Columbia president Minouche Shafik faces criticism in all directions

When Minouche Shafik was announced as Columbia University’s president last year, she was called the “perfect candidate” by the chair of Columbia’s Board of Trustees.

When Minouche Shafik was announced as Columbia University’s president last year, she was called the “perfect candidate” by the chair of Columbia’s Board of Trustees. Now, some of her own students and professors, as well as the speaker of the House of Representatives, are calling on her to resign. Just over nine months into her tenure, Shafik — an Egyptian-born economist and former high-ranking official at the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Bank of England, and former president of the London School of Economics — is under pressure for her handling of Columbia campus protests over the war between Israel and Hamas. College administrators have been under intense scrutiny in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and Harvard University president Claudine Gay both stepped down in the wake of pressure over their response to antisemitism on campus. At Columbia, some students, faculty and left-leaning lawmakers are enraged that Shafik authorized the New York Police Department to shut down student protests on campus that have been urging the university to cut off its economic and academic ties to Israel. They say the crackdown on student protests, which resulted in more than 100 arrests, violated academic freedom. At the same time, students, religious groups and right-leaning lawmakers say the administration has failed to stop antisemitism inside Columbia’s campus and at protests outside its gates. “Calling in police enforcement on nonviolent demonstrations of young students on campus is an escalatory, reckless, and dangerous act,” Democratic Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez posted on X Tuesday. “It represents a heinous failure of leadership that puts people’s lives at risk. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.”