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Eileen Barroso
The 2024 Alexander Hamilton Medal will go to Lee C. Bollinger, the President Emeritus of Columbia University. Bollinger led Columbia from 2002 to 2023, the longest tenure of an Ivy League president in the modern era.
The Hamilton Medal is the highest honor awarded to a member of the Columbia College community and recognizes distinguished service to the College and accomplishment in any field of endeavor.
During his two decades of leadership, Bollinger enacted a wide array of transformational academic initiatives to assure the University’s future among the greatest institutions of higher learning in the world. Among these was creating 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, the world’s foremost neuroscience research center, and created the Columbia Climate School, the first of its kind in the nation. To leverage scholarly knowledge for solutions to global problems — what he described as the University’s Fourth Purpose — Bollinger established Columbia World Projects and built a network of 11 Columbia Global Centers across four continents.
He led two of the most successful capital campaigns in the history of higher education and, throughout his presidency, continued to teach a popular undergraduate course on the First Amendment.
A prominent advocate for diversity in higher education, Bollinger led the seminal Supreme Court cases at the University of Michigan that first upheld the constitutional right of colleges and universities to consider race in admissions to build a more diverse student body.
During his tenure, Columbia substantially expanded financial aid for the College and Columbia Engineering, and achieved record levels of undergraduate applications, selectivity and diversity. Bollinger is the first Seth Low Professor of the University, a member of the Law School faculty and one of the nation’s foremost First Amendment scholars, widely published on the centrality of free speech and press to a democratic society.
The 76th annual Alexander Hamilton Award Dinner will take place on Thursday, Nov. 21, in Low Rotunda.