A New Book Defends the Modern University, But Skips the Hardest Question

In his spirited new book defending universities, Lee Bollinger largely ignores some of higher education's important failings

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Original illustration by Tuhina Sharma, 2026 (used with permission).

By John Mac Ghlionn

Lee C. Bollinger has spent his career inside the American university, not as a casual observer, but as one of its stewards and defenders. He led the University of Michigan through one of the most consequential affirmative action battles in modern legal history, then took the helm at Columbia University for nearly two decades—long enough to test whether his beliefs were genuine or merely convenient. Bollinger’s, it turns out, are the real deal.

He taught constitutional law. He thought seriously, and for a very long time, about how a free society protects the free exchange of ideas. And he came through it, not bitter, but battle-tested.

His new book, University: A Reckoning, arrives at a difficult moment. American universities are both praised as engines of discovery and condemned as temples of self-satisfied detachment. They are celebrated for producing Nobel laureates and blamed for producing graduates who can’t hold a civil conversation with someone who sees the world differently. They carry enormous prestige and, increasingly, enormous suspicion.

Public trust has eroded on both sides of the political divide, though for very different reasons. On the right, universities are seen as ideological monasteries—places where adherence to one set of views is enforced through social pressure dressed up as intellectual consensus. On the left, they are blamed for serving wealth and privilege rather than challenging it. Both critiques contain enough truth to sting. Into this atmosphere of palpable frustration, Bollinger steps forward, not to apologize or deflect, but to defend.

The question worth asking from the very first page is how honestly he manages it in this book. The answer, reached gradually, is this: honestly enough to make the book worth reading, but not honestly enough to fully satisfy the reader.

His central argument is sturdy and stated without hesitation: The American research university remains one of the country’s most important institutions. It preserves knowledge, expands it, and passes it forward. It trains the people a society quietly depends on and usually takes for granted—the doctors, lawyers, engineers, and scientists, without whom everything falls apart. In Bollinger’s telling, the university isn’t a sanctuary for those who’d rather not engage with the wider public. It is, at its best, one of the few institutions standing between a functioning society and its worst instincts.

He makes this case with skill, and he makes it in plain English. There is no jargon, none of the deliberate obscurity that so often passes for depth in academic writing. Bollinger writes the way a good lawyer argues: clearly, purposefully, and with an eye on what actually matters.

One of the book’s real strengths is its portrait of what academic work actually looks like. The popular image of the tenured professor—insulated, unhurried, writing impenetrable papers for an audience of 12—gets a serious and welcome correction. Bollinger describes what the work genuinely demands: It means mastering a field that never stops changing, producing research that actually advances rather than rehashes what is already known, teaching students at every level of preparation, surviving a review process that can be rigorous and petty, and doing all of it while the world asks with growing impatience what any of it is worth. It is demanding, often unglamorous work. Bollinger gives it the respect it deserves.

More than the workload, though, he’s interested in describing what he calls the scholarly temperament—the particular cast of mind that separates genuine inquiry from performance. Real scholars must sit with opposing views, not as a courtesy but as a genuine commitment to the truth. They must hold conclusions loosely. They must begin with a question rather than an answer and follow the evidence wherever it leads, including straight back to that question.

“You must entertain—really entertain—the possibility that you are wrong,” Bollinger writes. “And, finally, you must be willing to change your mind if the evidence calls for it.” It is an old-fashioned idea, which is another way of saying it is an idea that used to be obvious. It is also exactly right. This is what the university, at its best, is supposed to produce—not true believers with diplomas, but people who have learned to think honestly under pressure.

His discussion of tenure is one of the book’s most compelling sections. To outsiders, tenure looks like a golden shield against accountability, a permanent exemption from consequence. But Bollinger reframes it as something more demanding than a job guarantee. Tenure is a kind of contract: Security in exchange for independence, intellectual rigor, and a life devoted to the work itself. “You, the university, will give me tenure for life,” he writes, “and I will give you my life for tenure.”

This line lands with the weight of a vow. Part contract, part calling—a pledge to trade private comfort and higher earnings for a life of teaching, research, and service to something larger than yourself. There’s something faintly ecclesiastical about it, and Bollinger knows it. The sincerity, though, is unmistakable. And the logic holds. A scholar who fears losing his job cannot follow an argument where it leads. Tenure, he insists, is not a sinecure but a safeguard, and the difference matters enormously.

From there, Bollinger turns to the university as a community, and here the book finds its warmest voice. The university is not a place of rules and hierarchy, but a culture built on conversation. Knowledge advances through argument, challenge, and revision. Journals, departments, conferences, and the informal networks that link researchers across institutions keep a steady, self-correcting exchange alive. Ideas are proposed, tested, refined, and eventually either proven or discarded. The process is slow. It can be maddening. It is also, Bollinger argues, irreplaceable. Much of this will feel familiar to anyone who has spent time in academia. But the reminder is well-placed. Obvious truths still need defending, especially when the institutions that carry them are under pressure to justify themselves in faster and simpler terms.

The book’s most ambitious claim connects the modern university to the history of American free speech. Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar of genuine standing, traces how both developed in tandem across the past century, each strengthening the other. A society committed to open debate needs institutions that model what open debate looks like—that build, through daily practice, the habits of mind that democracy ultimately depends on.

The university, in this account, isn’t merely a place where people study things; it is a civic institution. It sustains the culture of disagreement, the tolerance for unsettling ideas, and the willingness to be persuaded—without which self-government is just a ceremonial exercise. It is a large claim, and Bollinger, to his credit, makes it land.

His point about the difference between a university and a political party is equally sharp and equally necessary. Universities investigate contested questions—race, law, inequality, power—but their purpose is to examine, not to campaign. They study. They do not recruit. At a moment when a remarkable number of universities appear to have lost sight of that distinction, this reminder also lands.

And yet—and here the book’s limits come into view—Bollinger is more accurate about what universities should be than about what many of them have become. His tone, for long stretches, edges toward reverence. Parts of the book feel written for 1996 rather than 2026, when universities still had the luxury of assuming everyone basically wished them well. He acknowledges problems—conformity, internal friction, scholarship that falls short of the ideals he describes—but treats them as isolated failures rather than signs of something deeper. The cracks are mentioned, but the shaky foundations beneath them are left largely unexamined.

This is most obvious in how he handles political pressure. Bollinger focuses heavily on external threats, including government interference, legislative overreach, and the use of federal funding as a weapon against academic independence. His concern is real, and his argument on this ground is strong. He has been openly critical of the Trump administration and makes no effort to hide it. Governments that punish universities for reaching inconvenient conclusions are governments at war with honest inquiry, and Bollinger says so directly. Fair enough.

But when it comes to examining the university’s own role in its troubles, the book discovers a previously unannounced commitment to brevity. The high cost of holding an unfashionable view, the social dynamics that shape what gets studied and what gets left alone, the informal rules about which conclusions are welcome and which are not—these forces are at least as powerful as any government threat, and they receive far less scrutiny here.

A book genuinely committed to the values it describes would press on both sides with equal force. It would ask not only who threatens the university from outside, but what the university has done to earn some of the distrust directed at it. Bollinger is bracing on one front and oddly diplomatic on the other. The scholarly disposition, it turns out, has its limits.

Another issue I have with the book is that the economic picture is acknowledged the way one acknowledges an uncomfortable relative at a family gathering: briefly, warmly, and without further inquiry. Public confidence in higher education has dropped sharply, and not without reason. A generation has been loaded with debt that reshapes their lives for decades. The labor market increasingly rewards practical skill alongside—and sometimes instead of—the traditional degree. A diploma no longer carries the job guarantees it once did. And a growing number of people are asking, with understandable concern, whether a university degree is still worth the price. The answer, it seems, is no.

Bollinger is too intelligent and too experienced to be unaware of any of this. Yet he addresses the financial crisis facing universities with considerably less urgency than he brings to their intellectual defense. The book reads, in places, like a man delivering an eloquent lecture on the architectural significance of a building while the curtains catch fire behind him.

Technology gets a similar pass. Bollinger notes that digital tools have disrupted universities the way the internet disrupted newspapers, and that artificial intelligence is already changing how students learn and how researchers work. The observations are accurate. But they feel cautionary rather than curious.

Online learning has already weakened the university’s hold on how education happens. Writing tools, research tools, and tutoring tools are changing what happens inside the classroom and what a degree is actually measuring. Bollinger opens the door on these questions and stops at the threshold. Which is, it must be said, a peculiar stance for a book about the importance of the pursuit of knowledge.

None of this makes the book a failure. Instead it makes it the best possible version of a book that was never going to tell the whole story. Bollinger writes with skill, with seriousness, and with an affection for universities that never tips into nostalgia. His defense is not the defense of a flawless institution, but of an essential one whose failures are real and whose value is greater still. He is right that a culture of genuine inquiry, protected by institutions willing to defend it even when it is uncomfortable, is something a free society can ill afford to lose.

But what the book needed, and only partially delivers, is the same candor it so eloquently champions. The disposition Bollinger argues for demands engaging the strongest argument against you—sitting seriously with the possibility that the institution you have devoted your life to has failed, in important and not entirely external ways, to live up to its own ideals. That reckoning is still, in large measure, ahead of us. And it will require exactly the kind of courage Bollinger describes so well but applies so selectively.

America is still home to some of the finest universities in the world. They have shaped the nation’s science, law, medicine, and public life in ways many take for granted, precisely because the achievement has been so thorough and consistent. They deserve a defense—clear-eyed, honest, and unsparing about their failures as well as their successes. Bollinger offers most of that. The rest he leaves, perhaps deliberately, for the reader to supply.

University: A Reckoning is an imperfect book. Read it anyway. The gaps it leaves are, in their own way, as instructive as the arguments it makes.

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