Columbia University President Resigns

Minouche Shafik resigned Wednesday as Columbia University’s president, ending an embattled 13-month term during which her New York City campus was the scene of a series of chaotic and sometimes violent protests by students, faculty and other activists. 

Protests over the Israel-Hamas war began in October and continued through much of the winter at Columbia and many other schools. The protests intensified in April after Shafik testified before Congress.

The protests divided the campus, with many Jewish students saying they were fearful to pass by demonstrations. Shafik faced a backlash after calling on city police to break up an encampment, and again when students and others took over an academic building.

She has seen tenuous support from faculty and administrators, as well as calls from some alumni and donors to resign. She is the fifth Ivy League president to step down over the past year.

 

 

 

“Over the summer, I have been able to reflect and have decided that my moving on at this point would best enable Columbia to traverse the challenges ahead,” she wrote in a letter to the school community on Wednesday.

Katrina Armstrong, who currently runs the Columbia University Irving Medical Center and is dean of the university’s medical school, was named as interim president.

 

Embattled presidents

It has been a brutal time for leaders of the nation’s most closely scrutinized universities, which have been accused by some politicians and alumni of shifting too far left.

The pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses began almost immediately after Hamas militants killed 1,200 Israelis on Oct 7. They escalated as the Israeli military launched an offensive in Gaza.

Some of those politicians and alumni claimed the protests and a lack of response from school administrators were proof that schools had turned into ideological echo chambers where the support of mass murder was legitimized if done for politically appropriate reasons.

The presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania resigned over the winter, not long after a congressional hearing in which they failed to unequivocally condemn antisemitic behavior on their campuses. The president of Cornell stepped down in May after a seven-year tenure, and the president of Yale also retired earlier this year.

Shafik testified at the April hearing that she would do everything in her power to stem antisemitism on her campus. Her remarks prompted pro-Palestinian protests that were so disruptive that Columbia moved its classes online for the end of the academic term and canceled the university’s main graduation ceremony.

 

Columbia University President Minouche Shafik told a House committee that she was ‘personally committed’ to confronting antisemitism on campus. Photo: Ken Cedeno/Reuters

Soon after graduation, three Columbia deans were caught on text message deriding student concerns about antisemitism. “Amazing what $$$$ can do,” read one message.

The deans were put on leave and eventually resigned. 

The incident highlighted Shafik’s dilemma—caught between two sharply divided camps within the university. Progressive faculty, concerned about free speech protections, blocked proposals to pass more restrictive codes of conduct. Meanwhile, donors, alumni and other faculty and students pushed for tougher discipline against protesters.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Shafik had proposed ways of beefing up the school’s security force, including by giving them new authority to arrest protesters. Some trustees have been losing patience with a lack of new parameters ahead of the new school year, according to interviews with some trustees.

“I have tried to navigate a path that upholds academic principles and treats everyone with fairness and compassion. It has been distressing—for the community, for me as president and on a personal level—to find myself, colleagues, and students the subject of threats and abuse,” Shafik wrote in her letter Wednesday. “I remain optimistic that differences can be overcome through the honest exchange of views.” 

Up next

Columbia’s board of trustees said in a letter Wednesday that it accepted Shafik’s decision to step down during “an extraordinarily challenging time.” They continued, “While we are disappointed to see her leave us, we understand and respect her decision.”

Shafik, an economist, took the helm at Columbia in July 2023 after serving as president of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before that, she worked at the World Bank, the U.K.’s Department for International Development, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England, and held academic roles at the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University.

Shafik said Wednesday that she had been asked by the U.K. foreign secretary “to chair a review of the government’s approach to international development and how to improve capability.”

Armstrong, an epidemiologist by training who has run Columbia’s medical center since 2022, previously led the department of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and was on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania.

“I am acutely aware of the trials the University has faced over the past year. We should neither understate their significance, nor allow them to define who we are and what we will become,” she wrote in a letter Wednesday.

“Never has it been more important to train leaders capable of elevating society and addressing the complexity of modern life,” Armstrong wrote. “Columbia University has a long history of meeting the moment, and I have faith that we will do so once again.”

Write to Melissa Korn at Melissa.Korn@wsj.com and Douglas Belkin at Doug.Belkin@wsj.com

Appeared in the August 15, 2024, print edition as 'Columbia University President Resigns'.