I have a column up at Tech Central Station:
Inopportune comments by Harvard President Lawrence Summers back in January about possible innate differences between men and women were enough to set off a national firestorm that raged for weeks and is still smoldering today. So why is the bullying and carpet-sweeping being perpetrated by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger with regard to student complaints of intimidation in the classroom by anti-Israel professors being ignored?
If Summers’ remarks were unfortunate, Bollinger’s conduct has been downright unethical — and it has done far more lasting damage to the reputation of the institution he serves.
Last week, Columbia finally released the highly anticipated report of an “ad hoc” faculty committee set up in December of 2004 to look into complaints from students — mostly Jewish and largely pro-Israel — who have reported incidents of verbal abuse from professors in the university’s Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department.
And, surprise: It’s the whitest of whitewashes.
The report’s pretty poor. But don’t expect to hear it from the Times.
Before becoming president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger was the president of the University of Michigan. Bollinger was the chief architect of U of M’s program to discriminate against whites (spin term - affirmative action). Bollinger is largely given “credit” for coming up with U of M’s argument that U of M was discriminating against whites not just because it was alleged to help blacks, but because it was alleged to help U of M’s white students (at least those that were not denied admission to U of M so that an “affimative action” could black could have what would have otherwise been their seat). Bollinger, who is a lawyer and was a U of M law school professor before becoming U of M’s president, wrote a lenghtly and pathetic article(in legal and logical terms) wherein, according to him, he demolished all possible objections to U of M’s discrimination against whites. The piece was published in one of the Detroit newspapers and was widely praised by those who supported discrimination agianst whites. Bollinger took patenty false factual positions in drive to keep race discrimination against whites as a centerpiece of U of M’s admissions policy, including denying that race was awarded a specific number of points in U of M’s addmission even though the extra points award was right on U of M’s addmission application for a period of time. Prior to becoming president at U of M (and propably a main reason he was subsequently appointed president), Bollinger was instrumental in crushing free speech at U of M by writing legal position papers to justify U of M’s speech code, which was subsequently struck down in a 1989 federal court decision, Doe v. University of Michigan. Bollinger has been continually praised in the the left, Old News (formerly MSM) media for both of his endevors and Columbia probably considered them as important factors in its decision to hire him at Columbia’s president. Therefore, it should be no suprise that Bollinger is doing the same things at Columbia and getting off scott free withthe Old News. They loved what he did at U of M and they love what he is doing now at Columbia.
What a surprise - one of Arnie Klingon’s cronies at Tech Central gets the Summers/Bollinger comparison exactly backwards! Bollinger rightly dismissed the whiny Zionists’ complaints about someone who dared to speak the truth about eretz yisrael. And Larry “my daughter named her truck so women shouldn’t be scientists!” Summers is rightly being tarred and feathered for his lame-brained pseudoscientific sexist gibberish.
I, for one, am glad that the left and right wings of academia are finally duking it out.