The medal — given for distinguished service and accomplishment in any field of endeavor — is the highest honor awarded to a member of the Columbia College community, and the Alexander Hamilton Award Dinner is one of the College’s signature fundraising events. This year’s proceeds of more than $1 million will benefit College students by supporting the Core Curriculum and financial aid.
Remarks honoring Bollinger were given by Sherri Pancer Wolf CC’90, president of the Columbia College Alumni Association; University Trustees co-chair and 2022 Hamilton Medal recipient Claire C. Shipman CC’86, SIPA’94; Dean Josef Sorett; and Interim President Dr. Katrina Armstrong, who was attending the dinner for the first time. Bollinger’s wife, Jean Magnano Bollinger, celebrated his achievements along with 12 previous Hamilton Medal honorees, alumni, faculty, students, friends and other guests.
“It is difficult to wrap my head around — much less adequately convey — the scope and impact of Lee Bollinger’s tenure as president of this university,” Sorett said. “When I first joined the Columbia faculty 15 years ago, Lee was already in the seventh year of his presidency. By that point, his vision, and the broad strokes of his most transformative initiatives, had already been defined. Across the intervening years, buildings rose, initiatives were imagined and enacted, and this institution, this community, evolved in ways large and small.
“We are all fortunate for having observed his approach to engaged scholarship, his brand of the life of a public intellectual and his model for the kind of leadership it takes to move an institution like Columbia.”
Armstrong concurred: “For two decades, Lee Bollinger managed, over and over again, to pull off a remarkable balancing act: He was able to move Columbia into the future to meet the challenges of the 21st century while carefully preserving our distinctive academic character and long-cherished traditions.”
During his tenure, Bollinger enacted a wide array of transformational academic initiatives, including the creation of Columbia’s first new campus in nearly a century, in Manhattanville — a pioneering model designed for artistic creativity and local community engagement. He also established the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and created the Columbia Climate School, the first of its kind in the nation. In addition, Bollinger established Columbia World Projects and built a network of 11 Columbia Global Centers across four continents.
Bollinger also oversaw the substantial expansion of financial aid for the College and Columbia Engineering; on his watch, Columbia achieved record levels of undergraduate applications, selectivity and diversity.
After receiving the Hamilton Medal, Bollinger spoke about the enduring power of education, and of Columbia University. “I have loved my time with College students and students of [the] graduate schools,” he said. “There is nothing like seeing a young person enraptured with the prospect of being able to enter into serious dialog with the world of ideas. Certainly, there is nothing more affirming for those of us who have spent their lives in that world.”
He continued: “We are now living in a new reality in which we risk losing some of our most fundamental values, and we might imagine ourselves as being back where we were [when the Core Curriculum was launched] in 1919 … I want to say that I take great comfort in knowing, whatever happens, Columbia will endure. And the reason it will endure is explained simply by the student on the steps of Low Library reading Socrates.
“The human need to know, to understand, to participate in the quest for knowledge and to develop that special mentality that accompanies it, will never die, can never be destroyed. If anything in life is permanent, this is it, and Columbia will always offer it at its best. So thank you for bringing me back to that fundamental truth, and thank you for this honor.”