A Degree of Transparency

Columbia’s Lee Bollinger has been central in healing tensions between the university and one of America’s most historic Black neighborhoods.

By Jamal Watson

When Lee C. Bollinger arrived in New York City in 2002 to take the helm of Columbia University, he was treated as a hero almost immediately by the city’s Black community.

Within days of his appointment, word spread across Harlem, just a few blocks to the north and west of Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. The general feeling was that Bollinger — a noted legal scholar of the First Amendment and well-known defender of affirmative action — was someone who could be trusted.

“He’s a friend to the civil rights community,” a Black city councilman told a crowded room of activists at a meeting several years ago. “He’s a real decent man. Let’s give him a chance.” The meeting had been called to discuss the best way to curtail Columbia’s plans to expand into Harlem. And there were plenty of reasons for the neighborhood’s residents to be suspicious. 

Activists had spent years locked in a contentious battle with the Ivy League university over its expansion plans. Harlem residents complained that Columbia was quietly gobbling up land and forcing poorer residents to flee.

Today, Columbia is expanding farther into Harlem, but there seems to be a degree of transparency that was not present a decade ago. The shift in attitude among locals may represent the inevitable realities of gentrification, but many concede that Bollinger’s charisma has gone a long way toward healing whatever tensions still exist between the university and its neighbors.

He has courted political leaders like U.S. Rep. Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., and has created partnerships with many of the same grassroots community organizations that once protested the university. At times, those groups likened Columbia to an imperialist dictator intent on seizing land.