” oppress and intimidate the sector.

“Now that’s a failure of imagination when you see what is happening today, and as I look back, I wonder what could we have done? What should we have done?

“I wish that I had, along with others, anticipated what is happening today and took steps to try to ameliorate that assault.”

While he is sympathetic to university leaders that are engaging individually with the Trump administration and “hoping for the best”, Bollinger, who was also president of the University of Michigan, called for more collective action among university leaders.

“I think university presidents, university leaders, universities generally are in a very, very difficult spot right now and clearly, different institutions have tried different strategies to grapple with this.

“I believe a much stronger, much more unified resistance is the right path, the best path.”

He said he hopes university leaders reading his book will be encouraged to attempt to articulate more clearly why universities are one of the great achievements of US society.

“I wanted to try to articulate as best I could, as quickly as I could in the current context, a framework, a blueprint, for how to respond to what I think is an unprecedented assault on the freedom of the university in America.”