Columbia University announced on Friday evening, after Shabbat had begun, that its board co-chair Claire Shipman, who referred to the House education panel’s probes of Jew-hatred on campus as “nonsense,” is replacing its interim president Katrina Armstrong.
Armstrong, a physician, “has always given her heart and soul to Columbia,” stated the private school’s board chair David Greenwald. The announcement comes shortly after Columbia appeared to agree to Trump administration terms, after the government threatened to cut more than $400 million in federal funding for what it said was the school’s inaction on Jew-hatred.
Subsequent reporting revealed that Armstrong had downplayed the promised changes in a virtual meeting with faculty.
Shipman, a former CNN reporter who, per the New York Post, is married to former Obama administration press secretary Jay Carney, stated that she assumes the interim Columbia presidency “with a clear understanding of the serious challenges before us and a steadfast commitment to act with urgency, integrity and to work with our faculty to advance our mission, implement needed reforms, protect our students and uphold academic freedom and open inquiry.”
“Columbia’s new permanent president, when that individual is selected, will conduct an appropriate review of the university’s leadership team and structure to ensure we are best positioned for the future,” she added.
A 325-page House Committee on Education and the Workforce Committee report, released TK, revealed that Shipman sent a Dec. 28, 2023, text message to university leaders saying that a New York Times article, which the committee report called “complimentary” to the university, “heavily inoculates us for a while from the Capitol Hill nonsense and threat.” (Shipman spelled it “capital hill.”)
The message came weeks after the House education panel held a Dec. 5 hearing on Jew-hatred on campus with the presidents of Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (The presidents of the former two subsequently resigned.)
Shipman’s text message suggests she “was more concerned about Columbia’s public image and exposure than confronting the substantive problem of antisemitism at the university,” per the House committee report.
“Shipman’s message also showed that at the same time that Columbia was touting aggressive actions on antisemitism to the media, such as suspending its chapters of student groups that had repeatedly violated university rules in the course of engaging in antisemitic and pro-Hamas conduct, she was working behind the scenes to appease the university’s antisemitic actors,” the report states.
“She wrote that she was seeking to ‘unsuspend the groups.’ She also proposed partnering with Rashid Khalidi, a prominent Palestinian faculty member who has called terrorists ‘resistance fighters,’ Israel the ‘result of a settler colonial project,’ and said in 2017 that Israel’s supporters would ‘infest’ the U.S. government in the forthcoming Trump administration,” it adds.
Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), chair of the House education panel, stated on Friday that “now is not the time for Columbia University to regress as it works to combat the rampant antisemitism plaguing the school.”
“So far Columbia has largely failed to uphold its commitment to Jewish students and faculty—leaving them to face harassment, intimidation and even assault,” Walberg said. “Thankfully, the Trump administration is ushering in an era of common sense, and this committee is working diligently alongside it to continue the momentum we’ve created in addressing antisemitism.”
“But the school and its administrators must put in the work to combat this evil,” he stated. “Ms. Shipman, while we wish you all good success, we will be watching closely.”
Also on Friday, the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism—a joint venture of the U.S. Departments of Education and of Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration—stated that “the action taken by Columbia’s trustees today, especially in light of this week’s concerning revelation, is an important step toward advancing negotiations as set forth in the pre-conditional understanding reached last Friday between the university and the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism.”
Armstrong—who is returning to her roles as CEO of the Columbia Medical Center, executive vice president for health and biomedical sciences and dean of the health and medicine faculties—stated that it was “a singular honor to lead Columbia University in this important and challenging time.”