Thomas Piatak wrotes in:
“John—You are absolutely right to nominate Bollinger as Weasel of the Year. I went to the University of Michigan Law School when he was the dean there. The year before he became dean, a student singing group sang several Christmas carols at the school’s end of semester gathering. After Bollinger became dean, he told the chorus that they could not perform any Christmas carols or even any songs that mentioned the word ‘Christmas.’ One of the banned songs was Mel Torme’s ‘The Christmas Song.’ Bollinger confessed that he was rather fond of the song, but felt the need to ban it because it ends by wishing everyone a ‘Merry Christmas.’ If the song had only mentioned Christmas in passing at the beginning, he might have allowed the students to sing it, but the provocative ending was just too much to bear.
“Instead of Christmas music, we got to hear some awful contemporary music inspired by ‘Antigone.’ As a friend remarked at the time, ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Thebes.’
“Bollinger was always doing stuff like this, which is why those of us in the Michigan Federalist Society (including the redoubtable Ann Coulter, one year ahead of me at Michigan) called Bollinger ‘Dean Bolshevik.’”
[Derb] This Bollinger dude would obviously be much happier running Pyongyang Institute of Applied Socialism.