Columbia University's newly appointed President, Claire Shipman, has come under scrutiny for previously dismissing congressional hearings on antisemitism on college campuses as "Capitol Hill nonsense.
".
This revelation emerged from leaked messages, raising questions about her stance on significant issues affecting higher education.
Shipman, who was named president of Columbia on Friday, had been serving as co-chair of the university's board of trustees. Her background includes a tenure as a CNN White House correspondent, and she was formerly married to Jay Carney, the press secretary during the Obama administration.
According to The Post Millennial, Shipman expressed her views in a December 2023 text message to then-President Minouche Shafik, suggesting that Columbia would avoid involvement in what she termed "Capitol Hill nonsense." This comment referred to the congressional hearings led by Rep. Elise Stefanik, which addressed antisemitic protests on campuses following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
The hearings had significant repercussions, leading to the resignations of Harvard President Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill after they hesitated to clarify whether advocating for the genocide of Jews breached their institutions' harassment policies. Shipman's messages, disclosed in an October report by the Republican House Committee on Education and the Workforce, also indicated her belief that student groups involved in protests should be reinstated. "I do think we should think about unsuspending the groups before semester starts to take the wind out of that," she wrote to Shafik.
In a related development, Interim President Armstrong resigned shortly after the university complied with a list of demands from the Trump administration to secure $400 million in federal funding. Armstrong had agreed to a mask ban during campus protests but reportedly assured faculty she would not enforce it, as reported by the New York Post.
Login