Inside Columbia College’s Full Give up to Trump

On the morning of April 1, Katrina Armstrong entered a crowded convention room in Washington, D.C., sat down at a protracted desk, and ready to be deposed by the Job Power to Fight Anti-Semitism, a panel President Trump had fashioned to research and punish America’s universities. Armstrong had simply resigned beneath strain because the performing president of Columbia College — the administration’s No. 1 goal and the primary to yield to its calls for. These within the room understood she was in Washington to take a beating, however what transpired was nonetheless painful to behold.

Because the deposition received underway, Armstrong appeared unable to reply the federal government’s more and more hostile questions, as if the expertise of operating Columbia had shattered her. “The final weeks, if not the final months, or a 12 months — it’s simply extremely difficult for me to recollect something in specificity,” Armstrong stated in certainly one of many evasions. “It has been probably the most difficult time of my life.”

Her questioner, Sean Keveney, a member of the duty power and the performing normal counsel for the Division of Well being and Human Companies, was unmoved. “I admire that, ma’am,” he stated. “You’ve stated that a few instances.”

Armstrong had led Columbia for eight fraught months, bringing a measure of stability to a campus that had torn itself aside over the battle between Israel and Hamas. The college’s trustees, at their annual retreat in February, had come near selling Armstrong from interim to full president — the twenty first within the college’s historical past. Armstrong hadn’t but made up her thoughts whether or not to simply accept when Trump’s sudden assault on the college in March made the query moot. Armstrong watched as his administration reduce $400 million of Columbia’s analysis funding and despatched Immigration and Customs Enforcement brokers onto campus to arrest scholar activists. She acquired a listing of presidency ultimatums stuffed with contempt for the college’s tutorial mission. She introduced that Columbia would comply. After which, when she practically blew up the deal by privately telling college that it wasn’t a capitulation, that the truth is there was some wiggle room, she misplaced her job. On March 28, the identical day Armstrong resigned, she discovered that Trump’s job power had demanded she seem in Washington directly.

Armstrong is 59, and in her years operating Columbia’s medical middle, she had cultivated a bedside method that was upbeat, kinetic, approachable. Her quick time triaging the complete college’s issues had taken a visual toll. “She regarded like she was on the snapping point,” somebody who dealt along with her repeatedly stated. To a different, “she appeared like an individual who desperately wanted associates and allies and felt like she was very alone.”

Within the deposition room, Armstrong appeared decided, most of all, to keep away from perjuring herself. She couldn’t recall when she had grow to be performing president. She struggled to say who is actually in command of Columbia — the president or the trustees. Pressed by Keveney to confess that Columbia was detached to antisemitism, Armstrong described her tenure as a “blur” 5 instances and as “difficult” or “troublesome” 11 instances and stated she didn’t recall not less than 28 instances.

“I’m simply making an attempt to grasp,” Keveney stated acidly, “how you will have such a horrible reminiscence of particular incidents of antisemitism whenever you’re clearly an clever physician?”

A partial transcript shortly leaked to a conservative outlet and was learn by America’s tutorial elite. These I spoke with have been horrified much less by Armstrong’s self-pitying efficiency than by Columbia’s obvious willingness to sacrifice her. “She undoubtedly was not ready for this, and actually, I feel that’s Columbia,” the previous president of a analysis college advised me. “They threw her beneath the bus. She had simply resigned!” Armstrong was represented throughout the session by her private attorneys, who intervened usually on her behalf, whereas two attorneys from Columbia within the room remained silent. Earlier than her ordeal in Washington, Armstrong had deliberate to return to guide the medical middle. Afterward, Columbia issued a terse replace to the general public: She was taking an indefinite sabbatical.

Columbia’s feebleness this spring has dismayed the various college students, college, and alumni who want it could wage a extra principled combat in opposition to Trump — as Harvard has executed by suing his administration in federal court docket. However even Trump’s allies didn’t predict how a lot of a pushover it has been. “I used to be shocked by how shortly and the way fully the college folded,” Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow on the Manhattan Institute who helped develop the technique to crush Columbia, advised me.

As lately as October 6, 2023 — the day earlier than Hamas attacked Israel — Columbia appeared a juggernaut. After a long time of development, the endowment was a fats $14 billion and buildings named for a brand new technology of megadonors have been rising throughout 17 acres of latest campus. After a world search, the college had chosen a cosmopolitan new president, Minouche Shafik of the London College of Economics, to guide it into the longer term. However since that golden second, the turmoil has been virtually an excessive amount of to catalogue. Countless protest and counterprotest. Campus lockdowns. Police raids. A president paraded earlier than Congress. College students dragged earlier than secretive self-discipline panels. One canceled graduation, two presidential resignations, and numerous college students questioning if ICE is inside their dorms. The strife is ongoing, and the campus is as depressing as ever. Columbia is a damaged place.

I wished to know why the college had buckled so comprehensively — why, at no level after October 7, it ever appeared to be in command of its campus, message, or technique. However one other approach the college has failed is in telling its personal story, and it declined to make its leaders out there for interviews. As a substitute, this account relies on conversations with greater than 60 individuals, together with those that both are, or have shut information of, Columbia’s most influential figures: its presidents, trustees, directors, and senior college. They describe a collapse in three acts. A interval of vertiginous success that hid underlying issues. A gentle burn by the months after October 7. And a blitz by adversaries in authorities who understood Columbia’s vulnerability higher than anybody.

After one other embittered class has its graduation on Might 21, Columbia will lurch right into a summer season of ugly potentialities. College students are nonetheless trying main disruptions on campus, and the college has laid off 180 staff whose pay relied on federal funding. Scientists are hoarding provides. “All the pieces is just about being held along with Scotch tape,” the director of a analysis institute at Columbia stated. “The one factor that’s saving us from a wholesale exodus is that they’re not funding any new grants at Harvard both, however we’re very frightened concerning the flight of our most excellent individuals. The Europeans and Chinese language are each circling like mad.”

The expertise crunch is acute, and never simply within the sciences. One star tutorial at a rival college, who had all however determined to take a place at Columbia this 12 months, modified his thoughts after Katherine Franke, a professor on the regulation college, stated she had been fired for her advocacy. “I need to be in a spot that I do know has the college’s again on the subject of their skill to talk,” he stated.

College are withering of their evaluation of the board of trustees, which has final energy over the college’s affairs. Courtney Cogburn, a extremely regarded affiliate professor on the College of Social Work, was amongst a small delegation of college invited to handle the board in June 2024 — a stilted continuing in a grand room the place individuals needed to lean ahead and activate a microphone to be heard. “The selections we’ve revamped the previous 12 months have disregarded what it means to be a college and the way universities interact and attempt to clear up difficult issues,” she stated. “It felt like so many choices have been being made in panic and worry.”

Jean Howard, a former division chair and vice-provost for variety initiatives, stated that the concessions the trustees have provided to the Trump administration are “antithetical to the whole lot the college stands for.” One other senior member of the college stated, “There’s no precept. There’s no guiding mild. There’s no strategic imaginative and prescient that’s guiding the choices they make. When you’ve conceived the precept that the federal government has a proper to say something concerning the inner governance of an instructional division at a non-public analysis establishment, you’ve misplaced.”

For a lot of college, the only most damaging change the trustees have made entails the Center Jap, South Asian, and African Research division, or MESAAS, the place the topics vary from introductory Wolof to intensive programs on “the Zionist-Palestinian battle” and postcolonial idea. The Trump administration demanded the unit be put into tutorial receivership — a proper declaration that it’s too dysfunctional to handle its personal affairs. As a substitute, Columbia appointed a brand new senior vice-provost to supervise the division. Defenders of the trustees see this as proof they’ve some spine. Inside MESAAS, nonetheless, the association is taken into account even worse than what Trump requested for. “There’s an excellent argument to be made that they took the issues that receivership takes away from the division and scaled it up,” a professor there stated.

Already, many college students perceive that the Columbia they’re getting — and paying as a lot as $93,417 for yearly — is lower than the Columbia they have been promised. The model is tainted, and within the Ivy League, each little bit of fame slippage issues. “For folks,” stated Elizabeth Doe Stone, who runs the consultancy Prime Tier Admissions, “Columbia used to really feel like a secure status play. And now it is perhaps a speaking level they’d have to clarify at a household dinner.”

Columbia is now led by one other momentary president, Claire Shipman, a former TV journalist. The Trump administration appears to love her. One member of the antisemitism job power has stated she is “very happy” with Columbia’s current actions, and the group praised Shipman’s swift dealing with of a pro-Palestinian protest at Butler Library, which led to the suspension of greater than 65 college students. Regardless of this, many members of the Columbia group have seen hopeful indicators that there are some strains Shipman and the trustees received’t cross. “We might reject any settlement that may require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy as an academic establishment,” she wrote in a public letter on April 14.

The federal government has reportedly threatened Columbia with a consent decree that may permit Trump’s individuals to succeed in deeply into the college’s operations, from the form of college students it admits to what they’re taught. What’s at stake is Columbia as we all know it — New York’s most formidable middle of inquiry and information. There isn’t a clearly appropriate technique, given the choices. Stand as much as the federal authorities and be crushed; give up and self-destruct. Lose-lose is the place Columbia finds itself at present. A acknowledged objective of the college’s enemies was to “merely destroy Columbia,” and in some sense they’ve already succeeded.

The investiture of Shafik because the college’s twentieth president, on October 4, 2023, was an event for gale-force Columbiana. Deans and provosts processed out of Low Library, the neoclassical masterpiece on the middle of campus, and a trustee emerita in particular costume bore the Columbia mace, a two-foot scepter adorned with a king’s crown and leaves of acanthus. Shipman was then the co-chair of the board of trustees, and she or he paused her remarks to acknowledge the a number of protests that have been loudly disrupting the ceremony. One concerned a labor dispute; one other, the college’s failure to guard a whole lot of ladies from a sexual predator Columbia employed for a quarter-century. “One unbelievable a part of Columbia’s fame, for these of you who’re new to campus, is that we welcome all voices always, particularly voices of dissent,” Shipman stated. “That is a part of the Columbia tapestry.” When Shafik spoke, she thanked her longtime good friend Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Financial institution, for instructing her “how you can lead with readability and compassion, how you can take incoming fireplace with grace, and how you can all the time do the appropriate factor even when it’s very onerous.”

Three days later, Hamas attacked Israel, killing some 1,200 civilians and taking some 250 hostages. It’s attainable that no person might have efficiently led the college by what occurred subsequent. However Columbia had a number of long-standing, long-neglected issues that primed Shafik for failure.

Even by the cats-in-a-bag normal of recent analysis universities, Columbia is a cursed place to control. It’s large, with 17 colleges to handle, and its endowment is the second smallest within the Ivy League on a per-student foundation, after Cornell. There’s by no means sufficient funding, which suggests Columbia has an extra-toxic model of a typical college downside: resentment between the liberal-arts packages, that are prestigious and lose cash, and the cash-cow items that subsidize them.

Then there are the ghosts of Columbia’s uniquely tortured historical past. After 1968, when antiwar activists took over 5 buildings, the trustees made an enormous change to Columbia’s governance construction. They created a senate with a supermajority of college and college students and gave it the facility to supervise self-discipline and draft college insurance policies. Over the a long time, although, many of those delegated powers eroded, changed by folkways and presidential work-arounds. The end result has been that Columbia has shared governance on paper however not likely in apply. It was a legitimacy bomb, ready to go off in a disaster.

In 2002, after a long time of economic struggles, the trustees put in Lee Bollinger as president, and he started to make the college greater and extra formidable in virtually each approach. He appeared much less fascinated by day-to-day tutorial administration than in pushing Columbia into thrilling new fields, like neuroscience, and creating interdisciplinary facilities world wide. He developed a brand new campus in Manhattanville and paid for it with multibillion-dollar capital campaigns. To perform this, Bollinger largely bypassed the senate and his fractious schools. It earned Bollinger a fame as the best college president of his technology; it got here at the price of professors and deans feeling disenfranchised. An org chart that circulated amongst deans and the president’s workplace annually confirmed a tangle surrounding Bollinger. Dozens of individuals reported on to the president, lots of them floating off to the aspect, outdoors any recognizable hierarchy.

In his 20 years main Columbia, Bollinger outlasted increasingly more of the trustees, and he was capable of form the group in his picture. “Lee mainly seizes management,” an alumnus who has interacted with the board over a few years stated. “Should you’re a trustee, you possibly can yell at your chief government, however your solely recourse is to fireplace him. And Lee mainly would say to the trustees, ‘Oh, you need to fireplace me? Go proper forward. Guess what? Manhattanville remains to be not executed. And anybody whom you rent as a successor just isn’t going to need to spend the primary 5 years of his or her reign fundraising for my legacy.’”

The trustees weren’t oblivious. They knew that Columbia’s financial place was fragile and that success had masked a worrying degree of institutional rot. When Bollinger was lastly able to retire in 2023, the board changed him with Shafik, then the president of the London College of Economics. That faculty was small and easy in comparison with Columbia, however Shafik was refined and had a compellingly globalist biography that matched the political second. An Egyptian-born member of the British peerage, she’d been educated in America and England and held a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford. She can be Columbia’s first feminine president and its first of shade. Her temporary was to maintain Columbia rising world wide whereas modernizing its operations in Morningside Heights.

The evening earlier than her investiture, Shafik hosted an intimate dinner within the courtyard of the president’s home, a McKim, Mead & White mansion on West 116th Road. In his later years, Bollinger had grow to be infamous for conducting a lot of his enterprise there and rarely showing in his workplace. One attendee recalled a member of Shafik’s household toasting how that they had “fairly actually pulled again the curtains and let the sunshine in.” From the angle of Columbia’s senior leaders, there was a plan in place to shore up the college’s basis. It could simply take time.

For a second, it was attainable to suppose that Shafik was nicely outfitted to guide Columbia by the aftermath of October 7. She had excellent information of the conflicts within the Center East: She had been concerned within the Oslo peace course of and written books concerning the financial potentialities of a regional accord. However her perspective was from the Davos-y orbit of the World Financial institution and Worldwide Financial Fund, the place debate and respect abound since you’re handing out cash. Shafik had no expertise of the Israel-Palestine situation because it performed at Columbia and on the Higher West Facet, with the tabloids and Congress watching. The college is dwelling to each a big inhabitants of observant Jewish college students and a cohort of professors who’re avid supporters of Palestinian statehood. These two teams weren’t going to attend for his or her new president to rise up to hurry.

What occurred in these first few weeks, earlier than Israel’s formal counteroffensive, satisfied many within the Jewish group that Columbia was dwelling to irredeemably antisemitic college and college students. Sooner or later after 10/7, probably the most outstanding Palestinian advocate on the college, Joseph Massad, a professor in MESAAS, wrote an op-ed for The Digital Intifada that known as the Hamas operation “progressive,” “gorgeous,” “astonishing,” and “unbelievable.” On the second day, two scholar teams known as for Columbia to divest from Israel and finish its tutorial exercise in Tel Aviv, the place the college was planning to open a satellite tv for pc campus. Quickly, the primary “From the river to the ocean” chants have been heard at protests. College students, college, and outsiders aligned with Israel argue that the pro-Palestinian activists’ claims to be motivated by concern about genocide are false as a result of they confirmed their colours on this interval, earlier than the total invasion of Gaza.

For Shafik and others in college management, managing the torrent of exercise was not simply troublesome however maybe unimaginable. Each administrative motion boomeranged. On October 12, after a protest and counterprotest on campus, public-safety officers directed demonstrators towards separate exits. However that despatched the pro-Palestinian aspect onto West a hundred and fifteenth Road, headed towards the Kraft Heart for Jewish Pupil Life. The issue was compounded when Jewish college students there have been locked inside, which a number of stated made them really feel unsafe.

A dynamic of parallel realities took maintain. Professional-Palestinian teams felt that Shafik was so completely pro-Israel that she wouldn’t even point out their trigger in letters that referenced, obliquely, “violence that has effects on so many individuals.” “We really feel deeply harm by your one-sided College-wide emails that left us feeling excluded from our personal college,” college students wrote her. The identical week, a zealously pro-Israel business-school professor, Shai Davidai, burst on the scene with a viral speech condemning Shafik as a “coward” for not standing as much as “pro-terror” forces on campus.

One strategy to perceive this contradiction is ineptness. Columbia was taking motion, however lots of these actions have been insufficient and poorly communicated, and so the individuals they have been supposed to succeed in have been both not conscious or not impressed, whereas the opposite aspect might level to the strikes as proof of assist for the enemy. One instance entails doxing. A truck circled campus displaying pro-Palestinian college students’ names and faces beneath the heading COLUMBIA’S LEADING ANTISEMITES, and certainly one of its targets wrote to a dean: “I really can’t even wrap my head round how careless the complete college is concerning the scenario. I’ve been making calls, sending emails, discovering new contacts for assist nonstop and am but to listen to something from Columbia. As an Arab and Muslim scholar, I do know I’m not the precedence right here.” Inside per week, Columbia created a Doxing Useful resource Group, however college students who tried to contact it discovered their messages weren’t going by. One scholar waited 15 days for a response.

Shafik held common listening classes with college students, however many Columbians thought of her walled off and unreachable. She appeared remoted, too, on the administrative degree. Shafik had not introduced a group of loyal employees from her outdated job, and all through the unending uproar, she was nonetheless hiring for core positions. She chosen a chief working officer and provost in January 2024. One supply of candid recommendation was the common gatherings of an “Ivy plus” presidents group, which one participant described as half technique session, half group remedy. They met in particular person as soon as a month on the Penn Membership in midtown and each Sunday by way of Zoom when the disaster ran particularly sizzling.

Early on, Shafik had been fortunate to dodge a congressional listening to at which the presidents of Harvard and Penn addressed reviews of antisemitism in lawyerly phrases and later resigned. However it meant that when the Home Committee on Training and the Workforce returned to the problem, it held a listening to targeted completely on Columbia. Shafik, Shipman, and Shipman’s board co-chair, David Greenwald, went to Washington to testify. On the morning of April 17, 2024, earlier than they arrived on Capitol Hill, they discovered that pro-Palestinian college students had taken over the college’s South Garden.

Within the 30 hours that ensued, Shafik’s presidency was misplaced and Columbia plunged into true disaster, by no means to recuperate. In the course of the listening to, Shafik struck a far totally different pose from Harvard’s Claudine Homosexual. She agreed that antisemitism was a significant downside at Columbia and mentioned disciplinary actions in opposition to particular professors with out reservation. If this placated congressional Republicans for a nanosecond, it completely misplaced no matter goodwill she had left with the Columbia rank and file. As a member of the college later put it to me, “A pair different Ivy presidents went to Congress and misplaced their job. Shafik went to Congress and misplaced a college.”

Shafik headed again to New York on the Acela and determined to authorize the New York Police Division to enter campus and break up the encampment. It turned a modest demonstration into a world media spectacle. One professor who spoke with Shafik at her dwelling in a while requested why she’d introduced within the cops. “She didn’t perceive what it meant to name the NYPD,” the professor stated. “She was from London. The police in London don’t carry weapons.” For her half, Shafik advised college that anybody who imagined the protests might affect real-world occasions was delusional: In her World Financial institution days, when she’d sat in on precise peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Group, no person had as soon as talked about a college.

A second encampment fashioned spontaneously after the bust-up of the primary. Protest leaders refused to fulfill with Shafik. Representatives from scholar authorities rendezvoused along with her in a clandestine assembly in a basement, leaving their telephones outdoors so no person might make a recording, however there was no significant progress. Shafik approved a second police raid to finish the scholars’ takeover of Hamilton Corridor and canceled graduation. The 12 months was in ruins. Shafik’s chauffeur tailed her round campus on foot, involved for her security.

An NYPD helicopter over campus on Might 7.
Photograph: Stella Ragas

That spring, Columbia’s board started to indicate indicators of dysfunction. Its 24 members are restricted to 2 six-year phrases, and none predated the Bollinger period. It was a gaggle assembled in peacetime that had till lately been coping with a president who ran the college out of the palm of his hand. Now, feeling like Columbia was spiraling uncontrolled, the trustees turned way more assertive.

A number of individuals with information of the board’s evolution described a dynamic by which a subset of members was satisfied that Columbia had a harmful focus of antisemites and that sturdy motion was wanted to convey the campus again to order. That circle’s most outstanding member is Victor Mendelson, a part of a four-generation Columbia lineage, whose father was additionally a trustee. The billionaire Mendelsons run HEICO, a Florida-based aerospace firm and protection contractor. There’s additionally Shoshana Shendelman, whose youngster is a present scholar, and to a quieter diploma Greenwald, a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who spent his profession at Fried Frank and Goldman Sachs. A extra reasonable set contains Mark Gallogly, who co-founded the funding agency Centerbridge Companions and who has given tens of millions to Democratic candidates for workplace; Kathy Surace-Smith, a lawyer and partial proprietor of the Seattle Mariners whose husband is the president of Microsoft; Abigail Black Elbaum, who runs a real-estate administration agency; and Jonathan Rosand, a professor of neurology at Harvard. Two others have been extra clearly recognized with the liberal-coded place that antisemitism was a priority however one which was getting used disingenuously to stifle speech: Wanda Marie Holland Greene, who runs a progressive college for women in San Francisco, and Li Lu, a pacesetter of the 1989 scholar protests in Tiananmen Sq. who turned a billionaire investor.

In April 2024, the New York Publish painted Columbia’s board as “ultra-liberal” and “stacked with Democratic apparatchiks and megadonors.” (Mendelson lately visited an undergraduate seminar and advised the scholars that as one of many panel’s few registered Republicans, “I’m the one the White Home calls to yell at.”) However that doesn’t seize how the board behaved in non-public. There was not a set of trustees that argued as vociferously on speech rights or Islamophobia because the Mendelson aspect did on antisemitism. Bollinger, a famous First Modification scholar, had stocked the board with individuals who held expansive views on speech, but in apply they discovered it troublesome to aspect with protesters who knowingly violated Columbia’s insurance policies on when and the place demonstrations might happen. “It could have been simpler for the First Modification absolutists to defend the scholars if that they had revered the college’s time, place, and method restrictions,” a trustee advised me.

Antisemitism turned the prevailing concern. In a minuted assembly, with colleagues who have been whispering to right-wing publications and Republicans in Washington, it was troublesome for trustees to take the place that antisemitism was a small or medium-size downside — even when they actually noticed it that approach. Greene and Li quietly rotated off the board final summer season, additional tilting the stability. “The board misplaced two of its sturdy oppositional voices once they left,” an individual who interacts with the group stated. Throughout one session, the trustees had a preliminary dialogue about granting arrest energy to campus safety officers. Inside hours, it was in The Wall Road Journal — a leak that some interpreted as an effort to lock in that final result.

Some trustees turned obsessively targeted on self-discipline and pushed Shafik to debate particular person college students’ recordsdata intimately. If that was deeply inappropriate, it was additionally true that self-discipline was the place Columbia was opening itself as much as assault. College students’ instances have been progressing slowly and uncertainly. The foundations codified after 1968 established two tracks for college students accused of transgressions: Dean’s Self-discipline, for points like dishonest on exams, and the College Judicial Board, for violations associated to protest. The senate managed who was appointed to the latter. However massive demonstrations occurred solely on occasion, and the group was convened haphazardly. Instances typically adopted each tracks in parallel; different instances, outdoors arbiters have been known as in. Directors regarded down on the Judicial Board as a result of they have been entitled to only certainly one of its 5 seats, with the others going to presumably softhearted college students and college. All this meant that after the October 7 assaults, Shafik routed self-discipline instances by a comparatively new workplace that she managed, the Heart for Pupil Success and Intervention. The senate, appalled by Shafik’s testimony earlier than Congress and the police raids, roused itself and demanded the instances be run by its group. In July 2024, Shafik and the trustees conceded the purpose, and the vast majority of instances associated to the takeover of Hamilton Corridor have been transferred to the Judicial Board.

Months handed. The delays signaled to Columbia’s gathering adversaries that of all American universities, this was the one least capable of get its home so as. “There’s some deep-rooted structural issues,” stated Ester Fuchs, a professor who co-chairs an inner group Columbia fashioned to doc antisemitism and advocate reforms. “All the pieces was damaged: the entire freaking administrative infrastructure of the college to cope with protest, the safety, the disciplinary course of. Why did it take us so lengthy to get that self-discipline executed? As a result of it was damaged. There was nothing there.”

Shafik stop in August after the shortest presidential tenure in additional than 200 years. “How weak, how pathetic are these individuals?” Donald Trump requested the subsequent day at a press convention at certainly one of his golf golf equipment. He’d been making common point out of campus unrest throughout his marketing campaign, usually singling out Columbia. Now, for anybody who cared to concentrate, he laid out exactly what he would do if reelected: deport “the international jihad sympathizers” and use the problem of antisemitism to chop “each single final penny of federal assist.”

Pupil protesters at Butler Library on Might 7.
Photograph: Stella Ragas

Katrina Armstrong loves a medical metaphor. When the trustees hurriedly tapped her to interchange Shafik as performing president, she’d been operating Columbia’s huge Irving Medical Heart for 2 years, and she or he began to reassure those who the college was now within the ER or ICU and efforts have been being made to cease the bleeding. She positioned herself because the anti-Shafik, ultracommunicative and accessible to all. Matthew Connelly, a historical past professor and vice-dean — “the lowliest administrative position you possibly can have” — advised me that Armstrong would reply to his emails instantly: “I’ve by no means had that have with some other principal at Columbia.” Armstrong had a politician’s intuition for telling totally different constituencies what they wished to listen to. She helped freshmen transfer into their dorms, had dinner on the Chabad brownstone, and gave an interview to the Columbia Each day Spectator apologizing to college students who felt “harm” by the police raids.

Peter Bearman, a sociology professor who had helped begin a vote of no confidence in Shafik, was shocked when Armstrong reached out to him. “I assumed, Oh, she’s good,” he recalled. The 2 developed a working relationship. Bearman complained that the color-coded system Columbia used to sign whether or not campus was open or closed made the place really feel like a TSA checkpoint. As a hospitalist, Armstrong appreciated such heuristics, however she took the notice and made a change. Bearman stated, “She additionally identified that the safety guards have been disagreeable, form of fascistic, and that she was going to make it a rule that they stated ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thanks.’ And you already know what? They did.” On one other event, Armstrong known as Bearman, who’s Jewish, into her workplace and requested him to clarify to her the divide inside Jewish college — why some felt the college had an unforgivable tolerance for antisemites whereas others thought of the problem overblown, a smoke display screen for human-rights abuses in Gaza. On the medical campus Armstrong had run, 50 blocks north of Low Library, Israel-Palestine simply hadn’t been a problem her medical doctors and scientists bothered her with.

Whereas Armstrong was making an attempt to make peace, some scholar activists have been cultivating a extra radical model. In October, Columbia College Apartheid Divest, a coalition of pro-Palestinian teams that had helped manage the South Garden encampments, introduced that it was formally endorsing armed resistance. Again within the spring, in a gesture of moderation, CUAD had distanced itself from one of many saga’s most objectionable characters, a scholar who had stated “Be grateful that I’m not simply going out and murdering Zionists” throughout his disciplinary listening to. Now, CUAD reversed that place and apologized to the coed, writing that “the place you’ve exhausted all peaceable technique of decision, violence is the one path ahead.” (CUAD took credit score for organizing the Might 7 disruption at Butler Library.) A protest on the primary anniversary of the October 7 assault introduced a whole lot of pro-Palestinian college students collectively on campus, some chanting issues like “There is just one answer: intifada revolution.”

A Republican blueprint for assailing increased training, with Columbia as its main goal, was coming collectively. In his first time period, Trump had signed an government order that expanded Title VI protections to victims of antisemitism. Biden rescinded lots of Trump’s orders, however he let this one stand. On the finish of October 2024, Republican staffers within the Home launched a 325-page report, “Antisemitism on Faculty Campuses Uncovered,” which relied on greater than 40,000 pages of inner Columbia paperwork. The report is heavy-handed, however for these inclined to imagine, it substantiates the allegation that Columbia is a breeding floor for antisemitism. And if there’s antisemitism, the federal government can now drive a college into chapter 11.

How, precisely? Just a few weeks after Trump was elected to a second time period, a comparatively unknown fellow on the American Enterprise Institute, Max Eden, printed an essay titled “A Complete Information to Overhauling Increased Training.” It targeted on Columbia. Eden laid out particular coverage concepts for the brand new administration to implement, starting from an excise tax on endowments to revoking scholar visas to capping oblique prices on analysis grants. (He additionally known as for Bollinger to be imprisoned for his position in a previous controversy involving the U.S. Information & World Report faculty rankings: “Maybe the faculty presidents might be taught a worthwhile lesson from the sight of him in an orange jumpsuit.”)

At Columbia, a lot of the management was in denial that an asteroid was heading their approach. A bunch of alumni and college had lately fashioned the Stand Columbia Society, which had wonderful again channels to directors. The group labored up an in depth evaluation of Columbia’s publicity to a hostile administration — $250 million within the quick time period, $3.5 billion in a worst-case situation — and circulated it as a warning. In accordance with Stand Columbia, senior directors responded that the maths was “cute” however far-fetched.

The false sense of safety could have been inspired by the widespread view that Armstrong’s tenure was going nicely. Most individuals who interacted along with her on the time received the impression she was campaigning to get the presidency on a proper foundation. There was, nonetheless, a nine-figure hitch. Amid an in any other case bleak 12 months for fundraising, Columbia’s single largest benefactors, Roy and Diana Vagelos, had made a $400 million reward to the medical college. They have been enthusiastic followers of Armstrong and made the donation contingent on her returning to the medical complicated. However Roy Vagelos, the previous chairman of Merck, was 95, and that would in all probability be sorted out. Columbia’s trustees mentioned the matter and got here shut to creating Armstrong a proposal.

Such plans have been obliterated when Trump started his assault. On the appropriate, there was a consensus that amongst elite universities, Columbia was the weakest hyperlink. “Columbia is simply the least defensible,” Rufo stated. “I imply, the conduct at Columbia, the ideologies from Columbia, the response by Columbia have been the least defensible. They confirmed the utmost weak point. And so I feel that’s why the president chosen them first.”

Trump’s Job Power to Fight Anti-Semitism moved quickly, from a warning shot about slicing $50 million in funds on March 3 to canceling $400 million on March 7. Federal brokers started knocking on college students’ doorways and ready within the lobbies of Columbia buildings. Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian nationwide and Fulbright scholar, fled to Canada, and Yunseo Chung, a junior who has lived within the U.S. since she was 7, went into hiding. ICE brokers arrested Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a outstanding spokesperson for the garden encampments, and flew him to a jail in Louisiana to await deportation proceedings. (One other scholar, Mohsen Mahdawi, was arrested in April; he has since been launched.) On March 13, Trump’s job power delivered what college consult with as “the extortion letter” or “the ransom notice,” a listing of 9 calls for that needed to be met earlier than the federal government would think about reinstating the cash, with a one-week deadline.

Many on campus spent that week hoping for a lionhearted response. Bollinger gave interviews to the New York Instances and The Chronicle of Increased Training warning that Columbia confronted an “existential risk” and that “we’re within the midst of an authoritarian takeover.” A bunch of regulation professors wrote a public letter concerning the authorized flimsiness of utilizing Title VI to unilaterally reduce grants, particularly in areas of Columbia’s operations removed from any alleged antisemitism.

However the thought of a defiant authorized response was a fantasy. Columbia’s board was already on the identical wavelength because the Trump administration. On a number of of the duty power’s calls for — together with banning masks, limiting protests, stripping disciplinary powers from the senate, and permitting campus police to arrest demonstrators — the group was able to concede instantly. On March 21, it despatched a letter to the federal government basically surrendering. Maybe reflecting an understanding that the letter wouldn’t go over nicely with the Columbia group, no person signed it. Jack Halberstam, a professor of gender research and English, was among the many college aghast on the determination. “It’s greater than capitulation,” Halberstam advised me a number of hours after the letter was launched. “It’s anticipating much more calls for that is perhaps made and fulfilling them upfront.” The Trump administration’s preliminary letter hadn’t talked about “viewpoint variety,” code phrases that typically imply hiring extra conservatives as professors, however Columbia pledged that searches for brand new college had already begun.

Armstrong’s fall in these weeks was astonishingly quick. There have been rumors that she and different members of the administration can be arrested for harboring immigrants. At one level, John Kluge, whose late father had endowed a program for minority students at Columbia with what was then the most important reward in Ivy League historical past, emailed Armstrong for reassurance that there was a technique for defending it. Armstrong didn’t write again for 4 weeks. Khalil’s spouse, who gave start to their first youngster whereas he was incarcerated, has by no means acquired a notice or supply of help from Columbia. The members of the college’s inner antisemitism evaluate, involved that their work might have lent legitimacy to Trump’s assault, took it upon themselves to jot down a press release. Directors by no means issued it.

College who interacted with Armstrong on this interval say she was genuinely shocked that the world believed Columbia had caved. It made a sure sense, from the standpoint of somebody merely making an attempt to outlive minute by minute in a disaster: There had been a gun pointed at Columbia’s head, and to get it lowered, all she needed to do was conform to some issues her trustees already wished.

Persuaded that the college’s communications store was lower than the duty, Armstrong enlisted a professor to behave as her ghostwriter. “Katrina is soliciting the assistance of college to jot down emails which can be going out beneath her title as a result of she doesn’t really feel like she’s getting the proper of perspective and recommendation and language from the those who she’s imagined to depend on,” the professor stated. “Each single particular person in a senior management place tells me that they know our communications is horrible.” (Columbia’s chief spokesperson, Franz Paasche, resigned in April after simply eight months on the job.)

Ultimately, it was one other little bit of novice hour that sank Armstrong. At one of many non-public college conferences the place she tried to spin the cope with Trump as a win, individuals warned that their videoconferencing software program was producing a transcript. “The one who’d arrange the assembly stated, ‘Oh, I don’t know how you can cease that. Can anyone — is there any tech? Can we get any tech?’ And no tech appeared,” recalled one of many professors current. “They allowed a confidential assembly with the college to go on, realizing that there was a transcription being made. After which in fact it was leaked. I imply, it was such a shambolic occasion. She wasn’t in management. Isn’t that simply a sign of full discombobulation in our management?”

Members of the board of trustees give totally different accounts of who broke up with whom. Some keep that Armstrong was compelled out; others say there was mutual settlement she couldn’t stay. Both approach, she was gone. Solely per week earlier, the previous research-university president had joked to me that Armstrong’s job was safe: “You’ll be able to’t fireplace an interim. You’re actually not going to have the ability to rent a president after you do this.” With few good choices, the trustees changed Armstrong with certainly one of their very own. Shut observers of Columbia’s demons famous that Armstrong, a creature of the worthwhile medical division, had been knifed by somebody from the underfunded liberal arts.

In her early days on the job, Claire Shipman, an performing president changing an interim president changing a failed president, is thrashing expectations. At 62, a former correspondent for NBC and ABC Information, she is a assured, mediagenic speaker, and as a board member since 2013, she is aware of the establishment. She met privately with 300 restive college in mid-April, heard them out, and didn’t commit any gaffes value leaking to the press. She is taking actions which can be symbolic — mentioning Khalil and Mahdawi’s names for the primary time — and structural. Shipman introduced critiques of Columbia’s communications workplace and monetary mannequin and began a web site with sources for worldwide college students frightened of deportation. Most importantly, Shipman is looking for the senate itself to be reconsidered. In a letter emphasizing that “I’m deeply dedicated to shared governance,” Shipman opened the door to eliminating main parts of it.

What Columbia ought to do with its governance construction is a wide-open query. The Stand Columbia Society has known as for “basic reform” and predicted “the top of the College Senate as we all know it.” It could possible ignite one more spherical of protest on campus if the trustees have been to formally scale back the facility that college and college students wield by the senate. And but the present system, conceived in disaster half a century in the past, is clearly not working.

Within the meantime, the Columbia group is ready to see whether or not Shipman can reverse a few of the college’s reputational loss. Harvard is basking within the glory of combating Trump in court docket, and Princeton’s president, Chris Eisgruber, gave a humiliating interview to the Instances providing his fellow Ivy notes on character. “I perceive why Columbia may really feel that they needed to make concessions beneath the circumstances,” he stated. “You’ve careers at stake. You’ve jobs at stake. You’ve the flexibility to coach your college students at stake. And you could say, ‘Look, I want I might take a stand on precept, however given what’s at stake, I can’t.’ However then you must say that.” Cogburn, the social-work professor, urged that the individuals operating the college are too compromised to be credible: “I don’t know what their intentions are, whether or not they really need to dismantle the senate or whether or not they earnestly need to think about one of the best ways to control, however they’re persistently underestimating how a lot they’ve broken their reputations and belief.”

The trustees have promised {that a} new president will probably be put in by January 1, 2026. That’s a quick timeline, and it would point out the particular person will come from inside Columbia. A number of individuals I spoke with appeared to grimace once I requested them to counsel candidates. “I’m having bother imagining the Venn diagram of anyone who can be good and who would need it,” stated Web page Fortna, a political-science professor. “I wouldn’t want it on my worst enemy. I imply, I can consider some individuals who can be nice, however they’re associates of mine. And so for his or her sake — no!” She continued, “For the entire armchair criticism that we will all do of Shafik and Armstrong and now Shipman, I’ve large empathy for all of those ladies. A few of what has made this difficult is the assaults on them as ladies. I form of really feel like the subsequent president must be a white man as a result of I don’t need to see any extra ladies’s careers get derailed by this.”

On a Wednesday night in April, for the primary time, two trustees met publicly with college students to listen to their considerations concerning the senate — and the whole lot else that had gone improper over the previous two years. The occasion was held within the auditorium of the Lee C. Bollinger Discussion board, a 56,000-square-foot constructing on West one hundred and twenty fifth Road designed by Renzo Piano’s agency. It didn’t start nicely. There was confusion concerning the begin time, and when a moderator stated at 6:40 p.m. that the trustees needed to go away at seven, there have been indignant calls of “Is {that a} joke?!” One trustee, Keith Goggin, a graduate of the journalism college who went to work on Wall Road, remained and gamely took college students’ abuse for an hour. “Please let me get by this so that you all perceive it after which you possibly can yell at me,” he stated. The longest applause of the evening got here when a scholar famous that whereas Columbia had fashioned its personal job power on antisemitism, it had not created one to cope with “the demonization of Palestinians.”

Early on, a scholar requested, “Why are you not taking motion in opposition to the federal government — ” resulting in a number of overlapping calls of “Like Harvard!” “Harvard!” “Harvard!” and “We wish you to combat!” Goggin identified that Harvard had acquired extra invasive calls for from Trump than Columbia had. “If we will do one thing that we have been going to do anyway with out having to litigate, and restore the issues that we care about right here, that’s in our opinion — or for my part — our greatest path,” he stated. “That’s the place we’re at present. It doesn’t imply we’ll be there tomorrow.”

After an hour, Goggin gathered his issues. “I feel we’ve had a very good dialog. You need to yell at me, however I actually do admire all of you,” he stated. Somebody within the viewers shouted, “Is our cash going to kill children in Gaza or not?” Goggin left to boos. In lower than a minute, the scholars and college turned the city corridor into an organizing session, and somebody was on the microphone calling for a normal strike.