The Presidents of Columbia, Howard and N.Y.U. Announce Their Retirements

Within the announcement of Mr. Bollinger’s pending departure, Columbia mentioned it had labored with communities surrounding the brand new campus “to help priorities like housing and training and to construct alliances which might be creating important bonds with our neighbors and defining a brand new period of collaboration and progress.”

Nonetheless, these sentiments conceal a extra contentious actuality. At first, the enlargement threatened to turn into a brand new chapter in Columbia’s lengthy historical past of friction with the encompassing Harlem neighborhood in a city and robe battle between the privileged world of academia and the usually forgotten world of the poorer neighborhood round it.

A spokeswoman for Columbia, Victoria Benitez, mentioned the college had tried to deal with neighborhood considerations by serving to companies to relocate or preserving them, stepping up sources for native youth and constructing reasonably priced housing for residents within the affected space.

Keith Wright, a state assemblyman from Harlem for 44 years, was intimately concerned in negotiating with Columbia over the enlargement, which Harlem residents feared would displace them and native companies. Mr. Wright, now a advisor, recalled that negotiators had spent virtually 24 hours locked in a room earlier than they got here out with an settlement over the venture.

The purpose of neighborhood leaders, Mr. Wright mentioned on Thursday, was “to create a pipeline so Columbia College could be accessible to people down within the valley.”

“I believe we bought quite a lot of neighborhood giveback,” he added.

Mr. Bollinger additionally attracted consideration in 2007 by inviting the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to talk at Columbia after which attacking Mr. Ahmadinejad’s file as he sat close by. A minimum of one professor at Columbia accused Mr. Bollinger, a First Modification scholar, of inappropriately dabbling in politics.

Mr. Bollinger was a distinguished determine in two pivotal affirmative motion admissions circumstances, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, as president of the College of Michigan earlier than he arrived at Columbia.