Columbia president resigns after months of turmoil on campus

Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, resigned Wednesday after months of far-reaching fury over her handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and questions over her management of a bitterly divided campus.

She was the third leader of an Ivy League university to resign in about eight months following maligned appearances before Congress about antisemitism on their campuses.

Shafik, an economist who spent much of her career in London, said in a letter to the Columbia community that while she felt the campus had made progress in some important areas, it had also been a period of turmoil “where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.”

“This period has taken a considerable toll on my family, as it has for others in our community,” wrote Shafik. “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 added that her resignation was effective immediately, and that she would be taking a job with Britain’s foreign secretary to lead a review of the government’s approach to international development.

The university’s board of trustees named Dr. Katrina A. Armstrong, the CEO of Columbia’s medical center and dean of its medical school since 2022, as the interim president. The board did not immediately announce a timeline for appointing a permanent leader.

“Minouche has contributed so much to the Columbia community in an extraordinarily challenging time,” the board’s co-chairs wrote in a statement, adding, “While we are disappointed to see her leave us, we understand and respect her decision.”

The resignation of Shafik, who in July 2023 became the first woman to lead Columbia, was unexpected in its timing, with the first day of the fall semester less than three weeks away. Columbia’s board members have repeatedly said they stood behind her leadership, and the campus had been largely quiet through the summer.

But as much as its sudden end, the brevity of Shafik’s presidency underscores how profoundly pro-Palestinian demonstrations shook her campus in New York and universities across the country.

Facing accusations that she was permitting antisemitism to go unchecked on campus, Shafik made a conciliatory appearance before Congress in April that ended up enraging many members of her own faculty. She twice summoned police to Columbia’s campus, including to clear an occupied building. The moves angered some students and faculty, even as others in the community, including some major donors, said she had not done enough to protect Jewish students on campus.

Shafik’s tenure was among the shortest in Columbia’s 270-year history, and much of it was a sharp reminder of the challenges facing university presidents, who have sometimes struggled recently to lead upended campuses while balancing student safety, free speech and academic freedom.

Few university leaders were as publicly linked to that dilemma as Shafik, whose school emerged as a hub of the campus protests that began after the Israel-Hamas war erupted last year.

Those protests, as well as accusations of endemic antisemitism, drew the attention of House Republicans, who orchestrated a series of hearings in Washington starting last year.

Shafik appeared at one in April, months after appearances by Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, and Claudine Gay, Harvard University’s leader, helped to drive them out of their jobs. (Another Ivy League president, Martha Pollack of Cornell University, recently stepped down. Pollack, who had not been grilled by lawmakers in public, stressed that the decision was “mine and mine alone,” but her departure came amid acrimony over disciplinary action against pro-Palestinian student activists.)

The resignations of Gay and Magill, who were also relative newcomers to the high-wire demands of university presidencies, showed the perils of coming down firmly on the side of the right to protest, even when the protesters’ words were hateful or antisemitic. But Shafik’s difficulties over the last several months showed the repercussions of coming down hard against protesters and faculty.

Neither strategy proved to be foolproof antidotes to campus demonstrations, which led to thousands of arrests across the country and which students have vowed to continue this fall.

When Shafik – whose given name is Nemat but who goes by Minouche – arrived at Columbia last year, she was the rare Ivy League president who was not steeped in American academia and who was new to the tensions on its college campuses. She had been president of the London School of Economics and Political Science for six years before taking the Columbia job.

Before that, she served in senior roles at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as in the British government, where she was a deputy governor of the Bank of England and an independent member of the House of Lords.

Columbia’s board had seen her international experience as a source of strength. But the way she approached the protests from their start last fall generated fierce criticism across the campus, and tensions only escalated following her testimony to Congress in April.

When a group of pro-Palestinian students set up an encampment on a college lawn, Shafik quickly called in police, leading to more than 100 arrests the next day. Students were outraged, and the episode helped spark a wave of similar encampments at colleges nationwide.

But when Columbia protesters defied university administrators and reestablished their encampment, Shafik was seen as too slow to act, angering those who objected to their language and tactics. Her negotiations with the protesters were limited, and she never visited the encampment herself. Almost two weeks passed before she called in police again, and only after protesters took over a campus building, Hamilton Hall.

In May, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia passed a resolution of no-confidence in Shafik, saying she had violated the “fundamental requirements of academic freedom and shared governance.” They also accused her of engaging in an “unprecedented assault on students’ rights” when she decided to seek the arrests of protesters despite contrary advice from the University Senate – a grave charge on a campus where a history of police intervention against protesters has haunted administrators for decades.

The faculty also said she had violated the norms of academic freedom when, during her appearance on Capitol Hill, she named and publicly promised to fire faculty members accused of antisemitism. Her decision to keep the campus in a state of near-lockdown for weeks, with a continuing police presence after the Hamilton Hall takeover, also angered many people on campus.

At the same time, some leading donors sharply criticized Columbia’s response as inadequate and demanded that the university do far more to protect Jewish students. A few contributors, including Robert Kraft, an alumnus and owner of the New England Patriots, said publicly that they would stop donating until things changed.

Many people with close ties to the university said Wednesday night that the news had left them stunned.

But Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who led some of the most intense rounds of questioning during the congressional hearings, celebrated Shafik’s resignation and said she would continue to monitor campuses for signs of antisemitism.

Although the campus was mostly quiet over the summer, tensions remain. Four undergraduate deans were swept up in a scandal sparked by mocking texts they were caught sending to one another in late May during a campus forum on antisemitism. Three have since resigned.

To prepare for the possibility of renewed protests in the fall, the university announced a new color-coded system to guide the community on protest risk level on campus, similar to a Homeland Security advisory system. The level was recently set from Green to Orange, the second-highest, meaning “moderate risk.” Only people with Columbia identification are permitted to enter the central campus in upper Manhattan, which in the past has been open to the public.

College protesters have vowed to come back stronger than ever to push their main demand that Columbia divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies that profit from the occupation of Palestinian territories.

“Regardless of who leads Columbia, the students will continue their activism and actions until Columbia divests from Israeli apartheid,” said Mahmoud Khalil, a student negotiator on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the main protest movement. “We want the president to be a president for Columbia students, answering to their needs and demands, rather than answering to political pressure from outside the university.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.