Shafik is the third president of an Ivy League university to resign in the wake of school protests for Gaza, citing the toll the unrest inflicted on her family
She stated that she made the news early in order for the student demonstrators, who have promised to restart their protests when the new term begins on September 3, to have new leadership in place.
It has been a turbulent time, and it has been challenging to get past different points of view in our community. My family and other members of our community have suffered greatly throughout this time,” Shafik stated in a statement.
The institution declared that its new interim president would be Katrina Armstrong, dean of Columbia’s medical school. A statement from Armstrong stated that she was “acutely aware of the trials the University has faced over the past year.”
In response to Palestinian civilian casualties in Gaza, demonstrators held portions of the Columbia campus in April and May, causing hundreds of arrests. Pro-Israel supporters chastised Shafik for not taking strong enough action against the protesters, while the protestors criticized her for bringing police onto campus to put an end to them.
The group organizing the protests, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, praised the resignation but insisted it shouldn’t take away from their goal of getting Columbia to cut its ties to businesses that back Israel’s military and its occupation of Palestinian territory.
Leading the group’s negotiations with the school’s administration is Mahmoud Khalil. “We hope that Columbia will finally appoint a president that will hear the students and faculty rather than appeasing Congress and donors,” Khalil stated.
Republican U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik, a critic of university leaders in congressional hearings over Gaza protests nationwide, called Shafik’s resignation “overdue” on X because of what she called failure to protect Jewish students.
Following criticism from Congress, the presidents of two additional Ivy League universities also resigned. In December 2023, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania resigned, and a month later, Claudine Gay of Harvard did the same.
Shafik is a British-American economist of Egyptian descent who has held positions as president of the London School of Economics, deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and deputy governor of the Bank of England.
Shafik announced that she would return to the British House of Lords to chair an evaluation of the government’s foreign development strategy, having led Columbia for just over a year.
When pro-Palestinian demonstrators erected scores of tents on the main lawn at Columbia, her standing there was called into question.
After encampments were not removed willingly, she took the unprecedented step on April 18 of inviting New York police to enter the campus, infuriating faculty, students, and rights organizations.
The tents were taken down and more than a hundred individuals were detained, but the encampment was back up in a matter of days. After 300 individuals were taken into custody at and around Columbia and the City College of New York on April 30, the university requested that the police return. The arrests resulted in injuries to a few demonstrators.
The most recent round of violence in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict began on October 7 when Hamas-affiliated Palestinian fighters assaulted Israel, murdering 1,200 people and kidnapping another 250 more, according to Israeli estimates.
Following its attack on the Hamas-run enclave, Israel has killed almost 40,000 Palestinians, the local health ministry reports, uprooting almost the entire population of 2.3 million, resulting in a hunger crisis and prompting accusations of genocide at the World Court, which Israel disputes.
Facebook Comments