Columbia University president Minouche Shafik is stepping down after protests over the war in Gaza roiled the university community and spread to campuses nationwide, and in Europe, last spring.
“This period has taken a considerable toll on my family, as it has for others in our community,” Shafik said in a letter announcing her resignation Wednesday. “Over the summer, I have been able to reflect and have decided that my moving on at this point would best enable Columbia to traverse the challenges ahead.”
Shafik has faced pressure to resign for months. Both those who supported the spring protests and those who opposed them have criticized how Shafik handled the demonstrations, as did a number of right-wing politicians, who claimed the president failed to do enough to protect Jewish students. House Speaker Mike Johnson called her resignation “long overdue” on Wednesday.
Not all of the spring protests — which largely involved students demanding that their schools divest from companies linked to Israel amid its ongoing war in Gaza — reached the intensity of those at Columbia. Some schools managed to negotiate with protesters to voluntarily dismantle their pro-Palestinian encampments without any police intervention.
At Columbia, however, Shafik swiftly called the police on protesters who had erected an encampment on the university’s main lawn in a display of force that sparked widespread outrage. That decision fueled protests with more escalatory tactics thereafter, and also resulted in a faculty vote of no confidence in her leadership. Things progressed to the point where some protesters eventually took over a campus building before they were forcibly removed by police and arrested.
Now, Shafik has become one of several Ivy League presidents who departed their roles amid the campus furor. The question is not just where that leaves Columbia — now headed by interim president Katrina Armstrong, the CEO of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center — but all universities as students return to campus this fall. Demonstrations are expected to resume as the war in Gaza, in which more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, continues and yet another round of ceasefire talks has begun. And it will be incumbent on administrators to find a way to avoid a repeat of the spring.
“I think tensions are going to be high, higher than I think they already were,” said Nico Perrino, executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan group that advocates for free speech. “Hopefully policies are in place and discussions are happening with students and faculty surrounding how to respond in case encampments go up or students are being threatened or denied access to different portions of campus.”
There are two key lessons other university administrators might take away from Shafik’s missteps ahead of what is expected to be a contentious semester:
In the spring, protests escalated to the point that normal university operations couldn’t continue.
Columbia held virtual classes in the final weeks of the spring semester. UCLA also canceled classes after pro-Palestinian protesters came under attack by masked agitators and campus police failed to intervene for three hours. USC scrapped a commencement speech by its pro-Palestinian valedictorian over safety concerns.
Universities should be planning now for how they can prevent that from happening again. If protests escalate this fall to the level of requiring the invention of campus public safety or police, then “something’s already gone terribly wrong,” said Frederick Lawrence, the former president of Brandeis University and a lecturer at Georgetown Law.
The most important step schools can take now is to set clear ground rules for protests that will be applied neutrally — no matter who’s involved or what their cause — such as prohibiting occupying buildings or blocking students from getting to class.
Ahead of the fall semester, Lawrence said, university administrators and protesters should plan for a reset that begins with communication.
“This is a good time to be reaching out to student leaders on all sides of this and other related issues, and listening to them, but also trying to bring them on board, to try to find constructive ways of having demonstrations, having expressions of views, but doing it in a way that’s constructive for them and constructive for the university,” Lawrence said.
University administrators have dual responsibilities to uphold free speech and keep their community safe. Their ability to carry out those responsibilities is compromised when they aren’t seen as neutral mediators.
Some university administrators learned this the hard way earlier this year when their statements about the Gaza war were copiously picked apart in the media and in widely publicized congressional hearings — as well as on their own campuses, as some student protesters at Stanford occupied the offices of their college president.
In the spring, some universities did decide that it is not the role of a university to take stances on issues at an institutional level. Harvard, for instance, announced that it would no longer comment on contentious issues that do not directly relate to the university. That change in policy came after former Harvard president Claudine Gay was heavily criticized for her initial statement on the war. The beleaguered Gay resigned after facing a later plagiarism scandal.
Perrino framed Harvard’s approach as a positive development.
“That should hopefully alleviate some of the messaging concerns around these colleges,” he said. “Universities are the hosts and sponsors of critics. They are not themselves the critics, and by becoming the critics, they put their thumb on the scale of the campus debate.”
Rather than issuing blanket statements, there may be a more nuanced role for educators to play, by discouraging certain kinds of speech, even if it is permitted under university rules. For example, Yale president Peter Salovey stated in the spring that “Chants or messages that express hatred, celebrate the killing of civilians, or contain calls for genocide of any group are utterly against our ideals and certainly are not characteristic of our broader community.”
Those kinds of warnings can have the effect of lowering the temperature.
“A lot of things get said in the heat of the moment that are not helpful, and it is useful for the administration to deescalate and to say, ‘You can communicate that in a way that’s not deeply offensive to your classmates,’” Lawrence said.
