From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday, February 11th.

With us now, Lee Bollinger, constitutional scholar and lawyer, and the president of Columbia University from 2002 to

2003. Before that, he was president of the University of Michigan. Some of you know that while at

Michigan, a landmark Supreme Court case, Grutter versus Bolinger, upheld the school's right to use race

as a factor in admissions to build a diverse student body.

And that decision, as many of you know, was overturned by the current court in 2023.

Lee Bollinger still teaches law at Columbia, which, as you probably know, is coming under fierce

criticism these days from the left and right alike.

He still teaches a class that

ties academic freedom and journalistic freedom together called freedom of speech and press.

And in that context, he has a new book called University A Reckoning. Professor Bollinger,

thanks for coming on for this book. Welcome back to WNYC. Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Let's go right to the heart of the matter. You write that we're witnessing a tectonic shift in America

toward the use of authoritarian tactics that threaten our democratic form of government, quote from you.

How do you think that most applies to universities?

So what we saw beginning in the past year was a very, very strong and unfortunate attack on universities using the lever of funding through the NIH National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation,

which for decades have funded science and biomedical and medical research,

using that funding, suspending it, in order to try to capture various aspects of control of universities,

from admissions to faculty hiring to DEI programs and so on.

And this was really an unprecedented assault on traditional notions of academic freedom.

I don't think there's been anything like it until you go back to the McCarthy period.

It's unclear where this is going, what the next steps will be,

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