The campus isn’t ‘misunderstood.’ It’s mismanaged — on purpose.

Former Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger has produced a slender, puzzling book. It glides past the central problems facing campuses — weak leadership, weak accountability, and ideological capture — and lingers instead on nostalgia and the “community of scholars.”

It also prompts a blunt question: Why do university presidents publicly dissemble? Not in the chest-thumping manner of a cable-news partisan, but in the lubricated, bureaucratic manner that says almost everything except what matters most.

Bollinger presents a university with virtually no blemishes — blameless, well-run, noble — and then points outward, toward Trump and the federal government, as the true threat.

Bollinger was recruited by W.W. Norton editor in chief Dan Gerstle to adapt lectures delivered in spring 2025 into a book. He aims to remind readers