Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, whose embattled presidency of Columbia University came to encapsulate a period of historic tumult in American higher education, resigned suddenly on Wednesday. She had led the institution for just over a year.
Shafik was one of several Ivy League presidents who were grilled last academic year by congressional lawmakers about colleges’ handling of antisemitism following Hamas’s attack on Israel and the ensuing war. In a notorious hearing that preceded Shafik’s by several months, Claudine Gay, of Harvard University, and Liz Magill, of the University of Pennsylvania, appeared wooden and bureaucratic in responding to the lawmakers’ questions. Both lost their jobs.
Facing similar questions in April, Shafik took a different tack, pledging to act with more force against hateful rhetoric. The next day, on April 18, she ordered the New York Police Department to clear a pro-Palestinian encampment that had cropped up on the Manhattan campus, resulting in over 100 arrests.
On April 30, she called in New York police again to forcibly evacuate an academic building that had been occupied by protesters — resulting in jarring images of officers in riot gear storming the campus.
Shafik became a lightning rod. Some alleged that she had put students in danger in an effort to appease lawmakers and others. Others insisted that she wasn’t doing enough to protect Jewish students. But she defended herself, writing in a May message that protesting students had crossed a line and put the safety of others at risk. “This drastic escalation of many months of protest activity pushed the University to the brink,” she wrote the morning after police cleared Hamilton Hall, “creating a disruptive environment for everyone and raising safety risks to an intolerable level.”
The immediate reason for Shafik’s departure was unclear. In a message to the Columbia community, she referenced the toll that the turmoil had taken on her family, as well as a request from Britain’s foreign secretary for her to lead “a review of the government’s approach to international development and how to improve capability.”
Whatever the reason, the political significance of Shafik’s departure was already being felt Wednesday night. Elise Stefanik, the Republican congresswoman who publicly pushed for the resignations of Gay, Magill, and Shafik, declared on X: “THREE DOWN, so many to go.”
Shafik was tapped in January 2023 as the successor to one of higher ed’s longest-tenured leaders, Lee C. Bollinger, a renowned First Amendment scholar who led Columbia for 21 years.
Shafik’s ascension to the role in July 2023 meant that, for the first time, six of the eight Ivy League institutions would be led by women. (Since then, four of the six women have resigned.)
Shafik didn’t have much time to establish trust on the campus before the crisis came. The outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas last October supercharged pro-Palestinian student activism across the country and stirred backlash from donors who were alarmed at escalating criticism of Israel. Columbia quickly became an epicenter of those tensions.
In November, Shafik suspended Columbia’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, saying that the student organizations had held an unauthorized campus rally and that some of their protest chants had veered into harassment and threats.
Shafik then spearheaded efforts to revise Columbia’s protocols, approving an interim protest policy that established “demonstration areas” and “demonstration times” to try to keep activists in check. Within a few weeks, Shafik took a hard line on enforcing policies, suspending students involved with a panel discussion that had not been approved by the university. The “Resistance 101” event featured a speaker who had praised Hamas and other groups designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government, the Columbia Daily Spectator reported.
The April arrests of hundreds of activists at Columbia catalyzed a national protest movement that eventually touched more than 100 colleges, pitting students who demanded clear commitments of support for Palestinian rights against administrators who balked at changing their investment policies or taking overt political stances. Students’ demands and tactics drew comparisons to the antiwar activism of the 1960s; at Columbia, protesters even occupied the same building that students took over in 1968. Like in 1968, the occupation ended with a police raid.
As tensions continued to boil and the end of the semester loomed, Shafik called off Columbia’s main graduation, opting instead to hold smaller ceremonies for the university’s individual schools.
The problems kept building over the summer: Three administrators came under fire for text messages they exchanged during a panel discussion about Jewish life at Columbia. The texts — which included comments that Jewish campus leaders were taking “full advantage of this moment” — were initially published in the Washington Free Beacon and later released in full by U.S. House Republicans, who are investigating a number of colleges over allegations of antisemitism. The trio of administrators were placed on leave in June and removed shortly after that.
Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and chair of the U.S. House’s Committee on Education and the Workforce, is leading the congressional investigations. Foxx said in a statement on Wednesday that the Columbia campus had been “engulfed” by “a disturbing wave of antisemitic harassment, discrimination, and disorder” during Shafik’s presidency.
“Columbia’s next leader must take bold action to address the pervasive antisemitism, support for terrorism, and contempt for the university’s rules that have been allowed to flourish on its campus,” Foxx said.
This week, Shafik continued to grapple with the protest fallout by announcing that Columbia would be restricting access to its New York City campus this fall.
In her message on Wednesday, Shafik said that personal reflections “over the summer” had made her see that “moving on at this point would best enable Columbia to traverse the challenges ahead.” She added: “I am making this announcement now so that new leadership can be in place before the new term begins.”
Katrina Armstrong, the university’s executive vice president for health and biomedical sciences, will serve as interim president.
