For all the talk of how the modern university has been corporatized, neoliberalized, and so on, there hasn’t been as much attention paid to the ways in which it has been presidentialized.
The presidentialization of Columbia dates back well before the current moment. Our last president, Lee Bollinger, ran the university for over two decades. During his tenure, Bollinger oversaw the rise of a substantial administrative apparatus—the ten highest paid Columbia employees, apart from surgeons, are now all senior executives—as well as the creation of a dizzying array of research centers, policy institutes, and global programs that operate more or less independently of the academic departments. Bollinger’s office also launched countless smaller projects with discretionary funds. After the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, for instance, he came up with the idea for a Constitutional Democracy Initiative (with which I am affiliated) and, within weeks, an impressive new outfit was up and running. Meanwhile, the most broadly representative body on campus, the University Senate, seemed to become less relevant with every passing year.
This basic dynamic is familiar to scholars of U.S. public law, who have long documented the growth of executive power relative to Congress and the growth of presidential power within the executive branch—what Justice Elena Kagan famously termed “presidential administration.” Under presidential administration, as Kagan describes it, regulatory activity increasingly becomes “an extension of [the president’s] own policy and political agenda.” This mode of governance has some real benefits, above all energy and efficiency. And President Bollinger did many valuable things for the university. Yet by the time he created a constitutional democracy initiative, Columbia’s own democratic life had withered considerably.
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