From ‘Perfect Candidate’ to Sudden Exit: Inside the Fall of Columbia’s President

Nemat Shafik was vilified on almost all sides for her handling of the protests over the Israel-Hamas war. When given an offramp, she took it.

The part-time role in London was unpaid, temporary and only advisory, but to Nemat Shafik, it offered a way out of her beleaguered presidency at Columbia University.

She had arrived in New York only last year for one of academia’s plum jobs: running an Ivy League university with enormous riches and diversity, extraordinary prestige and a heritage that predated American independence. To the university’s leaders, Dr. Shafik was a peerless pick, a globally minded economist with a remarkable personal story, and the first woman to lead Columbia.

These last 10 months, though, since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, had been miserable for Columbia and its president. The university, which Dr. Shafik had championed as a haven for the world’s best minds who could help solve society’s intractable problems, disintegrated into factions. And as Dr. Shafik’s response proved swerving and uneven, she found herself with few allies and facing a campus where she was perceived as insular and rarely seen.

By the time summer break arrived, she had been vilified on campus and in Congress as an ally of antisemites, a turncoat to academic freedom and free speech, and an enfeebled leader who had both allowed pro-Palestinian protests to plunge into lawlessness and been too willing to call in the police. Her home seemed as much a fortress as a residence. And even as summer brought a respite from encampments and protests, university officials so feared the possibility of future trouble that they began weighing police powers for campus security officers.

People who had spoken to Dr. Shafik in recent months came to believe that she was deeply unhappy, and she had told faculty members that she thought there was little trust in her administration.

Ultimately, she decided to resign from Columbia, accept the British Foreign Office’s offer to chair an outside review on development policy and return to her peerage in the House of Lords. The bruising environs of Westminster and Whitehall would be her safe harbor — away from the grandstanding and protesting of an American political season wrapped up with a grinding war many of her students reviled.