Lee C. Bollinger will become the 12th president of the University of Michigan on Feb. 1, Interim President Homer A. Neal announced on Nov. 27. Three weeks earlier, U-M Regents voted unanimously to offer the presidency to the 50-year-old provost and professor of government at Dartmouth College, who is a former dean of the U-M Law School, where he began his teaching career in 1973.

In a half-hour public meeting Nov. 5, followed by a two-hour reception at the Michigan Union, Bollinger and his wife, the artist Jean Magnano Bollinger, met with a cheerful throng of faculty, students, staff and administrators who warmly welcomed their return to Ann Arbor.

Several of the Regents commented on Bollinger's deep love of the University and identified Bollinger as a candidate who would "hit the ground running," an ability they said was particularly important for the University at this stage in its history.

Bollinger, who succeeds President James J. Duderstadt, left for Dartmouth in 1994 after a seven-year term as dean of Michigan's Law School. He holds a BS degree from the University of Oregon (1968) and a law degree from Columbia University (1971). His first-year salary of $275,000 will make him among the nation's highest paid public university presidents.

An avid outdoorsman since his summers working for the US Forest Service and on ranches in Oregon, Bollinger is a backpacker and runner. He was hailed as the nation's fastest dean after running his 440-yard, mile-relay leg for the Ann Arbor Track Club in under 55 seconds in the Master's Relay at New York's Millrose Games eight years ago. That squad finished third in the nation. He ran at Millrose again in 1990. Wolverine fans have firm ground for assuming that they now have the nation's fastest university president.

In addition to Bollinger, three other presidential finalists met with the Regents and the campus community in an almost completely open selection process, as required under the State of Michigan's open meetings law. They were: Stanley A. Chodorow of the University of Pennsylvania, Carol T. Christ of the University of California at Berkeley, and Larry R. Faulkner, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. All of them are provosts at their schools and candidates for various university presidencies.

In his official acceptance speech, Bollinger said he took his new post "with the deepest emotions, close to those connected with family. And, as the years of our collective service to this great university roll by, this abiding affection we all share should be our bond and the source of our decisions and of our treatment of each other."

"There are special moments in life," he said, "when we feel we see more clearly and more deeply into the truth of things. I feel this is such a moment for me, and I hope it is for the University. If this is such an occasion, then we ought to make every effort to hold onto this clarity of understanding, as the daily cares will inevitably threaten to overwhelm us in the years ahead. To this end we might employ as a point of reference a little poem, Spring Pools, written by the great American and great University of Michigan poet, Robert Frost; a poem, by the way, he composed in Ann Arbor.

"Just after the last snow has melted, the poem says, small pools of water form and, in the still leafless forests, they reflect the 'total sky almost without defect.' Such near-perfect vision, however, is fleeting, for the trees 'have it in their pent-up buds/To darken nature and be summer woods'; the roots will 'blot out and drink up and sweep away' these momentary pools of sight. 'Let them think twice,' the poem warns, before they 'bring dark foliage on' to destroy these 'flowery waters' 'from snow that melted only yesterday.'

"I would like to think that today is at least my 'spring pool,' and with Frost's exquisite sense of poignancy I want to say to the inevitable burdens and cares of the years ahead, let them think twice before they use their powers to bring dark foliage on."

Lee Bollinger has always taught while serving in administrative posts. He said he would attempt to continue that practice as Michigan's president. An expert on the First Amendment, he taught a class on that subject for 80 Dartmouth undergraduates last semester. Boston Magazine cited it as one of the three best courses at Dartmouth. A Dartmouth senior, Lynne Campbell, told a reporter that she was taking the course because she had heard from fellow students that it was ranked among the top 10 college courses in the country.

His accessibility to students was among the top qualities that Bollinger's colleagues at both institutions cited. In a public interview before the Regent's made their selection, he said he enjoyed getting to know some of his students individually and encouraged them to contact him "in a variety of contexts," including the classroom, special office hours or chats on the street. "Clearly you have to do more [than that]," he continued. "You have to make regular appearances around campus, try to make the meetings substantive. I try never to turn down a request to speak with students."

Bollinger's major writings on the First Amendment include two books, The Tolerant Society (Oxford University Press, 1986), which was inspired by the free speech case involving American neo-Nazis' bid to march in predominantly Jewish Skokie, Illinois, and Images of a Free Press (University of Chicago, 1991), an exploration of freedom of the press as it has been developed and applied to various media in this century.

Bollinger spoke about his research and a variety of other topics in an interview with Michigan Today editor John Woodford at U-M's Inglis House in December.

Michigan Today: Have you found appreciable differences between the ties that link alumni to private schools like Dartmouth and those that connect a public university like Michigan to its graduates?

Lee Bollinger: There is a very special relationship between alumni and this university---that is one of the principal foundations of Michigan's greatness. There is actually quite a strong similarity between Dartmouth and the University of Michigan in this respect. Both institutions have created environments for their students that inspire a life-long attachment and devotion. That is simply extraordinary. It is a precious tradition, and I look forward to working with the Alumni Association and other alumni groups and with individual graduates. This was one of the greatest sources of pleasure for me in being dean.

MT: What is it about higher education that creates such strong and long-lasting attachment?

LB: From the perspective of the faculty, it is the intellectual growth of the students. From the students' perspective it is a combination of intellectual, social and emotional development. It's a stage of life when they are making new friends, having new experiences, when there seem to be unlimited possibilities---a community imbued with the sense of the fresh start. These are the things that you never fully recapture in any later stage of life. And that is why, I believe, we will never have "virtual" universities. Human nature being what it is, people will always prefer to live in a community of individuals doing the same thing. The new electronic capabilities will be a very important supplement to that experience, however.

MT: You surprised a good number of people when you stated during your interview with the Regents that you shied away from certain managerial customs like strategic planning. How did you arrive at your position?

LB: Planning for the future is certainly a good idea. The question is, what is the most effective way to do that. In recent years, many universities have followed a path of developing formal strategic plans. In general this has occupied an enormous amount of time of highly talented people with, what seem to me at least, to be very limited results.

We all understand the need to draw various groups into the decision-making process, and strategic planning has some of that value. But we should always prefer combining real substance with real participation. It is telling, I think, that all university strategic plans look remarkably identical. That alone ought to make us suspicious of their value. The plans are also often expressed in high generalities and abstract terminology. I think that fails the true test of a plan. Most important decisions that universities or institutions make are the results of unwritten, deep understandings rather than of paragraphs in strategic plans and mission statements.

MT: One role of leaders of higher education is to make a case for continued strong public support. Yet you have said you don't think top administrators should adopt an "advocacy model" like that of public interest groups. What do you mean by that?

LB: I believe that universities must participate in the public debate about national priorities not with the sense that they have obvious rights of entitlement but rather with an understanding that we, too, have to explain and justify our existence, and share in the search for solutions to common problems. I also believe that the best way to demonstrate the value of universities to society is to invite legislators and policy-makers to campus. Nothing I could say in an office can compare with a visit to the campus to see what actually happens here the excitement of learning, the dedication of faculty to teaching and discovery, the atmosphere of high purpose.

The advocacy or interest group model is also inconsistent with the fundamental principle of open-mindedness within the University. To turn the University into an interest group, therefore, is to have a contradiction at the very top, and that's unthinkable.

MT: Your observation that the University is in some ways too modest also surprised a number of people who are used to hearing the charge that the University is arrogant.

LB: I think that Michigan, compared with other major universities, understates its actual accomplishments. Public universities, like private institutions, seem to have distinctive personalities---with good and bad aspects---and one facet of Michigan's personality, I believe, is that it has not had a sufficiently deep commitment to its own history. I cited as an example how Michigan has not kept alive the association it has with so many highly talented people. I mentioned Robert Frost, John Dewey, Donald Hall and W.H. Auden, but there are many others. Frost spent only a few months at Dartmouth, yet you can see references to him on that campus almost anywhere you turn. He spent much more time at Michigan, at a crucial moment in his creative life, but there is little public indication of that here. Michigan's modesty in this regard is unfortunate, but it can be remedied.

MT: Affirmative action is a controversial issue that affects higher education as it does other institutions. For example, some say diversifying the student body on the basis of economic circumstances would be an effective and more equitable replacement for programs based on ethnicity.

LB: Ten years ago, when I became dean of the Law School, there was virtually no public discussion in this country about affirmative action programs. The past 10 years have brought a dramatic change in that. We are now in a period of national reassessment of this major public policy---and of our Constitutional principles---which has its origins in the historic events of the 1950s and '60s. It was inevitable that such a period would come, and we should not regard it as an unwelcome development. As with all major social policies, some segments in the debate, on all sides, take unfortunate positions, but in general it is a reasonable debate. To the extent that an institution such as Michigan wants to be committed to the continuation of affirmative action programs or some variation of them, it is incumbent upon the institution to help make a case for that policy. I am eager to do that.

MT: You have said that your interest in the First Amendment grew out of your involvement with your father's newspaper in Oregon. What did you do on the paper?

LB: My father recently retired from the Santa Rosa (California) Press Democrat, part of the New York Times chain. I have four brothers and a sister, and several of them and other members of the family also worked for the Santa Rosa paper. When I was in junior and senior high, my father was editor and publisher of a daily newspaper in Baker, Oregon, a small town near the Oregon-Idaho border. I worked as a janitor and developed film for the paper. I acquired tremendous admiration for what the press does in this country, though I also recognize---and have written about---its many shortcomings. At its best journalism is a calling for people, just like it is for academics. People often sacrifice much larger incomes to pursue this vocation. Journalism is also imbued with this sense of autonomy and independence, along with a spirit of public responsibility. That is the sense of journalism I picked up while working on my father's paper. In my academic research it has led me to explore how we nurture and protect that freedom of the press and where we draw its limits.

For the past several years I've been working on a book on issues involving what I call public cultural institutions---including universities, public museums, public broadcasting, national endowments for the arts and humanities, and public art programs. These are all institutions created for the purposes of preserving and inspiring what we think of as high cultural achievement. I'm interested in understanding the basic social purposes and functions of these institutions, the degree to which they are thought to be separate from politics and commerce, and the extent to which they should receive protection under the First Amendment against government regulation. I view this as part of the new frontier of the First Amendment.