Columbia president Minouche Shafik at centre of campus turmoil

As pro-Palestinian protests roiled its campus and forced a switch to remote learning, Columbia University’s board of trustees this week expressed confidence in its president, Minouche Shafik.

But with police drones circling overhead, a censure motion looming in the university’s senate and politicians calling for her to quit, the turmoil facing veteran economist Shafik — a former senior figure at the World Bank and Bank of England who has been at Columbia for less than a year — was far from over.

An academic who knew her well in earlier roles said: “Minouche [has been] tremendously successful at engaging the leadership wherever she went. But I can’t see how she navigates this and survives.

“It’s a Catch-22. The more you appease the rightwing attacks on campus culture, the more you undermine your position with the university.”

Shafik has had to walk a delicate line between enabling freedom of speech on campus and condemning episodes of antisemitism and Islamophobia as they occurred, in a febrile atmosphere generated by Israel’s war with Hamas and US elections this year.

But tensions at Columbia escalated sharply this month when the 61-year-old was questioned by a committee of the US House of Representatives on April 17. She condemned incidents of antisemitism — in stronger terms than other university presidents, who placed more emphasis on freedom of speech — but also annoyed faculty by confirming publicly the names of several among their number who were under investigation.

The “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” of protesters and their tents sprang up at Columbia that same day, calling for the university to divest its funds from companies linked to Israel’s military campaign in the Palestinian enclave.

Marcel Agueros, a professor of astronomy and secretary of the Columbia branch of the American Association of University Professors, said the greatest shock for him and colleagues came shortly afterwards, when — against the advice of the executive committee of the university senate — Shafik requested that New York police enter the main campus last Thursday.

They arrested 108 students from the tent camp. Such a police intervention had not taken place on Columbia’s campus for three decades, and raised the shadow of a notorious incident there in 1968 — New York police stormed the campus, using tear gas, to arrest students protesting against the war in Vietnam.

The police have remained present, along with private security guards enforcing tight controls on access to the main campus.

Shafik now faces pressure from multiple directions. Republican politicians led by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who appeared on campus after meeting Shafik on Wednesday, are calling for her removal for failing to adequately tackle antisemitism on campus.

At the same time, Columbia’s senate, a policymaking body of 111 faculty, staff and students, may vote in the coming days on a motion brought by the AAUP criticising “President Shafik’s violation of the fundamental requirements of academic freedom and shared governance, and her unprecedented assault on students’ rights”.

Agueros attacked Shafik for her decision to call in police. He said the past week had been “catastrophic”, dismissing suggestions that the students were nearly as disruptive as the police force.

“We have seen an unprecedented combination of disastrous decisions. The biggest disruption has been the setting up of this mini-police state. Of course we condemn antisemitic acts but we need leaderships of universities to stand up for what they are about,” he said.

The motion presents little direct threat to Shafik: supporters of the censure move are still trying to find a committee to sponsor it, meaning the senate — which in any case lacks the power to oust her — may end up voting on a much milder rebuke.

And the trustees of the university, who appointed Shafik, said on Wednesday they “strongly” supported her “as she steers the university through this extraordinarily challenging time . . . We are urgently working with her to help resolve the situation on campus and rebuild the bonds of our community”.

Shafik herself defended her actions on Wednesday, saying: “The right to protest is essential and protected at Columbia, but harassment and discrimination is antithetical to our values and an affront to our commitment to be a community of mutual respect and kindness.”

Shafik, whose given first name is Nemat, was brought by her parents from Egypt at the age of 4 to the American south. She studied economics at Amherst, the London School of Economics and Oxford before rising to senior positions at the World Bank, the UK’s Department for International Development, the IMF and the BoE before returning to LSE as president and then to Columbia.

Her Columbia biography touts her record at “pivotal, high-stakes moments . . . to address some of the world’s most complex and disruptive challenges”.

When Shafik started at Columbia last July, many faculty were impressed not only by her appointment as the first woman leader of the institution, and of Arab Muslim origin, but also by her warmth and communication with academics. Her predecessor Lee Bollinger had been viewed as remote and focused mainly on the university’s ambitious new building projects.

That positive relationship chilled after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, when demonstrations on campus and concerns over antisemitic remarks and threats led the administration to ban the main groups protesting against Israel’s offensive in Gaza — Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace — despite concerns over freedom of speech.

Columbia established a committee on antisemitism, but was slower to support another on alleged Islamophobia; it also faced claims of failing to take rapid action against “doxxing” by individuals on and off campus who were publicly identifying student protesters.

The university faced criticism and lawsuits from Jewish student organisations, along with threats by donors to withdraw funding. At the same time, more moderate Jewish faculty raised concerns that antisemitism was being “weaponised” by politicians on the right, who they said were clamping down on any criticism of Israel’s offensive in Gaza — including campus protests — as antisemitic.

Marianne Hirsch, a professor of English at Columbia, said: “Most right-wing Republicans calling for [Shafik’s] resignation are not our alumni, are not protecting Jews but are attacking the independence of universities in ways that are unacceptable. She’s been set up and I would love to see her succeed, but we need a reset.”

Since the war in Gaza began, Shafik has outlasted presidents at two other Ivy League schools — Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania — who both quit in the wake of congressional grillings over similar campus issues late last year.

In the wake of Shafik’s own congressional appearance, Nick Dirks, a former dean of arts and sciences at Columbia and author of City of Intellect, a book on universities, argued such sessions function as a trap for university leaders.

“When you are set up in Washington by that kind of interrogation by a really hostile group of congresspeople who are effectively using McCarthyite tactics, you cannot articulate the principles of academic freedom and not be condemned,” Dirks said.

Additional reporting by Joshua Chaffin in New York and Claire Jones in Washington