Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, announced on Wednesday that she’s resigning from her role effective immediately, CNN reports. Her resignation comes months after a tumultuous academic year that included anti-war campus protests that helped spark demonstrations at universities across the country.
“This period has taken a considerable toll on my family, as it has for others in our community,” Shafik wrote in a letter to staff and students on Wednesday. “It has also been a period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.”
Shafik, the first woman to be appointed president of Columbia, started her job in July 2023. Following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing War in Gaza, Muslim and Jewish students began expressing concerns about not feeling safe on campus. In November, Shafik’s judgment was called into question after Columbia suspended two pro-Palestine groups from campus. Criticism of Shafik’s leadership peaked in the spring, when she called on the NYPD to remove student protesters from Hamilton Hall, leading to about 100 arrests. The fallout made national news, and led the university to cancel its main commencement ceremony.
In a May New York Magazine poll, 50 percent of students, faculty, and staff said Shafik should resign. Thirty-two percent said she was stifling freedom of speech, while 10 percent said she wasn’t doing enough to fight antisemitism. In her letter to the Columbia community, Shafik wrote that she “tried to navigate a path that upholds academic principles and treats everyone with fairness and compassion.” Along that path, she added, 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 said that her next job will be with the UK’s foreign secretary.
Shafik’s resignation comes months after University of Pennsylvania president M. Elizabeth Magill and Harvard president Claudine Gay gave into pressure to step down after critics said their testimonies before the Committee on Education and the Workforce didn’t go far enough to protect the safety of Jewish students. Asked what they thought of Shafik’s testimony, 37 percent of staff, students, and faculty told New York Magazine that she said what was necessary to avoid Gay’s fate and 23 percent said she sold out her students.
Columbia announced that Katrina Armstrong, the chief executive officer of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, will serve as interim president. In a statement, Armstrong said, “As I step into this role, I am acutely aware of the trials the University has faced over the past year. We should neither understate their significance, nor allow them to define who we are and what we will become.”