University President Lee Bollinger loves to talk about Manhattanville and globalization—a fact he acknolwedged in an interview last week with Spectator.
But he also dished on why college rankings (kinda) matter, what he's looking for in the new dean for SEAS, and which presidential candidate's candidates policies would be better from an academic standpoint. Some highlights from the interview:
- There's a presidential election a month away, in case you didn't know, and while Bollinger would not express his personal views on the election, he said he thought that the policies of Democrat Barack Obama, CC '83, were generally more supportive of student loans, funding for research, affirmative action, and other issues in academia and education administration than those of his Republican opponent Mitt Romney.
The leeway that the Department of Education and Department of Justice granted admissions offices last December with regard to the educational benefits of diversity is something that "you would not expect to come out of the Romney administration," Bollinger said.
- Many people are skeptical of college rankings, Bollinger included. But he said that it is important that all of Columbia's schools are in the top 10 in the country. “I think these are crude ways of saying something that’s pretty deep and profound,” Bollinger said. “You do not want to run your institution according to what U.S. News and World Reports says.
