The part-time part in London was paid, temporary and only expert, but to Minouche Shafik, it offered a way out of her embattled president at Columbia University.
She had only recently arrived in New York for one of academia’s most successful jobs: running an Ivy League university with huge riches and variety, unusual prestige, and a history that facilitated American independence. To the school’s leaders, Shafik was a flawless pick, a worldwide thinking scholar with a remarkable individual story, and the first woman to lead Columbia.
These next 10 weeks, though, since the start of the Israel-Hamas battle, had been terrible for Columbia and its leader. The school, which Shafik had championed as a shelter for the country’s best heads who may help solve society’s insoluble problems, disintegrated into factions. And as Shafik’s answer turned out to be erratic and sluggish, she found herself with some friends and faced a school where she was viewed as isolated and hardly ever seen.
By the time summer split arrived, she had been vilified on college and in Congress as a supporter of antisemitism, a staunch supporter of academic freedom and free talk, and an incapacitated leader who had both allowed pro-Palestinian protests to fall into lawlessness and been very eager to visit in police. Her home appeared to be both a fortress and a place to live. And even as the summer provided a break from protests and encampments, university officials began weighing police powers for campus security officers because they were so worried about potential trouble in the future.
People who had spoken to Shafik in recent months began to believe she was deeply unsatisfied and had told faculty members that she believed her administration lacked confidence.
In the end, she made the decision to leave Columbia, accept the invitation from the British Foreign Office to hold an outside review of development policy, and then return to her House of Lords peerage. Her safe harbor would be the bruising environs of Westminster and Whitehall, away from the grandstanding and protests of an American political season that had been acrimonious by many of her students.
Shafik, who could not be reached for comment, ruefully claimed in an open letter 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 family and claimed it had been “distressing” for the community, for me as president, and for me personally to find myself, my colleagues, and students the subject of threats and abuse.
Just weeks after publishing a letter that did n’t give a hint that she was considering resuming work, she abruptly left Columbia. But her resignation, which Columbia’s board co-chairs said trustees accepted “regretfully”, would almost certainly not close this contentious era in the university’s 270-year history, or in higher education in the United States.
The blame game for months of turbulence is only just beginning, and a congressional investigation is still pending. Faculty and administrators are gearing up for a fall semester of flare-ups that could be used as ammunition for the 2024 presidential campaign in Columbia, which has interim leadership.
No one anticipated how she ended up this way, according to James H. Applegate, a professor of astronomy and a member of a university senate committee whose authority Shafik ignored when she summoned police to the campus in April.” She started with a lot of hope and optimism,” Applegate said. ” That is a tremendous disappointment”.
But, he added, perhaps her decision should not have been all that much of a surprise:” 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, by ‘ Humanity In All’s’.
It was never going to be all that easy to follow Lee C. Bollinger, the free-speech scholar who led Columbia for 21 years. But in January 2023, Columbia’s board announced Shafik’s appointment with glassy-eyed fanfare. The university board’s chair, then, Joanathan Lavine, deemed her to be” the ideal candidate: a brilliant and capable global leader, a community builder, and a preeminent economist who understands the academy and the world beyond it.”
Shafik, an economist who fled Egypt with her family when she was a child, had been raised in the American South before receiving degrees from Oxford University, the London School of Economics, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She rose to prominence at the World Bank, obtained a powerful position at the Development Agency of the United Kingdom, and then rose to senior positions at the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund. In 2020, she became a cross-bencher in the House of Lords– a bona fide baroness.
She was not, however, steeped in the byzantine world of university governance in the United States. At Columbia, as at many other universities, presidents are not autonomous rulers but essential figures in a shared power structure.
During her formal inauguration Oct. 4, she framed her address around a question:” What does the world need from a great university in the 21st century”?
In an earlier era, she noted, universities “were kept separate from the world around them”.
” Columbia started as a university for white, Christian men”, she added. It would have been inconceivable for someone who looked like me to be president of this great institution for the majority of its history. Our world is so much richer for it because of Columbia’s continued inclusion of humanity in all of its distinctive splendor today.
Three days later, Hamas fighters burst out of the Gaza Strip into Israel.
Shafik called on people to “reject forces that seek to tear us apart” two days later, declaring she was “devastated by the horrific attack on Israel.”
On Oct. 12, only eight days after her optimistic oration, Columbia closed its campus as hundreds of protesters amassed. It was a way of separating itself, for the moment, from the world around it.
Months of Turmoil
Shutting the gates resolved little. On campuses across the nation, protests were exploding, and Columbia was having trouble with ones that some students perceived had particularly ominous antisemitism and intimidation.
In November, the university was one of the first to suspend Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, two pro-Palestinian organizations that Columbia officials claimed had defied the laws governing demonstrations. Shafik also made a move to tighten the laws governing demonstrations. Critics suspected speech suppression.
A day later, hundreds of faculty members walked out after hundreds of students rallied to protest the suspensions.
For a time, though, Shafik was able to pursue order and soothe donors largely in private. And she snuck into the limelight in December when the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University presidents gave testimony to Congress. Their legal responses to antisemitism helped to end their terms in a month. Shafik was traveling abroad at the time of the hearing.
However, as protests continued and as antisemitism became more prevalent, pressure was mounting.
Then, on April 17, Shafik took her turn before Congress. The December showdown that had destroyed the Harvard and Penn leaders had been studied by Columbia officials, who decided to use Shafik as an example of empathy and concordance.
” Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct”? Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., demanded early in the hearing.
” Yes, it does”, Shafik replied, echoing the board co-chairs, Claire Shipman and David J. Greenwald, who had accompanied her to Capitol Hill.
Under persistent questioning from Republicans, Shafik went into surprising detail about the disciplining of university employees, which is usually confidential.
Congress, for the moment, was at bay. But that morning, students had gone to a grassy quad and pitched tents. They posted a sign:” Gaza Solidarity Encampment”.
Shafik decided to call in police, violating, in the view of many professors, university protocol since members of the university senate had warned her not to.
At Columbia, few decisions are as freighted as summoning the New York Police Department. More than 700 arrests were infamously made in 1968, which hampered applications and donations as well as stifling protests.
More than 100 arrests were made as a result of Shafik’s choice, which placed Columbia at the center of a national firestorm, making the campus a symbol for a springtime protest movement that ultimately resulted in thousands of arrests nationwide.
Faculty members began discussing a censure, a humiliating punishment. Shafik, students and professors railed, was stifling speech and threatening the academic freedom that had been sacrosanct for generations.
Worse yet for Shafik, the arrests only emboldened many of the demonstrators, who promptly reconstructed their encampment. House Speaker Mike Johnson and a group of Republican lawmakers held a press conference at Columbia on the steps of the Low Library, causing rumors that the National Guard would be stationed on the campus. According to Johnson, he stood in Shafik’s office and told her to quit.
She refused, much like the protesters who were rebuffed by packing demands.
Then, on April 30th, protesters stormed Hamilton Hall, a building protesters had occupied in 1968.
Although Columbia had earlier stated that it would be” counterproductive” to bring the NYPD back to campus, Shafik called in police once more. That night, hundreds of officers marched through the campus. The occupation, Shafik said, had left her with” no choice”.
Few of the arrests were successful. The return of the police sparked protests among their allies. Some people questioned Shafik’s justification for allowing such disorder to exist.
The besieged university, with its gates closed and many students opting for remote classes, staggered to the end of the semester. Shafik avoided each of the smaller ceremonies and Columbia canceled its main commencement ceremony.
London Calling
Summer arrived, easing the chaos, but Shafik soon discovered her university, which placed three deans on leave for text messages that she claimed” touched on ancient antisemitic tropes.” ( The deans resigned this month. A fourth administrator who was involved in the exchanges to a lesser degree, Josef Sorett, remains at Columbia. )
Soon after the” Textgate” scandal, as it became known on campus, a resurgent, recalibrated Labour Party in Britain thumped the Conservative Party in a general election. At the Foreign Office, Britain’s new top diplomat, David Lammy, ordered a trio of reviews to examine policy.
The government occasionally reached out to Shafik over the course of the past month or so to ask if she would sit on an advisory committee on development policy. The role was not conceived as a post-Columbia landing spot for Shafik, according to a British official who, in line with government protocol, spoke on the condition of anonymity.
To accept the position, Shafik did not need to step down from Columbia. In reality, the government was hiring other well-known outsiders to review British policy without any expectation that they would resign.
Shafik agreed to the post. And to the surprise of some in London and New York, she decided to quit Columbia, too.
A Last Surprise
Columbia planned to announce Shafik’s exit Thursday, but word began to bubble up Wednesday evening. There was little time to warn people of the seismic change, including that the board had selected Dr. Katrina A. Armstrong, the university’s executive vice president for health and biomedical sciences, as Columbia’s interim leader.
A campus that had been consumed by months of tumult found itself once more stunned.
” I’ve had calls since 7 in the morning”, Costis Maglaras, the dean of the business school, said Thursday. ” I think people are sad to learn Minouche has resigned, but people are now facing forward and sort of rallying around Katrina,” said one journalist.
But to some on campus, Shafik’s eventual collapse had been all but certain since April.
A Columbia economics professor named Brendan O’Flaherty claimed that her willingness to discuss name-calling professors before 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 said.
The university did not specify when Columbia would begin looking for a permanent president. Additionally, the university senate intends to have a commission conduct research into recent events, similar to what Columbia did following the protests in 1968.
For the moment, many Columbia students are reorienting toward the start of classes on Sept. 3 and anticipate whatever the new semester may bring.
Applegate said:” I wo n’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 Students for Justice in Palestine, a group Columbia suspended on her watch.
