Columbia University’s President Shafik Won’t Be Mourned or Missed | Opinion

“Three down, so many to go,” posted House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) on X at the unexpected news of Columbia University President Minouche Shafik’s sudden resignation on Wednesday.
Woefully misidentified by her controversial predecessor Lee C. Bollinger as “the best person to next lead Columbia,” Shafik had a 13-month tenure during which she shambolically debased one of America’s so-called best institutions of higher education as she spent months failing to resolve prolonged and often violent pro-Palestinian protests over the war in Gaza (full disclosure: I was offered admission to Columbia in the 1990s but declined in significant part because even then I could not find a single person who would recommend the experience of studying there).
In her Ivy League-level disgrace, Shafik joins former University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill and former Harvard President Claudine Gay, who both resigned after infamously telling Stefanik’s Congressional committee last December that unspecified “context” would determine whether calling for the deaths of Jews violated their campus harassment policies. Through this ill-advised answer, all three women are believed to have cost their institutions hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, massive reputational harm, and in, Gay’s case, embarrassing revelations that a majority of her academic publications include what appear to be plagiarized material, and that her career advancement may have depended on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) considerations, rather than merit or competence.
In the past year, Yale’s President Peter Salovey and Cornell’s President Martha E. Pollack also announced their early departures, alongside acerbic institutional disputes over free speech and anti-discrimination policies. Adding their sorry hides to Stefanik’s three presidential scalps means that five out of the Ivy League’s eight institutions have lost their chief executives in the last 12 months.
That’s not a great record for a syndicate that has boasted unchallenged educational leadership since colonial times—and who knows how soon the administrative Grim Reaper will come to Dartmouth, Brown, and Princeton—but Shafik’s dismal record speaks for itself.
As Columbia’s protests escalated this spring, she called in the NYPD to clear a student encampment. Criticized by the left for supposed violations of free speech and Columbia’s purported “community values,” Shafik dithered as the protestors returned in strength and forcibly occupied a campus building. Both incidents included reports of violent harassment and numerous violations of law. They resulted in hundreds of arrests, but few consequences as Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office subsequently dropped most criminal charges. Shafik, who touted high but foolish hopes for “dialogue” and “listening sessions,” placed her shaken campus’s courses online for the rest of the academic year and canceled its main graduation ceremony. Called to testify before Congress in April (Shafik had declined to testify alongside the ill-fated Magill and Gay last December, citing a scheduling conflict), her testimony struck critics as evasive, arrogant, self-serving, and, in Stefanik’s opinion, perjurious.
Earlier this week, three Columbia deans resigned after leaked texts published by the Washington Free Beacon revealed that they had engaged in antisemitic banter during formal on-campus discussions of the protests (a fourth Columbia dean resigned from his post but remains employed there as a tenured faculty member). Shafik claims to have taken the summer to “reflect” on her precarious position, but it may well have been this most recent incident that prompted her resignation so close to the beginning of a new academic year and with protesters energized to return to campus in a couple of weeks.
Rather than being seen in isolation, Nemat Shafik’s slow-motion downfall is merely emblematic of American higher education’s systemic failure to do what it long did with great success: provide an open space for free inquiry and small-l liberal values. Under the leadership of smarmy administrative-managerial caste flunkies like Shafik, our colleges and universities have disintegrated into dull zones of heavily policed ideological conformity where favored groups of “oppressed” people are free to express themselves while disfavored “privileged” groups, including Jews, may not. As fewer and fewer Americans see value in college education—with only a minority, according to Gallup, now believing it is essential for success compared to 95 percent in 1980—the system may go the way of medieval monasteries, a fading network of rigid institutions that claim a monopoly on truth but have ever-less relevance to the world around them.
Shafik appears to agree. Unlike her disgraced Ivy League sisters at Harvard and Penn, she will not remain at Columbia as a well-paid, if obscure, faculty member earning a salary closer to her massive presidential remuneration than to a normal professor’s compensation. Instead, she has announced that she will leave academia to chair a government international development review in the United Kingdom, where she is a citizen and, as Baroness Shafik, a lifetime member of the upper house of parliament. Working under Britain’s newly appointed Labour Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who has dropped Britain’s legal opposition to international arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and who appears to be open to cutting British military aid to Israel, she may feel more at home.
Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.