Nearly four months after Columbia University was rocked by campus protests over the Gaza war, the university’s president, Minouche Shafik, resigned from her position on Wednesday. Shafik’s resignation makes her the third president of an Ivy League university to step down in response to campus unrest surrounding the conflict.
Katrina Armstrong, the chief executive officer of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, has been appointed as the interim president, according to a BBC report. In an email to students and faculty, Shafik reflected on the challenges she faced during her tenure, particularly in managing the diverse and often conflicting views within the university community.
“This period has taken a considerable toll on my family, as it has for others in our community,” Shafik wrote in her resignation email. “Over the summer, I have been able to reflect and have decided that my moving on at this point would best enable Columbia to traverse the challenges ahead.”
Shafik emphasized that she had strived to uphold academic principles and treat all members of the community with fairness and compassion. However, she admitted that the experience had been personally distressing. “It has been distressing—for the community, for me as president, and on a personal level—to find myself, colleagues, and students the subject of threats and abuse,” she added.
The protests at Columbia escalated in April when Shafik made the controversial decision to allow the New York Police Department to intervene on campus, leading to the arrest of approximately 100 students who were occupying a university building. This marked the first instance of mass arrests on Columbia’s campus since the Vietnam War protests over 50 years ago. The decision sparked further protests at colleges across the United States and Canada.
The situation on U.S. college campuses became increasingly volatile following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza. These events turned universities into focal points for demonstrations, with tensions rising over the handling of protests related to the war.
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Shafik’s resignation follows similar departures by the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), both of whom faced significant backlash for their responses to campus protests and their testimonies before Congress. In particular, these leaders were criticized for their reluctance to assert that calls for violence, including the deaths of Jews, could breach university policies.
In April, Shafik defended Columbia’s efforts to combat antisemitism before Congress, highlighting an increase in such incidents on campus and the university’s measures to protect students. Despite these efforts, the growing unrest proved difficult to manage, ultimately leading to her decision to step down.
Shafik’s resignation also comes on the heels of the departure of three Columbia University deans last week. These deans resigned after text messages surfaced in which they used “antisemitic tropes” while discussing Jewish students. These messages were made public by the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce in early July, adding to the controversies surrounding the university’s leadership.
Minouche Shafik, an Egyptian-born economist with a distinguished career at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Bank of England, had previously served as the president of the London School of Economics before taking up the role at Columbia. Her resignation marks a significant moment in the ongoing debates over free speech, academic freedom, and the responsibilities of university leadership in times of crisis.
