After four years at the University of Michigan, former Dartmouth provost Lee Bollinger will assume the position of president at Columbia University.
The Columbia search committee's choice was announced last Wednesday. The committee initially approached Bollinger early in the summer.
On Saturday, shortly after Bollinger accepted the offer, the University's board of trustees voted unanimously to have him replace current president George Rupp.
"We concluded that he is an outstanding president of a wonderful university, that he has a great track record of dealing with faculty, staff and students, that he has a great vision of the life sciences," Columbia search committee head Henry King told The Michigan Daily.
That vision was most visible in Bollinger's establishment of the university's $700 million Life Sciences Initiative.
But Bollinger also demonstrated an appreciation for the arts, facilitating an agreement with Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company to construct a theater under the name of Michigan graduate Arthur Miller with a capacity of 450 persons.
In his tenure at Ann Arbor, Bollinger also attracted national attention for his fierce support of Michigan's affirmative action policies.
The university went to court over these matters twice in Bollinger's first year in office -- once each for the admissions offices of the law school and college. Bollinger was named as a defendant alongside the University of Michigan.
District court judges ruled in favor of the undergraduate policy and against the law school; both cases will be retried before Cincinnati's Federal Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit later this month.
"It is a question really of educational policy, not a matter of redressing past social injustices," Bollinger said Thursday in an interview with The New York Times.
"People learn more and learn better in an environment where they are part of a mix of people where there are substantial differences, with people not like themselves," he added.
The move to Manhattan will represent something of a homecoming for Bollinger, a 1971 graduate of Columbia Law School. He also served as a Supreme Court clerk under Chief Justice Warren Burger.
Just before Bollinger's departure from Dartmouth in 1997, then-College President James Freedman described him as "a person of intelligence and principle who understands the academic world," adding that he would be "an outstanding president of any university.
Bollinger is set to begin work at Columbia immediately following current President George Rupp's retirement on June 30, 2002.
