From ‘perfect candidate’ to sudden exit: Inside the fall of Columbia’s President Minouche Shafik

The part-time position in London was unpaid, momentary and solely advisory, however to Minouche Shafik, it supplied a approach out of her beleaguered presidency at Columbia College.
She had arrived in New York solely final 12 months for one of academia’s plum jobs: working an Ivy League college with huge riches and variety, extraordinary status and a heritage that predated American independence.To the college’s leaders, Shafik was a peerless decide, a globally minded economist with a exceptional private story, and the first girl to lead Columbia.
These final 10 months, although, since the begin of the Israel-Hamas battle, had been depressing for Columbia and its president. The college, which Shafik had championed as a haven for the world’s finest minds who might assist clear up society’s intractable issues, disintegrated into factions. And as Shafik’s response proved swerving and uneven, she discovered herself with few allies and going through a campus the place she was perceived as insular and barely seen.
By the time summer time break arrived, she had been vilified on campus and in Congress as an ally of antisemites, a turncoat to tutorial freedom and free speech, and an enfeebled chief who had each allowed pro-Palestinian protests to plunge into lawlessness and been too keen to name in police. Her dwelling appeared as a lot a fortress as a residence. And at the same time as summer time introduced a respite from encampments and protests, college officers so feared the chance of future hassle that they started weighing police powers for campus safety officers.
Individuals who had spoken to Shafik in latest months got here to consider that she was deeply sad, and she or he had instructed college members that she thought there was little belief in her administration.
Finally, she determined to resign from Columbia, settle for the British Overseas Workplace’s provide to chair an out of doors evaluate on improvement coverage and return to her peerage in the Home of Lords. The bruising environs of Westminster and Whitehall could be her protected harbor — away from the grandstanding and protesting of an American political season wrapped up with a grinding battle many of her college students reviled.
In an open letter launched Wednesday night time, Shafik, who couldn’t be reached for remark, stated ruefully that her 13-month tenure had included “a period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.” She cited the “considerable toll” on her household and stated it had 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.”
Her departure from Columbia was abrupt, simply weeks after she printed a letter that gave no trace that she was contemplating a retreat. However her resignation, which Columbia’s board co-chairs stated trustees accepted “regretfully,” would nearly definitely not shut this contentious period in the college’s 270-year historical past, or in increased schooling in the United States.
A congressional investigation is underway, and the blame recreation for months of turbulence is just starting. Columbia has interim management, and college and directors are bracing for a fall semester of flare-ups that might flip into fodder for the 2024 presidential marketing campaign.
“She started with a lot of hope and optimism, and no one foresaw it ending this way,” stated James H. Applegate, a professor of astronomy and a member of a college senate committee whose authority Shafik ignored when she summoned police to campus in April. “That is a tremendous disappointment.”
However, he added, maybe her resolution shouldn’t have been all that a lot of a shock: “At some point you have to say, from Shafik’s point of view, ‘How much longer do you want to put up with this stuff?’ It’s a toxic hellhole, and it’s directed at her.”

‘Humanity In All Its Differentiated Glory’

It was by no means going to be all that simple to observe Lee C. Bollinger, the free-speech scholar who led Columbia for 21 years. However in January 2023, Columbia’s board introduced Shafik’s appointment with glassy-eyed fanfare. Jonathan Lavine, then the college board’s chair, pronounced her as nothing lower than “the perfect candidate: a brilliant and able global leader, a community builder and a preeminent economist who understands the academy and the world beyond it.”
An economist who had fled Egypt together with her household throughout childhood, Shafik had been educated in the American South earlier than incomes levels from the College of Massachusetts Amherst, the London Faculty of Economics and Oxford College. She was a younger star at the World Financial institution, took a strong job in Britain’s improvement company and went on to senior roles at the Worldwide Financial Fund and the Financial institution of England. In 2020, she turned a cross-bencher in the Home of Lords — a bona fide baroness.
She was not, nonetheless, steeped in the byzantine world of college governance in the United States. At Columbia, as at many different universities, presidents will not be autonomous rulers however important figures in a shared energy construction.
Throughout her formal inauguration Oct. 4, she framed her tackle round a query: “What does the world need from a great university in the 21st century?”
In an earlier period, she famous, universities “were kept separate from the world around them.”
“Columbia started as a university for white, Christian men,” she added. “For most of its history, it would have been inconceivable for someone who looks like me to be president of this great institution. Today, Columbia includes humanity in all its differentiated glory, and our world is so much richer for it.”
Three days later, Hamas fighters burst out of the Gaza Strip into Israel.
Two days later, Shafik stated she was “devastated by the horrific attack on Israel” and known as on folks to “reject forces that seek to pull us apart.”
On Oct. 12, solely eight days after her optimistic oration, Columbia closed its campus as tons of of protesters amassed. It was a approach of separating itself, for the second, from the world round it.

Months of Turmoil

Shutting the gates resolved little. Protests had been exploding on campuses throughout the nation, and Columbia was grappling with ones that some college students felt had particularly menacing airs of antisemitism and intimidation.
Shafik moved to tighten guidelines round demonstrations and, in November, the college was amongst the first to droop Jewish Voice for Peace and College students for Justice in Palestine, a pair of pro-Palestinian teams that Columbia officers insisted had defied the guidelines for staging protests. Critics suspected speech suppression.
Lots of of college students rallied to oppose the suspensions, and a walkout of tons of of college members adopted a day later.
For a time, although, Shafik was in a position to pursue order and soothe donors largely in personal. And he or she prevented the highlight in December, when the presidents of Harvard College and the College of Pennsylvania testified earlier than Congress. Their lawyerly solutions to questions on antisemitism helped unravel their tenures inside a month. (Shafik was touring overseas at the time of the listening to.)
However strain was mounting as protests continued and fears of antisemitism surged.
Then, on April 17, Shafik took her flip earlier than Congress. Columbia officers had studied the December showdown that had undone the Harvard and Penn leaders, and so they settled on a unique strategy: Shafik would seem empathetic and conciliatory.
“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct?” Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., demanded early in the listening to.
“Yes, it does,” Shafik replied, echoing the board co-chairs, Claire Shipman and David J. Greenwald, who had accompanied her to Capitol Hill.
Below persistent questioning from Republicans, Shafik went into stunning element about the disciplining of college workers, which is normally confidential.
Congress, for the second, was at bay. However that morning, college students had gone to a grassy quad and pitched tents. They posted an indication: “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”
Shafik determined to name in police, violating, in the view of many professors, college protocol since members of the college senate had warned her not to.
At Columbia, few choices are as freighted as summoning the New York Police Division. In 1968, police had been infamously introduced in to quell protests and made greater than 700 arrests, a choice that shadowed the college for many years and hamstrung purposes and donations alike.
Shafik’s alternative led to greater than 100 arrests and propelled Columbia to the middle of a nationwide firestorm, turning the campus into a logo of a springtime protest motion that finally led to 1000’s of arrests throughout the nation.
School members started discussing a censure, a humiliating punishment. Shafik, college students and professors railed, was stifling speech and threatening the tutorial freedom that had been sacrosanct for generations.
Worse but for Shafik, the arrests solely emboldened many of the demonstrators, who promptly reconstructed their encampment. Rumors swirled that the Nationwide Guard could be deployed to the campus, and Home Speaker Mike Johnson, with a bunch of Republican lawmakers, held a information convention at Columbia on the steps of the Low Library. In accordance to Johnson, he stood in Shafik’s workplace and instructed her to stop.
She refused, very similar to the protesters who had been rebuffing calls for that they pack up.
Then in the early hours of April 30, protesters captured Hamilton Corridor, a constructing that demonstrators had occupied in 1968.
Columbia had days earlier stated that bringing the NYPD to campus once more could be “counterproductive,” however Shafik known as in police as soon as extra. Lots of of officers marched via the campus that night time. The occupation, Shafik stated, had left her with “no choice.”
The handfuls of arrests glad few. Protesters and their allies had been livid over the return of the police. Others demanded to know the way Shafik had allowed such dysfunction to reign in the first place.
The besieged college, with its gates closed and plenty of college students choosing distant courses, staggered to the finish of the semester. Columbia canceled its essential graduation occasion, and Shafik stayed away from every of the smaller ceremonies.

London Calling

Summer season arrived, dimming the chaos, although Shafik quickly discovered her college placing three deans on go away for textual content messages that she stated “touched on ancient antisemitic tropes.” (The deans resigned this month. A fourth administrator who was concerned in the exchanges to a lesser diploma, Josef Sorett, stays at Columbia.)
Quickly after the “Textgate” scandal, because it turned recognized on campus, a resurgent, recalibrated Labour Social gathering in Britain thumped the Conservative Social gathering in a common election. At the Overseas Workplace, Britain’s new prime diplomat, David Lammy, ordered a trio of critiques to study coverage.
Someday over the final month or so, the authorities reached out to Shafik to see whether or not she would chair an advisory committee on improvement coverage. The position was not conceived as a post-Columbia touchdown spot for Shafik, in accordance to a British official who, according to authorities protocol, spoke on the situation of anonymity.
To just accept the place, Shafik didn’t want to step down from Columbia. In reality, the authorities was recruiting different high-profile outsiders to scrutinize British coverage with no expectation that they’d vacate different roles.
Shafik agreed to the submit. And to the shock of some in London and New York, she determined to stop Columbia, too.

A Final Shock

Columbia deliberate to announce Shafik’s exit Thursday, however phrase started to bubble up Wednesday night. There was little time to warn folks of the seismic change, together with that the board had chosen Dr. Katrina A. Armstrong, the college’s government vice chairman for well being and biomedical sciences, as Columbia’s interim chief.
A campus consumed by months of tumult discovered itself shocked anew.
“I’ve had calls since 7 in the morning,” Costis Maglaras, the dean of the enterprise faculty, stated Thursday. “I think people are sad to learn that Minouche has stepped down, but people are now facing forward and sort of rallying around Katrina.”
However to some on campus, Shafik’s eventual collapse had been all however sure since April.
Brendan O’Flaherty, a Columbia economics professor, believed that her willingness to talk about disciplining professors by title earlier than Congress “was her undoing with the faculty.”
“For large numbers of faculty, that’s a major, major sin, which she did not repent of,” he stated.
The college didn’t say when Columbia would start a seek for a everlasting president. And the college senate is planning to have a fee research the occasions of latest months, a lot as Columbia did after the 1968 protests.
For now, many at Columbia are turning towards the begin of courses Sept. 3 and no matter the new semester might deliver.
Applegate stated: “I won’t be surprised if there’s an encampment on the first day of classes.”
In the meantime, Shafik’s critics in Washington, the politicians who insisted that she had caved to chaos, celebrated her exit. So did College students for Justice in Palestine, a bunch Columbia suspended on her watch.