Minouche Shafik has been president of Columbia University for less than a year. But any grace period typically afforded to a new leader of a large and complicated institution abruptly ended this month, as she faces intense pressure, and outright hostility, on numerous fronts.
Ongoing protests over the Israel-Gaza war have effectively ground normal university life to a halt on the Ivy League campus, and Shafik now finds herself in the crosshairs of Republican lawmakers including House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), who visited Columbia on Wednesday and called on her to resign. At least two prominent donors also have paused contributions.
On campus, Shafik faces anger from some and disappointment from others, drawing scrutiny after she summoned New York police to clear an encampment on campus last week, which led to the arrest of more than 100 people.
“I can’t think of anybody that is super pro-Minouche Shafik right now,” said Jared Kannel, 26, a student from Massachusetts who has been protesting as a member of Columbia University Jews for Ceasefire and the campus chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. “There are a lot of students that want her to step down, on both sides, for different reasons.”
“She has forfeited the privilege to lead one of the world’s great research universities, by not standing up for it,” Christopher Brown, a professor of history, said Wednesday. He said he watched in disbelief last week as Shafik and other university leaders testified before a House committee on antisemitism. Instead of defending the strengths of the institution, he said, she repeatedly apologized.
Despite the considerable headwinds, Shafik retains support from some on the campus. Hours after Johnson’s visit, Columbia’s Board of Trustees issued a strong statement of support for the university’s leader.
“The Columbia University Board of Trustees strongly supports President Shafik as she steers the university through this extraordinarily challenging time,” the board said. During the search process for the presidency, Shafik pledged to always take a thoughtful approach to resolving conflict and “balancing the disparate voices that make up a vibrant campus like Columbia’s, while taking a firm stance against hatred, harassment, and discrimination. That’s exactly what she’s doing now,” it said.
Shafik began as Columbia’s president in July, leading a university with 17 schools and about 35,000 students in the heart of New York. Shafik, who was born in Egypt and whose family fled to the United States in the 1960s, is an economist who has worked for the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England.
Just a few months into her tenure, the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the resulting Israel-Gaza war touched off intense protests on Columbia’s campus that have continued for months, bringing the same challenges that university leaders across the country are facing to balance students’ right to express their views with the need to ensure students feel safe on campus — with added intensity given the school’s location and student population in New York.
Amid the sustained student protests, Shafik also is contending with a congressional investigation into campus antisemitism, multiple lawsuits, an Education Department probe, volatile protests by external groups outside university gates, tense negotiations with passionate student protesters inside the gates, and sudden visits from high-profile lawmakers.
In recent days, prominent donors have paused giving. Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots and founder of the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, announced this week that he will pause his donations until the university takes corrective action because he is no longer confident that Columbia can protect its students and staff. He called on university leaders to stop the protests and work to earn back the trust of many who have lost faith in the school.
Len Blavatnik, a billionaire businessman and philanthropist whose foundation has given $10 million to establish a fund at the engineering school, has suspended his donations until he sees the university take action to prevent campus antisemitism, according to a spokeswoman.
The pressure on presidents from many sides is escalating, said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education.
“This is like trying to tap-dance on a surfboard, with the waves growing in intensity,” Mitchell said.
Being a college president has never been an easy job, he said, but in the past 10 or 15 years the challenges have magnified for numerous reasons. That includes ramped-up political pressure, from federal and state lawmakers and from donors and others, “who feel they have a stake in an institution, and that stake comes with a voice, if not a vote.”
On Columbia’s campus, some are frustrated by all the external scrutiny.
“It’s clear that outside forces are trying to divide us here on campus, and that’s very sad,” said Andrew Marks, chair of the department of physiology and cellular biophysics. “I know we’re supposed to be here to pursue education and teaching, and to see the university torn apart like this is a terrible thing.”
Brown said he talked to a couple of students Tuesday who said the Columbia community needs to give Shafik a chance to lead, rather than rushing to judgment. But he has also talked to other students who were “so aghast that the police were called in precipitously in such a massive show of force that they feel like they can never trust the administration, regardless of what happens from here.”
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing with Columbia University leaders over campus antisemitism on April 17 in Washington, D.C. (Video: The Washington Post)
Last week, Shafik spent hours on Capitol Hill answering scathing questions from a House committee about antisemitism on campus, just as three university presidents had done in December with disastrous results; the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard resigned within weeks of their testimony, in which they repeatedly declined to say that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their campus policies.
While Shafik and other university leaders were testifying that they will enforce rules about demonstrations, an unauthorized protest was happening at Columbia, with pro-Palestinian students in tents at the heart of the school’s Morningside campus.
The following day, the New York Police Department swept onto campus and arrested more than 100 students, a response that was criticized by some as far too harsh and antithetical to the university’s long tradition of celebrating student activism, and by others as ineffectual or even counterproductive, since the protests continued and drew large crowds of supporters to the streets outside the university gates.
In the days since, encampments have popped up at other schools across the country, while Columbia officials negotiate with protesters around-the-clock in an effort to de-escalate the situation and a growing number of external critics weigh in.
The Columbia University and Barnard College chapters of the American Association of University Professors introduced into the University Senate a resolution of censure against several of Columbia’s top leaders.
The proposed resolution criticizes Shafik, the university’s general counsel, chief operating officer and the co-chairs of the Board of Trustees. “President Shafik’s violation of the fundamental requirements of academic freedom and shared governance, and her unprecedented assault on students’ rights, warrants unequivocal and emphatic condemnation,” the resolution reads.
The proposed resolution is not a call for Shafik’s resignation, noted Sheldon Pollock, a professor of South Asian studies at Columbia University.
On Wednesday, Shafik met with faculty at a closed-door meeting.
Jeanine D’Armiento, a professor of medicine in anesthesiology at Columbia and chair of the executive committee of the University Senate, said Wednesday that the meeting was the beginning of a process and that there was nothing to report. On Monday, she said that the Senate supports Shafik, and the body recently wrote a letter expressing that.
That does not mean all members of the Senate are supportive of the decision to bring in police last week to arrest student protesters, D’Armiento said at the time. “We have had, obviously, concerns over a lot of administrative decisions that have been made,” she said. But the president is new at a complicated university, she said. “We find issues with what happened, and we support her.”
The University Senate is expected to meet again Friday.
Henning Schulzrinne, a professor of computer science and of electrical engineering, said Wednesday that not since protests in 1968 have university leaders confronted such issues that are so personal for so many, so divisive, and test the boundaries of speech and safety and protest so starkly. “Most people,” he said, “recognize that this is an almost impossible situation.”
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