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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14425 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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A Game of Chairs (At Columbia University)

or

How Trump Defeated Columbia University Columbia University Defeated Itself

The Intelligencer, a generally left-leaning American media outlet of the sort to still refer to anti-Trump actors 'the Resistance,' released a long-but-interesting report on many of the internal dynamics of the road to Columbia University's rise to prominence in the US culture war in the last year or so.

A (brief) recap for this year is that Trump Administration's suspended 400 million in grants and contracts on grounds of Civil Rights Act violations (namely anti-semitism related to Gaza War protests). Columbia's public acceptance of the Trump administration terms for restoring funding was under cut the then-President downplaying any impacts from the Federal agreement in a private faculty meeting.

As the strikethrough sub-title implies, the proximal cause, and political attribution that author (or editor) wants you to take away, is that Trump defeated Columbia. The not-so-deep subtext that is more interesting (and perhaps not surprising) is how the Columbia internal politics sabotaged set the stage.

TLDR: Columbia is currently in an unstable leadership vacuum because of how the university distributed internal administrative powers to students and faculty, how a key (but controversial) past President consolidated power in the office of the president rather than the senate, and how the Board attempted to mitigate/reform the Presidential power centralization led to leaders who were unprepared with the politics of the Gaza War. Would-be ambitious university faculty who tried to take advantage did not help.

This is presented because (a) the Columbia dynamics exposed may help people understand the dynamic of 'marching through institutions' across leadership generations, and (b) rabbit holes be fun to share.

///

The Nature of the Columbia Governance Problem

Even by the cats-in-a-bag standard of modern research universities, Columbia is a cursed place to govern. It’s huge, with 17 schools to manage, and its endowment is the second smallest in the Ivy League on a per-student basis, after Cornell. There’s never enough funding, which means Columbia has an extra-toxic version of a common university problem: resentment between the liberal-arts programs, which are prestigious and lose money, and the cash-cow units that subsidize them.

Two don't-call-it-foreshadowing notes here.

1: Remember that money is fungible.

2: Keep track of which department is offering praise or criticism.

(A) Root of the Problem

Then there are the ghosts of Columbia’s uniquely tortured history. After 1968, when antiwar activists took over five buildings, the trustees made a big change to Columbia’s governance structure. They created a senate with a supermajority of faculty and students and gave it the power to oversee discipline and draft university policies. Over the decades, though, many of these delegated powers eroded, replaced by folkways and presidential work-arounds. The result has been that Columbia has shared governance on paper but not really in practice. It was a legitimacy bomb, waiting to go off in a crisis.

As a result of Vietnam War protests, Columbia delegated various institutional powers to a sub-body that gave faculty and students- but particularly faculty and students coordinating together- not just policy power, but disciplinary power.

Columbia Presidential Centralization

In 2002, after decades of financial struggles, the trustees installed Lee Bollinger as president, and he began to make the university bigger and more ambitious in almost every way. He seemed less interested in day-to-day academic management than in pushing Columbia into exciting new fields, like neuroscience, and creating interdisciplinary centers around the world. He developed a new campus in Manhattanville and paid for it with multibillion-dollar capital campaigns. To accomplish this, Bollinger mostly bypassed the senate and his fractious faculties. It earned Bollinger a reputation as the greatest university president of his generation; it came at the cost of professors and deans feeling disenfranchised. An org chart that circulated among deans and the president’s office each year showed a tangle surrounding Bollinger. Dozens of people reported directly to the president, many of them floating off to the side, outside any recognizable hierarchy.

President Bollinger, 2002-2023, centralized administrative power in the office of the President, and sidelined the faculty/student senate institutions.

While not explicit, this is a two-fold basis of an anti-Presidential-deference institutional bias in the student-faculty senate. First, common grievance / loss of influence to bind teachers, and the students they can influence, seeking to regain influence. Second, and less obvious, that the President would decrease efforts to build/maintain a power coalition in the Senate that he does not need the assistance of... in favor of other, more directly influential, influence areas.

Bollinger Influence in the Columbia Board of Trustees

In his two decades leading Columbia, Bollinger outlasted more and more of the trustees, and he was able to shape the group in his image. “Lee basically seizes control,” an alumnus who has interacted with the board over many years said. “If you’re a trustee, you can yell at your chief executive, but your only recourse is to fire him. And Lee basically would say to the trustees, ‘Oh, you want to fire me? Go right ahead. Guess what? Manhattanville is still not done. And anyone whom you hire as a successor is not going to want to spend the first five years of his or her reign fundraising for my legacy.’”

Bollinger's influence matters because the Columbia Board of Trustees in power now is in a post-Bollinger transition. Because...

That spring [of 2024], Columbia’s board began to show signs of dysfunction. Its 24 members are limited to two six-year terms, and none predated the Bollinger era. It was a group assembled in peacetime that had until recently been dealing with a president who ran the university out of the palm of his hand. Now, feeling like Columbia was spiraling out of control, the trustees became much more assertive.

Reframed- the current board of trustees is not only Bollinger-era, but were used to a stronger University President who was willing to sideline / ignore the student-and-faculty university senate.

But the recent presidents are not strong Presidents, in part by the Board's own design.

The Board Strikes Back

The trustees weren’t oblivious. They knew that Columbia’s economic position was fragile and that success had masked a worrying level of institutional rot. When Bollinger was finally ready to retire in 2023, the board replaced him with Shafik, then the president of the London School of Economics. That school was small and simple compared to Columbia, but Shafik was sophisticated and had a compellingly globalist biography that matched the political moment. An Egyptian-born member of the British peerage, she’d been educated in America and England and held a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford. She would be Columbia’s first female president and its first of color. Her brief was to keep Columbia growing around the world while modernizing its operations in Morningside Heights.

In 2023, the Bollinger-era board replaced Bollinger with a new, and more importantly, foreign and less experienced in Columbia politics, University President. Shafik was a 'can appeal to all interests' compromise. She had the the demographic aspects attractive to the liberal-art progressive wing, the economic background to recognize the role / relevance of the 'cash cow' departments, and for the board she was a deliberate break from the Bollinger-style president.

And she was aware of that from the start.

The night before her investiture, Shafik hosted an intimate dinner in the courtyard of the president’s house, a McKim, Mead & White mansion on West 116th Street. In his later years, Bollinger had become notorious for conducting much of his business there and seldom appearing in his office. One attendee recalled a member of Shafik’s family toasting how they had “quite literally pulled back the curtains and let the light in.” From the perspective of Columbia’s senior leaders, there was a plan in place to shore up the school’s foundation. It would just take time.

And then history happened.

Shafik and the Gaza Conflict on Campus

For a moment, it was possible to think that Shafik was well equipped to lead Columbia through the aftermath of October 7. She had superb knowledge of the conflicts in the Middle East: She had been involved in the Oslo peace process and written books about the economic possibilities of a regional accord. But her perspective was from the Davos-y orbit of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, where debate and respect abound because you’re handing out money. Shafik had no experience of the Israel-Palestine issue as it played at Columbia and on the Upper West Side, with the tabloids and Congress watching. The university is home to both a large population of observant Jewish students and a cohort of professors who are avid supporters of Palestinian statehood. Those two groups were not going to wait for their new president to get up to speed.

The relevant point here isn't that the University had strong pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian groups. The point here is that Shafik was personally involved in the peace process before, which- along with her deliberately non-Columbia Uni/foreign background that went into her hiring- shaped her (eventual) decision to allow New York Police onto the campus to arrest protestor encampments/occupations, after an April 2024 Congressional hearing. (This Columbia-centric hearing followed the disastrous 2023 Congressional hearing that led to the replacement of Harvard's president.)

Skipping forward just a bit for a relevant perspective from her-

Shafik headed back to New York [from the April 2024 Congressional hearing] on the Acela and decided to authorize the New York Police Department to enter campus and break up the encampment. It turned a modest demonstration into an international media spectacle. One professor who spoke with Shafik at her home later on asked why she’d brought in the cops. “She didn’t understand what it meant to call the NYPD,” the professor said. “She was from London. The police in London don’t carry guns.” For her part, Shafik told faculty that anyone who imagined the protests could influence real-world events was delusional: In her World Bank days, when she’d sat in on actual peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, nobody had once mentioned a university.

So Shafik's lived experience- previously considered a virtue in her hiring- led to decisions that ultimately led to her ouster.

But there was more before then, which started the grounds by which the Trump Administration would later invoke the Civil Rights Act against Columbia.

The Rise of the Antisemitism Civil Rights Act Issue

Going back to the immediate aftermath of October 7, even before the Israeli ground incursion...

What happened in those first few weeks, before Israel’s formal counteroffensive, convinced many in the Jewish community that Columbia was home to irredeemably antisemitic faculty and students. One day after 10/7, the most prominent Palestinian advocate on the faculty, Joseph Massad, a professor in MESAAS, wrote an op-ed for The Electronic Intifada that called the Hamas operation “innovative,” “stunning,” “astonishing,” and “incredible.” On the second day, two student groups called for Columbia to divest from Israel and end its academic activity in Tel Aviv, where the university was planning to open a satellite campus. Soon, the first “From the river to the sea” chants were heard at protests. Students, faculty, and outsiders aligned with Israel argue that the pro-Palestinian activists’ claims to be motivated by concern about genocide are false because they showed their colors in this period, before the full invasion of Gaza.

For Shafik and others in university leadership, managing the torrent of activity was not just difficult but perhaps impossible. Every administrative action boomeranged. On October 12, after a protest and counterprotest on campus, public-safety officials directed demonstrators toward separate exits. But that sent the pro-Palestinian side onto West 115th Street, headed toward the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life. The problem was compounded when Jewish students there were locked inside, which several said made them feel unsafe.

This created 2 separate problems for pro-Palestinian institutional interests in Columbia against the office of the President, and the Board of Trustees more generally.

First, the divestment demand went against the Board's mandate for Shafik when they hired her, which is rarely helpful.

Her brief was to keep Columbia growing around the world

Particularly in the light of the 'liberal-arts are prestigious but unprofitable' tension. Spreading the brand is what allows subsidizing such.

Second, and worse, this created a Civil Rights Act violation risk if Columbia did not respond appropriately.

For those unfamiliar,...

OCR also issued a notice (1994) that assists school communities in understanding their obligations under Title VI and discusses some considerations for schools when taking action to remediate a hostile environment under Title VI. The existence of a hostile environment based on race, color, or national origin that is created, encouraged, accepted, tolerated, or left uncorrected by a school can constitute discrimination in violation of Title VI. When a school is taking action to remediate a hostile environment, just as when taking any other action, Title VI prohibits the school from discriminating against students on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

The 'or' is significant. A CRA hostile environment discrimination does not have to be created by the university. It is enough if you accept, tolerate, or leave uncorrected.

Additionally, anti-semitism is considered a violation of title VI CRA, but anti-anti-semitism is not, because the later is a political position, which is not a protected category, but antisemitism is considered an act against a protected category. This is Trump's fault.

In his first term, Trump had signed an executive order that expanded Title VI protections to victims of antisemitism. Biden rescinded many of Trump’s orders, but he let this one stand.

So. In the opening days following the October 7 2023 attack, a Columbia faculty member publicly praised the atrocity in glowing terms, campus protestors chanted slogan with known ethnic cleansing connotations, and at a University permitted protest, pro-Palestinian protestors ignored their designated deconfliction exit and instead mobbed a Jewish center and locked jewish students inside.

Also, later, unrepentent protestors did not help.

Back in the spring [2024], in a gesture of moderation, CUAD had distanced itself from one of the saga’s most objectionable characters, a student who had said “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists” during his disciplinary hearing. Now, CUAD reversed that position and apologized to the student, writing that “where you’ve exhausted all peaceful means of resolution, violence is the only path forward.” (CUAD took credit for organizing the May 7 disruption at Butler Library.)

Remember Title VI, and 'or left uncorrected.'

But back in April 24, Shafik went to Congress.

Early on, Shafik had been lucky to dodge a congressional hearing at which the presidents of Harvard and Penn addressed reports of antisemitism in lawyerly terms and later resigned. But it meant that when the House Committee on Education and the Workforce returned to the issue, it held a hearing focused exclusively on Columbia. Shafik, Shipman, and Shipman’s board co-chair, David Greenwald, went to Washington to testify. On the morning of April 17, 2024, before they arrived on Capitol Hill, they learned that pro-Palestinian students had taken over the university’s South Lawn.

This probably did not help Shafik's position before Congress. It also may or may not have been predictable what the outcomes would be.

In the 30 hours that ensued, Shafik’s presidency was lost and Columbia plunged into true crisis, never to recover. During the hearing, Shafik struck a far different pose from Harvard’s Claudine Gay. She agreed that antisemitism was a major problem at Columbia and discussed disciplinary actions against specific professors without reservation. If this placated congressional Republicans for a nanosecond, it permanently lost whatever goodwill she had left with the Columbia rank and file. As a member of the faculty later put it to me, “A couple other Ivy presidents went to Congress and lost their job. Shafik went to Congress and lost a university.”

A second encampment formed spontaneously after the bust-up of the first. Protest leaders refused to meet with Shafik. Representatives from student government rendezvoused with her in a clandestine meeting in a basement, leaving their phones outside so nobody could make a recording, but there was no meaningful progress. Shafik authorized a second police raid to end the students’ takeover of Hamilton Hall and canceled commencement. The year was in ruins. Shafik’s chauffeur tailed her around campus on foot, concerned for her safety.

Shafik resorted to law enforcement against the encampments. During this times, student government- but also teacher government because the Senate is both student-and-teacher dominated- met with Shafik privately, even as protest leaders- presumably a different and 'unconnected' group- refused to meet her at all.

And this is when we get our next governance turnover.

The Board Intervenes (Again)

That spring, Columbia’s board began to show signs of dysfunction. Its 24 members are limited to two six-year terms, and none predated the Bollinger era. It was a group assembled in peacetime that had until recently been dealing with a president who ran the university out of the palm of his hand. Now, feeling like Columbia was spiraling out of control, the trustees became much more assertive.

Several people with knowledge of the board’s evolution described a dynamic in which a subset of members was convinced that Columbia had a dangerous concentration of antisemites and that strong action was needed to bring the campus back to order. That circle’s most prominent member is Victor Mendelson, part of a four-generation Columbia lineage, whose father was also a trustee. The billionaire Mendelsons run HEICO, a Florida-based aerospace company and defense contractor. There’s also Shoshana Shendelman, whose child is a current student, and to a quieter degree Greenwald, a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who spent his career at Fried Frank and Goldman Sachs. A more moderate set includes Mark Gallogly, who co-founded the investment firm Centerbridge Partners and who has given millions to Democratic candidates for office; Kathy Surace-Smith, a lawyer and partial owner of the Seattle Mariners whose husband is the president of Microsoft; Abigail Black Elbaum, who runs a real-estate management firm; and Jonathan Rosand, a professor of neurology at Harvard. Two others were more clearly identified with the liberal-coded position that antisemitism was a concern but one that was being used disingenuously to stifle speech: Wanda Marie Holland Greene, who runs a progressive school for girls in San Francisco, and Li Lu, a leader of the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square who became a billionaire investor.

If you want to take a guess on how many of these identified members are Jewish, have children on campus who are jewish, or otherwise close connections with jewish friends / family, feel free to look up for yourself. The answer is more than two. I only bring this up to note the only time the article actually specifies someone's Jewishness later.

The point now, however, is that the Board has a positional divide between 'anti-semitism is a big problem' and 'anti-semitism is a concern but is disingenuously used to stifle speech.'

The issue that Columbia ran into was that the protestors lost the Free Speech argument with the Bollinger-era board... despite Bollinger being a notable First Amendment advocate himself in his selections.

Or possibly because of his influence.

In April 2024, the New York Post painted Columbia’s board as “ultra-liberal” and “stacked with Democratic apparatchiks and megadonors.” (Mendelson recently visited an undergraduate seminar and told the students that as one of the panel’s few registered Republicans, “I’m the one the White House calls to yell at.”) But that doesn’t capture how the board behaved in private. There was not a set of trustees that argued as vociferously on speech rights or Islamophobia as the Mendelson side did on antisemitism. Bollinger, a noted First Amendment scholar, had stocked the board with people who held expansive views on speech, yet in practice they found it difficult to side with protesters who knowingly violated Columbia’s policies on when and where demonstrations could occur. “It would have been easier for the First Amendment absolutists to defend the students if they had respected the university’s time, place, and manner restrictions,” a trustee told me.

This point here isn't that the pro-Palestinian protestors agitated their way into a losing argument, though they did. The point here is that the pro-Palestinian protestor advocates were running into the Civil Rights Act issue.

Columbia University had stated policies on time, place, and manner restrictions. These were pre-established, and pre-enforced, restrictions. Not equally enforcing them could become a form of favoritism contributing to, well, a Title VI hostile environment under the CRA.

However, the Board didn't come to a consensus as much as a consensus came with timely personnel turnover.

Antisemitism became the prevailing concern. In a minuted meeting, with colleagues who were whispering to right-wing publications and Republicans in Washington, it was difficult for trustees to take the position that antisemitism was a small or medium-size problem — even if they honestly saw it that way. Greene and Li quietly rotated off the board last summer, further tilting the balance. “The board lost two of its strong oppositional voices when they left,” a person who interacts with the group said. During one session, the trustees had a preliminary discussion about granting arrest power to campus security officers. Within hours, it was in The Wall Street Journal — a leak that some interpreted as an effort to lock in that outcome.

A previous gridlock leads to an imbalance in favor of the clamp downs by the Board. However, the Board doesn't have all the formal power here.

Remember the root of the problem paragraph earlier?

The Student-Teach Senate Demands Control Over The Judicial-Disciplinary Process (And Gets It (Back))

Some trustees became obsessively focused on discipline and pushed Shafik to discuss individual students’ files in detail. If that was deeply inappropriate, it was also true that discipline was where Columbia was opening itself up to attack. Students’ cases were progressing slowly and uncertainly. The rules codified after 1968 established two tracks for students accused of transgressions: Dean’s Discipline, for issues like cheating on exams, and the University Judicial Board, for violations related to protest. The senate controlled who was appointed to the latter. But big demonstrations happened only every so often, and the group was convened haphazardly. Cases sometimes followed both tracks in parallel; other times, outside arbiters were called in. Administrators looked down on the Judicial Board because they were entitled to just one of its five seats, with the others going to presumably softhearted students and faculty. All this meant that after the October 7 attacks, Shafik routed discipline cases through a relatively new office that she controlled, the Center for Student Success and Intervention. The senate, appalled by Shafik’s testimony before Congress and the police raids, roused itself and demanded the cases be run through its group. In July 2024, Shafik and the trustees conceded the point, and the majority of cases related to the takeover of Hamilton Hall were transferred to the Judicial Board.

After the Vietnam War Protests, the (presumably then-anti-war Board of Trustees) gave students (and teachers) the right to sanction protest rule violators. However, this was rarely and haphazardly used.

In the aftermath of Oct 7, Shafik used an office that was created during the Bollinger era of centralizing power into the Presidency to handle protest issues.

After the (highly condemned by student and teacher protestors) start of enforcement, Shafik gives up institutional control of the disciplinary process back to the Student and Teacher-dominated senate. This may be partly out of a (doomed) compromise to stable the ship of office, but it is also consistent with Shafik and the Columbia Board of Trustee's desire to dis-empower the Bollinger-era president.

But what Shafik did on her way out the door isn't what mattered. What the Senate did not do was more relevant.

Months passed [without disciplinary progress]. The delays signaled to Columbia’s gathering adversaries that of all American universities, this was the one least able to get its house in order. “There’s some deep-rooted structural problems,” said Ester Fuchs, a professor who co-chairs an internal group Columbia formed to document antisemitism and recommend reforms. “Everything was broken: the whole freaking administrative infrastructure of the university to deal with protest, the security, the disciplinary process. Why did it take us so long to get that discipline done? Because it was broken. There was nothing there.”

Remember Title VI.

The existence of a hostile environment based on race, color, or national origin that is created, encouraged, accepted, tolerated, or left uncorrected by a school can constitute discrimination in violation of Title VI.

Shafik started in an environment where Columbia professors (and students) were encouraging a hostile environment, faced with clear speech policy and protest management violations that made non-action against violators a form of acceptance / toleration, and then handed off the disciplinary/correction process to an institution that did not work... after her predecessor had given her office the tools to take actions.

In August 2024, Shafik quit, in what was the then-shortest presidential tenure in more than 200 years.

Enter Katrina Armstrong: The Anti-Anti-Bollinger President

Katrina Armstrong, Shafik's successor, was picked from the in-house university leaders to be an anti-Shafik. Someone who was more familiar with Columbia politics, more sensitive to student interests, and, well...

...well, remember the departments praise and criticism are coming from.

Katrina Armstrong loves a medical metaphor. When the trustees hurriedly tapped her to replace Shafik as acting president, she’d been running Columbia’s vast Irving Medical Center for two years, and she started to reassure people that the school was now in the ER or ICU and efforts were being made to stop the bleeding. She positioned herself as the anti-Shafik, ultracommunicative and accessible to all. Matthew Connelly, a history professor and vice-dean — “the lowliest administrative role you can have” — told me that Armstrong would reply to his emails immediately: “I’ve never had that experience with any other principal at Columbia.” Armstrong had a politician’s instinct for telling different constituencies what they wanted to hear. She helped freshmen move into their dorms, had dinner at the Chabad brownstone, and gave an interview to the Columbia Daily Spectator apologizing to students who felt “hurt” by the police raids.

Peter Bearman, a sociology professor who had helped start a vote of no confidence in Shafik, was surprised when Armstrong reached out to him. “I thought, Oh, she’s smart,” he recalled. The two developed a working relationship. Bearman complained that the color-coded system Columbia used to signal whether campus was open or closed made the place feel like a TSA checkpoint. As a hospitalist, Armstrong appreciated such heuristics, but she took the note and made a change. Bearman said, “She also pointed out that the security guards were unpleasant, kind of fascistic, and that she was going to make it a rule that they said ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thank you.’ And you know what? They did.”

However- and forgive the paragraph separation- Armstrong was not as familiar with Israeli-Palestinian politics as she might (not) have been with institutional politics.

On another occasion, Armstrong called Bearman, who is Jewish, into her office and asked him to explain to her the divide within Jewish faculty — why some felt the school had an unforgivable tolerance for antisemites while others considered the issue overblown, a smoke screen for human-rights abuses in Gaza. At the medical campus Armstrong had run, 50 blocks north of Low Library, Israel-Palestine just hadn’t been an issue her doctors and scientists bothered her with.

In other words: the Columbia Board of Trustees replaced an economist directly familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but insufficiency sensitive to the Columbia protests, with a doctor so unfamiliar with it (or inclined to play the part of ignorant) she had to ask the (it's important to note he's Jewish) Jewish professor who ousted her predecessor for being too hard on pro-Palestinian protestors why other Jewish faculty and students might perceive antisemitism.

The Gathering Enemy Action

A Republican blueprint for assailing higher education, with Columbia as its primary target, was coming together. In his first term, Trump had signed an executive order that expanded Title VI protections to victims of antisemitism. Biden rescinded many of Trump’s orders, but he let this one stand. At the end of October 2024, Republican staffers in the House released a 325-page report, “Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed,” which relied on more than 40,000 pages of internal Columbia documents. The report is heavy-handed, but for those inclined to believe, it substantiates the allegation that Columbia is a breeding ground for antisemitism. And if there’s antisemitism, the government can now drive a school into bankruptcy.

The 'how' to brankrupcy is another para that refers to an American Enterprise Institute paper by Max Eden. I don't feel the article characterizes it well, so link it for your own review.

However, the point is that financial interests were at risk was raised, and...

The Armstrong Denial

At Columbia, much of the leadership was in denial that an asteroid was heading their way. A group of alumni and faculty had recently formed the Stand Columbia Society, which had excellent back channels to administrators. The group worked up a detailed analysis of Columbia’s exposure to a hostile administration — $250 million in the short term, $3.5 billion in a worst-case scenario — and circulated it as a warning. According to Stand Columbia, senior administrators responded that the math was “cute” but far-fetched.

The Stand Colombia Society does not have much of a public facing position on politics in general. However, in March 2025 it did publish a (paywalled even on internet archive) position paper titled: Issue #037: No, the Endowment Cannot Be Used to “Fight Trump”

The public-facing summary is-

Recently, a new narrative has begun making its way around the higher education commentariat: that Columbia University should “use its $15 billion endowment to fight Trump.” It’s a tempting, feel-good slogan, but here’s the problem: this argument is financially illiterate, institutionally reckless, and strategically suicidal.

Pretty strong words. But why might interim president from the medical center have dismissed even a 'mere' quarter-billion million short-term threat?

Because there could be a bigger-than-that short-term windfall incoming, if Armstrong played her professional self-interest cards right.

Armstrong's Nine-Figure Gamble for the (Columbian) Presidency

The false sense of security may have been encouraged by the common view that Armstrong’s tenure was going well. Most people who interacted with her at the time got the impression she was campaigning to get the presidency on a formal basis. There was, however, a nine-figure hitch. Amid an otherwise bleak year for fundraising, Columbia’s single largest benefactors, Roy and Diana Vagelos, had made a $400 million gift to the medical school. They were enthusiastic fans of Armstrong and made the donation contingent on her returning to the medical complex. But Roy Vagelos, the former chairman of Merck, was 95, and that could probably be sorted out. Columbia’s trustees discussed the matter and came close to making Armstrong an offer.

Roy Vagelos's characterization here is interesting, because it provides some interesting sequencing implications, not least because the Vagelos donation was made public on 22 August with no public acknowledgement of the Armstrong condition. Which just so happened to be aweek after Armstrong took the acting-President position after Shafik's resignation on 14 August 24.

Which created a sequencing dynamic of...

  • 14 August 24: Armstrong emerges from the fall of Shafik as the new/acting University President... implicitly as a disconnected / apolitical / temporary choice
  • 22 August 24: Within a week of Shafik's ascent, VIP/Biggest Fan donors who love her so much make mega-donation... conditional on Armstrong losing power

Naturally, knowing that the biggest financial windfall of her university's year is conditional on her future exit, Armstrong...

  • begins campaigning for her temporary promotion to become permanent
  • taking into confidence the (Jewish!) professor who planted the first knife in her predecessor's final fall
  • is remarkably engaged with often-overlooked university faculty, including humanities departments, to building teacher support
  • begins a campaign for student support, apologizing for / signaling non-support of her predecessor's rule-enforcement (and CRA-compliance) policies

Which continues so that-

  • Summer 2024-First Quarter 2025: Armstrong continues this campaign despite the biggest donation of the previous year being explicitly-but-secretly conditional against it
  • Summer 2024 On: The 'we care about antisemtic indiscipline' faction grained predominance on the Board
  • March 2025: A group of well-connected Columbian institutionalists publish a warning that a hostile incoming Trump administration could cut $250 million in the short term

But really, remember the context.

  • $400 million is more than $250 million
  • And the donor who set the condition is, like, 95, and will die in a few years
  • And the Board- or at least Armstrong's allies/supporters on the Board- think that condition 'could be sorted out'
  • So there's not really a risk of losing $400 million!

And Armstrong would look really, really good to the student/teacher protestor block if she heroically stood up to the Trump administration, and held out against to any short-term cuts thanks to her ability to pull in that $400 million mega-donation to cover a year of cuts.

And thus Katrina Armstrong almost got the job of her ambitions, the accolades of her humanity peers, and the support of the Board.

And then the Fire Nation Trump Administration Attacked

Such plans were obliterated when Trump began his assault. On the right, there was a consensus that among elite universities, Columbia was the weakest link. “Columbia is just the least defensible,” Rufo said. “I mean, the conduct at Columbia, the ideologies from Columbia, the response by Columbia were the least defensible. They showed the maximum weakness. And so I think that’s why the president selected them first.”

Initial efforts start small, but escalate week by week.

Trump’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism moved rapidly, from a warning shot about cutting $50 million in funds on March 3 to canceling $400 million on March 7. Federal agents began knocking on students’ doors and waiting in the lobbies of Columbia buildings. Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian national and Fulbright scholar, fled to Canada, and Yunseo Chung, a junior who has lived in the U.S. since she was 7, went into hiding. ICE agents arrested Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent spokesperson for the lawn encampments, and flew him to a prison in Louisiana to await deportation proceedings. (Another student, Mohsen Mahdawi, was arrested in April; he has since been released.) On March 13, Trump’s task force delivered what faculty refer to as “the extortion letter” or “the ransom note,” a list of nine demands that had to be met before the government would consider reinstating the money, with a one-week deadline.

Yes, those individuals are non-citizens who were involved in participating or leading the Columbia protests. However, one of the interesting demands from the 'ransom note' list is actually institutional power related..

One of the bold letter demands is Primacy of the President in disciplinary matters, i.e. restoring the Bollinger reform, and reversing the late-Shafik power turnover to the University Senate.

Some held out hope for a defiant university administration. There was just one problem for the 'concede no ground' caucus-

Armstrong's support from the (still-Bollinger-era) Board wasn't as firm as she (probably) presumed.

The Fall of Armstrong

But the idea of a defiant legal response was a fantasy. Columbia’s board was already on the same wavelength as the Trump administration. On several of the task force’s demands — including banning masks, restricting protests, stripping disciplinary powers from the senate, and allowing campus police to arrest demonstrators — the group was ready to concede immediately. On March 21, it [the Board of Trustees] sent a letter to the government essentially surrendering. Perhaps reflecting an understanding that the letter would not go over well with the Columbia community, nobody signed it. Jack Halberstam, a professor of gender studies and English, was among the faculty aghast at the decision. “It’s more than capitulation,” Halberstam told me a few hours after the letter was released. “It’s anticipating even more demands that might be made and fulfilling them in advance.” The Trump administration’s initial letter hadn’t mentioned “viewpoint diversity,” code words that generally mean hiring more conservatives as professors, but Columbia pledged that searches for new faculty had already begun.

Again- remember the department.

But also- remember the sequencing.

  • Armstrong is made temporary President on donor big money condition that Armstrong leave
  • Armstrong lobbies hard to be Real President, despite the condition
  • Armstrong starts to go directly against the Board's summer 2024 consensus on the issue
  • Armstrong relaxes policies against student protestors the Board thinks are Very Concerning
  • Armstrong builds ties with faculty opposed to the opposing the protestors
  • Armstrong dismisses increasingly unsubtle warnings regarding the incoming Trump administration
  • Even after Trump's election, Armstrong thinks she is on track to become President
  • The Board encourages this belief, if she'll just hold on a little longer
  • One the first and predictable challenge, the Board folds

A sequence-conspiracist might think that- as Armstrong made her political alliances known- she was left to take an easily foreseeable fall.

Armstrong’s fall in these weeks was astonishingly fast. There were rumors that she and other members of the administration would be arrested for harboring immigrants. At one point, John Kluge, whose late father had endowed a program for minority scholars at Columbia with what was then the largest gift in Ivy League history, emailed Armstrong for reassurance that there was a strategy for defending it. Armstrong did not write back for four weeks. Khalil’s wife, who gave birth to their first child while he was incarcerated, has never received a note or offer of assistance from Columbia. The members of the university’s internal antisemitism review, concerned that their work could have lent legitimacy to Trump’s attack, took it upon themselves to write a statement. Administrators never issued it.

John Kluge's Sr.'s gift had been for... $400 million. Back in... 2007.

While $400 mil in 2007 is more than $400 mil in 2024, 2024 is a heck of a lot more recent- and influential- than 2007. And John Kluge Junior is not the one donating in a year Columbia needs money most.

Or, more relevantly, when Armstrong needs support most.

Faculty who interacted with Armstrong in this period say she was genuinely shocked that the world believed Columbia had caved. It made a certain sense, from the point of view of someone simply trying to survive minute by minute in a crisis: There had been a gun pointed at Columbia’s head, and to get it lowered, all she had to do was agree to some things her trustees already wanted.

Elsewhere...

Armstrong is 59, and in her years running Columbia’s medical center, she had cultivated a bedside manner that was upbeat, kinetic, approachable. Her short time triaging the entire university’s problems had taken a visible toll. “She looked like she was on the verge of collapse,” someone who dealt with her regularly said. To another, “she seemed like a person who desperately needed friends and allies and felt like she was very alone.”

Armstrong's finishing moment was, perhaps appropriately, a matter of record when she tried to make it not. Twice, sorta.

In the end, it was another bit of amateur hour that sank Armstrong. At one of the private faculty meetings where she tried to spin the deal with Trump as a win, participants warned that their videoconferencing software was generating a transcript. “The person who’d set up the meeting said, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to stop that. Can anybody — is there any tech? Can we get any tech?’ And no tech appeared,” recalled one of the professors present. “They allowed a confidential meeting with the faculty to go on, knowing that there was a transcription being made. And then of course it was leaked. I mean, it was such a shambolic event. She wasn’t in control. Isn’t that just an indication of complete discombobulation in our leadership?”

...

She announced that Columbia would comply. And then, when she nearly blew up the deal by privately telling faculty that it wasn’t a capitulation, that in fact there was some wiggle room, she lost her job. On March 28, the same day Armstrong resigned, she learned that Trump’s task force had demanded she appear in Washington without delay.

In the deposition room, Armstrong seemed determined, most of all, to avoid perjuring herself. She could not recall when she had become acting president. She struggled to say who is truly in charge of Columbia — the president or the trustees. Pressed by Keveney to admit that Columbia was indifferent to antisemitism, Armstrong described her tenure as a “blur” five times and as “challenging” or “difficult” 11 times and said she didn’t recall at least 28 times.

There is some irony in how Armstrong was replaced, though.

Members of the board of trustees give different accounts of who broke up with whom. Some maintain that Armstrong was forced out; others say there was mutual agreement she could not remain. Either way, she was gone. Only a week earlier, the former research-university president had joked to me that Armstrong’s job was secure: “You can’t fire an interim. You’re really not going to be able to hire a president after you do that.” With few good options, the trustees replaced Armstrong with one of their own. Close observers of Columbia’s demons noted that Armstrong, a creature of the profitable medical division, had been knifed by someone from the underfunded liberal arts.

So Armstrong was replaced by a member of the (Bollinger)-era Trustee Board member, Claire Shipman.

And not just any board member- the co-Chair.

What Next for Columbia?

In her early days on the job, Claire Shipman, an acting president replacing an interim president replacing a failed president, is beating expectations. At 62, a former correspondent for NBC and ABC News, she is a confident, mediagenic speaker, and as a board member since 2013, she knows the institution. She met privately with 300 restive faculty in mid-April, heard them out, and didn’t commit any gaffes worth leaking to the press. She is taking actions that are symbolic — mentioning Khalil and Mahdawi’s names for the first time — and structural. Shipman announced reviews of Columbia’s communications office and financial model and started a website with resources for international students fearful of deportation. Most significantly, Shipman is calling for the senate itself to be reconsidered. In a letter emphasizing that “I am deeply committed to shared governance,” Shipman opened the door to doing away with major elements of it.

And as an opening policy, Shipman, and the most direct Bollinger-era Board proxy yet, votes to dissolve the Senate.

In the end, perhaps Bollinger, or at least his influence, will win the Columbia game of chairs after all.

What Columbia should do with its governance structure is a wide-open question. The Stand Columbia Society has called for “fundamental reform” and predicted “the end of the University Senate as we know it.” It would likely ignite yet another round of protest on campus if the trustees were to formally reduce the power that faculty and students wield through the senate. And yet the current system, conceived in crisis half a century ago, is clearly not working.

Or maybe not. Chaos is a ladder, and all that.

Then again...

On a Wednesday evening in April [2025], for the first time, two trustees met publicly with students to hear their concerns about the senate — and everything else that had gone wrong over the past two years. The event was held in the auditorium of the Lee C. Bollinger Forum, a 56,000-square-foot building on West 125th Street designed by Renzo Piano’s firm. It didn’t begin well. There was confusion about the start time, and when a moderator said at 6:40 p.m. that the trustees had to leave at seven, there were angry calls of “Is that a joke?!” One trustee, Keith Goggin, a graduate of the journalism school who went to work on Wall Street, remained and gamely took students’ abuse for an hour. “Please let me get through this so you all understand it and then you can yell at me,” he said. The longest applause of the night came when a student noted that while Columbia had formed its own task force on antisemitism, it had not created one to deal with “the demonization of Palestinians.”

After an hour, Goggin gathered his things. “I think we’ve had a good conversation. You want to yell at me, but I really do appreciate all of you,” he said. Someone in the audience shouted, “Is our money going to kill kids in Gaza or not?” Goggin left to boos. In less than a minute, the students and faculty turned the town hall into an organizing session, and someone was at the microphone calling for a general strike.

I am sure they, and their preferred University leaders, will have the Board's full support.

What a silly shitshow. Thanks for writing it out, that was a fun read.

My question is why doesn't the board or president or whoever just launch a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protestors? Students have almost no political power in universities -- they're customers, not constituents. Most of them have political views that are only thinly-held, so just start issuing expulsions for some of the ringleaders and the rest will likely get over the whole thing. If they don't, keep issuing expulsions. Columbia has enough prestige that it won't realistically run out of students willing to go there. Faculty might be a trickier matter and some might protest out of principle, but if the students aren't protesting then that would probably take the wind out of their sails.

Because Ivy League students see themselves as minor royalty and the campus administration agrees.

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