A front-and-center protagonist  

I may have said that I was better off without some of the formerly sequestered Times columnists, but I wasn't speaking of Stanley Fish, whose columns I have always found be provocative. Here he is scolding Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, for his introduction of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week:

Leave the geopolitical pronouncements to the politicians whose job it is to make them and follow them up with actions. Remember always what a university is for -- the transmission of knowledge and the conferring of analytical skills -- and resist the temptation to inflate the importance of what goes on its precincts.

Isn't a university also for the creation of knowledge? It seems to me that research is a pretty fundamental function of the university, that seeking the truth (whatever you take this to mean) is well within its mission -- and certainly one could make a case that Bollinger's challenges fit within that mission. Or maybe I'm just inflating the importance of what goes on in the Academy?