In a dramatic flip of occasions at one in all America’s most elite universities, Columbia College’s interim president Katrina Armstrong has resigned, marking the second management shake-up on the Ivy League faculty in below a yr.
The transfer comes as Columbia faces mounting strain from the Trump administration over campus antisemitism, federal funding, and controversial protest insurance policies. Getting into the function as performing president is Claire Shipman — a longtime liberal journalist, elite insider, and spouse of former Obama press secretary Jay Carney.
Columbia has been the epicenter of far-left views and organizing efforts to harm Israeli pursuits and, many Jewish teams declare, goal Jews nationwide for violence.
Protesters final Could had stated “Zionists don’t need to stay” and their protest motion was spreading nationwide. The protester organizers blamed Israel for the Oct. seventh assaults.
Protest leaders requested to be thanked for not going out and killing Jews.
Three Columbia Deans needed to resign final yr due to anti-Jewish messages.
Many rich Jews, a number of value billions, introduced that they have been subsequently pulling donations from Columbia.
President Trump additionally used the ability of the Presidency to make sure that $400 million in federal funding was in danger except Columbia addressed the Anti-Semitism of its college students, college, and employees.
That demand is inflicting the school’s administration to break down, once more.
The resignation of Armstrong, who had served as interim president since former president Minouche Shafik stepped down in 2024, follows a contentious back-and-forth with the federal authorities over campus unrest. In latest months, Columbia has been accused of turning a blind eye to rising antisemitism, disorderly protests, and escalating threats towards Jewish college students — triggering a agency response from President Trump’s Division of Schooling.
The Trump administration had threatened to tug greater than $400 million in federal funding except Columbia applied strict reforms.
Among the many calls for from Trump to Columbia:
- an finish to campus insurance policies that allegedly allowed masked protestors to intimidate and disrupt,
- enforcement of civil rights protections, and
- clear penalties for scholar teams selling so-called “hate speech.”
Detractors of President Trump’s initiatives have recommended that these efforts are an affront to free speech protections. Columbia is a personal school, nonetheless, so it isn’t below the identical free speech necessities as different schools.
Moreover, revered free speech teams point out that Columbia has an terrible monitor file at defending campus free speech. The Basis for Particular person Rights in Schooling says that Columbia usually ranks second-to-last in defending campus speech, within the group’s 2025 School Free Speech Rankings.
Columbia doesn’t permit free speech, it punishes conservatives, it promotes far-left views, and it particularly encourages and amplifies far-left violent rhetoric towards Jewish college students.
After weeks of inside turmoil and widespread criticism of Armstrong’s dealing with of the state of affairs, Columbia’s Board of Trustees reportedly agreed to the federal calls for from President Trump — together with a full ban on masks at protests and a restructuring of how scholar teams are supervised and funded.
Armstrong, who additionally serves because the CEO of Columbia College Irving Medical Heart, quietly introduced she would step down and return to her former place.
Stepping in as performing president is Claire Shipman, a longtime Columbia trustee since 2013 with deep connections to the Democratic political machine. Shipman is a former ABC Information and CNN correspondent and has served on Columbia’s Board of Trustees since 2013, together with as co-chair since 2023. She holds levels from each Columbia School and Columbia’s College of Worldwide and Public Affairs.
Shipman is the co-author of three books: Womenomics (2009), The Confidence Code (2014), and The Confidence Code for Women (2018).
Shipman is married to Jay Carney, the previous White Home press secretary below Barack Obama, and has lengthy been a fixture in elite media and educational circles. Critics are already questioning whether or not her elevation to the presidency is an ideological doubling-down moderately than an effort to de-politicize the college’s management.
Shipman is now tasked with main Columbia by what will be the most politically fraught interval in its trendy historical past. Below strain from alumni, donors, federal officers, and scholar activists from each the precise and left, the college is at a crossroads. With a rising variety of dad and mom and taxpayers demanding accountability for elite establishments, Columbia’s management disaster could solely be a preview of what’s coming for the remainder of the Ivy League.
Traditionally, Columbia has produced far-left radicals. Amongst its most notorious alumnae is Elizabeth Bentley, a former Soviet courier who studied at Columbia earlier than turning into a key determine in Soviet espionage in america. Referred to as the “Pink Spy Queen,” Bentley ultimately defected and uncovered dozens of communist brokers embedded within the federal authorities. She wasn’t alone—Columbia was a recruiting floor for left-wing intellectuals sympathetic to Marxism, a lot of whom handed by its corridors throughout the top of Stalinist infiltration. Identified Soviet spies together with Julian Wadleigh, Victor Perlo, Nathan Silvermaster, Harry Dexter White, have been all college students of Columbia. This ideological breeding floor mirrored broader traits within the Ivy League, the place communist sympathies flourished below the guise of educational freedom, leaving one other indelible stain on Columbia’s legacy.
This marks the third presidential shuffle at Columbia in simply 9 months, a shocking signal of instability at a college that after branded itself as the educational residence of future presidents and Nobel laureates. However within the age of Trump — and with increased training more and more uncovered as a political and cultural battleground — even Columbia’s ivory tower can’t escape the reckoning.
