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AROUND THE QUADS

What They Said

President Lee C. Bollinger addressed the Association of the Bar of the City of New York on March 23 on the subject of academic freedom in the annual Benjamin N. Cardozo Lecture. “All of us, but universities in particular, must stand firm in insisting that, when there are lines to be drawn, we must and will be the ones to do it. Not outside actors. Not politicians, not pressure groups, not the media. Ours is and must remain a system of self-government.”

Johnathan Cole ’64, former University provost, spoke about the University’s role on March 22 in a talk sponsored by the Center for Comparative Literature and Society. “The research university was founded on the idea that professors should regulate their own affairs. The essence of a university lies in its multiplicity of voices. … The university must nurture the creating of novel and sometimes unsettling ideas. … Freedom of inquiry is our only reason for being.”

Madeline Albright ’68 GSAS, ’68 SIPA, ’78 GSAS, former U.S. Secretary of State and a visiting fellow at the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies, spoke about peace and democracy at SIPA’s Gabriel Silver Memorial Lecture on February 7. “Democracy is not an event, but a process. We should seek peace regardless of how well the democracy initiative is proceeding, and we should support democracy regardless of whether peace negotiations are going well.”

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker since 1998, spoke of changes in the magazine at a January 26 breakfast seminar hosted by Journalism School visiting professor Floyd Abrams. “Without being gross about it, the magazine has profited — in a larger sense — by more serious times. The New Yorker, I hope, has responded in the last several years … in a way that a lot of people have responded to and have taken seriously. It’s easier to get somebody to go to Baghdad at this point than to get something that is truly funny.”

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