President Shafik resigns after protests

The president of Columbia University is stepping down. Nemat “Minouche” Shafik announced her immediate resignation as chancellor of New York’s elite university on Wednesday – after just 13 months and 13 days in office, which was marked by violent anti-Palestinian protests and criticism from Jewish students.

At least the timing of Shafik’s withdrawal is surprising. The new semester at Columbia University, whose campus is in the Morningside Heights area, begins in just two and a half weeks for more than 36,000 students. (Katrina Armstrong, head of Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, is now temporarily taking over the role.)

In a long resignation letter, Shafik, who was born in Egypt and also holds British and American citizenship, blamed two reasons for her move. On the one hand, she mentioned the “turmoil” at Columbia University in the past months, which had also put a lot of pressure on her family. Over the summer, she came to the conclusion that it would be better for the university if she accepted a new challenge.

On the other hand, Shafik wrote that she had received a job offer from the new British Foreign Minister, which she would like to take. A move to London would also give her the chance to resume her mandate in the House of Lords. The 62-year-old, who holds a doctorate in economics and philosophy, was nominated to the Upper House in 2020.

The Columbia University campus was the site of violent anti-Palestinian protests last semester. Shafik appeared over these demonstrations, in which anti-Semitic slogans were heard in downtown New York. Her comment offended lecturers, students and several alumni and trustees of the university. Shafik seemed too passive and did not seem to be engaged energetically enough against the demonstrators, who had a tent camp in the courtyard of Columbia again paralyzing the activities of the university. Many Jewish students complained about anti-Semitic incidents, which often took place outside the private university’s large grounds.

What also caused red heads at the end of April was that Columbia’s president asked the city’s police to help clean up a university building. About 100 people were taken away; The images of a large police presence went around the world. A few weeks later, however, little remained of the charges against the residents. Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, announced in June that he was dropping most of the charges.

Resigning “long overdue,” the top Republican said

Shafik is the fourth president of an elite American university to lose his post since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in the Gaza Strip. Liz Magill, the head of the University of Pennsylvania, was the first person to be hit last December. In a hearing, Magill did not find a good answer to the question of how Jewish students could be better protected from harassment and threats.

Then in January, Harvard President Claudine Gay threw in the towel. She also engaged in statements in which she did not condemn Hamas’s crimes strongly enough. In addition, Gay, who had just been the president of the elite university in Cambridge (Massachusetts) since July 2023, was accused of plagiarism. In May, Martha Pollack retired after serving seven years at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Pollack denied that his resignation was related to campus tensions related to anti-Palestinian demonstrations.

In initial reactions, leading Republican politicians were extremely satisfied with Shafik’s resignation. The measure was “long overdue,” right-wing MP Elise Stefanik of New York state wrote in a statement. Stefanik has made a name for himself in recent months with his ongoing criticism of the country’s top universities. The Republicans accused the educational institutions of opposing anti-Semitism in the country with their positions.