Columbia University president resigns after Gaza protests turmoil

Columbia University President Minouche Shafik has resigned from her position amid a free speech debate over campus protests of the war in Gaza.

Ms Shafik’s resignation comes only a year after she took the position at the private Ivy League university in New York City, and just a few weeks before the autumn semester is due to begin.

Ms Shafik is now the third president of an Ivy League university to resign over her handling of Gaza war protests.

In April, Ms Shafik authorized New York Police Department officers to swarm the campus, a controversial decision that led to the arrests of about 100 students who were occupying a university building.

The episode marked the first time that mass arrests had been made on Columbia’s campus since the Vietnam War protests more than five decades ago.

The move inflamed other protests at dozens of colleges across the United States and Canada.

In an email to students and faculty on Wednesday, Ms Shafik wrote that she has overseen a “period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community”.

“This period has taken a considerable toll on my family, as it has for others in our community.”

Katrina Armstrong, chief executive officer of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, will serve as the interim president.

“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,” Ms Shafik wrote in her letter.

“I have tried to navigate a path that upholds academic principles and treats everyone with fairness and compassion,” she continued.

“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.”

Students’ anger over how Israel is fighting its war against Hamas has raised fraught questions for university leaders, who are already struggling with combustive campus debates around what is happening in the Middle East.

US college campuses have been a flashpoint for Gaza war protests since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, and Israel’s subsequent incursion into the Gaza Strip.

The leaders of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

The presidents of Harvard and UPenn ultimately resigned amid backlash over their handling of campus protests and congressional testimony, including their refusal to say that calling for the deaths of Jews could violate university policy.

In April, Ms Shafik defended her institution’s efforts to tackle antisemitism to Congress, saying that there had been a rise in such hatred on campus and the college was working to protect students.

Ms Shafik is a highly-respected Egyptian-born economist who formerly worked for the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England.

She also previously served as president of the London School of Economics.

Ms Shafik, who received a damehood in 2015, was previously considered to be on the shortlist for the Bank of England governor, the BBC reported in 2019.

Her letter adds that she has been asked by the UK Foreign Secretary to lead a “review of the government’s approach to international development and how to improve capability”.

The decision, she wrote, “enables me to return to the House of Lords and to reengage with the important legislative agenda put forth by the new UK government”.

Her resignation comes after three Columbia University deans also resigned last week, after text messages showed the group used “antisemitic tropes”, according to a statement by Ms Shafik, while discussing Jewish students.

The text exchanges were originally published by the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce in early July.

Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, the chairwoman of the congressional committee, praised the decision by the three administrators to resign.

“About time. Actions have consequences,” she said in a statement last Thursday, adding that the decision should have been made “months ago”.

“Instead, the University continues to send mixed signals,” she continued, adding that the administration is allowing a dean who has not resigned to “slide under the radar with no real consequences”.

Universities around the US are preparing for the academic year to begin in the next several weeks, as the conflict in Gaza continues.

On Tuesday, a judge in California ruled that UCLA — which saw violent protests break out on campus in May — must prevent protesters from blocking Jewish students from campus facilities.

Judge Mark Scarsi ruled that protesters had “established checkpoints and required passers-by to wear a specific wristband to cross them”, and blocking “people who supported the existence of the state of Israel”.

“Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” Judge Scarsi wrote in the order. “This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating.”

The university has blamed outside agitators for the checkpoints and said it objected to the ruling.

Hamas-led gunmen killed about 1,200 people in an attack on Israel on 7 October, taking 251 others back to Gaza as hostages.

That attack triggered a massive Israeli military offensive against Gaza and the current war.

At least 39,897 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli campaign, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.