CLEVELAND -- Lee Bollinger, president of the University of Michigan and recently named president of Columbia University, effective July 2002, will speak on "The Role of the Public University in American Higher Education" at the 2001 Frank J. Battisti Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Case Western Reserve University's School of Law.

The lecture will take place at 7 p.m. Thursday, October 25 in Harkness Chapel. It is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a reception at the law school.

"Our school is delighted to host President Bollinger, and grateful to the Battisti family and the judge's former clerks for making this forum possible," said Gerald Korngold, the dean and McCurdy Professor of Law. "As head of one of the nation's foremost public universities, he is uniquely qualified to discuss the role of public universities in higher education."

Bollinger has been president of the University of Michigan since 1996. Prior to that, he had been provost and professor of government at Dartmouth College since 1994. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School in 1973, and was named dean of the school in 1987.

A graduate of the University of Oregon and Columbia Law School, Bollinger served as law clerk for Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and for Chief Justice Warren Burger of the U.S. Supreme Court. He is the author of Images of a Free Press (University of Chicago Press, 1991) and The Tolerant Society: Freedom of Speech and Extremist Speech in America (Oxford University Press, 1986.) He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the boards of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The Frank J. Battisti Memorial Lecture Series was established in 1995 to honor Judge Battisti, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio from 1961-94. Battisti was best known for his rulings in Cleveland's long-running school desegregation case, ordering fair housing in the city of Parma, and expanding civil rights. He had hundreds of published decisions in numerous legal areas. He assumed senior status in 1994 and passed away later that year.