The resignation of Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University, is being hailed as a victory all around. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who had called for her resignation back in April, celebrated the news:

Since her catastrophic testimony at the Education and Workforce Committee hearing, Shafik’s failed presidency was untenable and it was only a matter of time before her forced resignation. After failing to protect Jewish students and negotiating with pro Hamas terrorists, this forced resignation is long overdue.

But at Columbia, the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) also celebrated:

After months of chanting ‘Minouche Shafik you can’t hide’ she finally got the memo. To be clear, any future president who does not pay heed to the Columbia student body’s overwhelming demand for divestment will end up exactly as President Shafik did.

While Stefanik and SJP play tug-of-war over Shafik’s scalp, the battle for Columbia is far from over. Once the academic year begins, Columbia could face some of the same problems it encountered last spring: encampments, building occupations, intimidation of Jewish students, faculty alienation, and campus shutdowns. The demand by faculty and student radicals for “divestment” from Israel isn’t going away, and it’s one that no Columbia administration can satisfy.

My personal view is that Shafik was probably as good as you could get at a university as corrupted as Columbia, and likely more than Columbia deserved.

What went wrong

I began sounding the alarm over Columbia many years ago. I spent a year there as a graduate student and earned a master’s degree in history in 1976. Aside from the indomitable J.C. Hurewitz, I found nothing to keep me there. So I returned to Princeton for my doctorate. I had completed my undergraduate degree there, and Princeton had just acquired Bernard Lewis.

I left Morningside Heights, but I continued to watch Columbia with an insider’s interest. After I published a critique of Middle Eastern studies in 2001, I began identifying Columbia as the epicenter of the problems plaguing the field—so much so that Columbia’s Palestinian star, Edward Said, made this complaint in 2003:

An outrageous Israeli, Martin Kramer, uses his Web site to attack everybody who says anything he doesn’t like. For example, he has described Columbia as ‘the Bir Zeit [West Bank university] on the Hudson,’ because there are two Palestinians teaching here. Two Palestinians teaching in a faculty of 8,000 people! If you have two Palestinians, it makes you a kind of terrorist hideout.

Only seven years later, Columbia inaugurated a new Center for Palestine Studies. The announcement stated that “Columbia University is currently the professional home to a unique concentration of distinguished scholars on Palestine and Palestinians.” How did Columbia go from “two Palestinians” to a “unique concentration” in just seven years?

The same way Hamas built an underground warren in Gaza: through resolve, deception, cooptation, and intimidation. No one should have been surprised when an army of pro-Palestine and even pro-Hamas students, encouraged from behind the scenes by faculty, appeared last spring. The plot against Columbia had been more than twenty years in the making.

Most of the tunneling took place during the tenure of Lee Bollinger, president from 2002 to 2023. Whenever trouble surfaced—whether it was granting tenure to unqualified extremists or hosting the antisemitic Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on campus—Bollinger turned on the charm machine. Columbia is so much more, he reassured. This “move on, folks, nothing to see here” approach worked because donors, alumni, and students needed it to work. After all, they had shares in Columbia, Inc. That included many Jews, in all three categories.

Shafik had nothing to do with the administrative neglect that ate away at the foundations of the university. She wasn’t an alumna, and she’d never taught there. Her whole career had unfolded in Britain. When she assumed the Columbia job in June 2023, she may not have known how deep the rot went. What had started as a faculty problem had metastasized over two decades, spreading both to the student body and to the administrative bureaucracy. “Bir Zeit-on-Hudson” had gone from (my) hyperbole to reality.

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I didn’t say so at the time, to avoid adding fuel to the wrong side, but I thought Shafik showed grit in calling in the NYPD twice: first, to clear the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on South Lawn, and second, to clear Hamilton Hall, which had been forcibly occupied by a mix of students and off-campus radicals. But those decisions are what ultimately doomed her presidency.

More precisely, it was the faculty who made her position untenable. They had already taken umbrage at her Congressional testimony, where she appeared vaguely amenable to disciplining faculty speech. Her decision to call in the police compounded the crisis. A no-confidence resolution passed by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (with 65 percent in favor) declared that Shafik’s decisions “to ignore our statutes and our norms of academic freedom and shared governance, to have our students arrested, and to impose a lockdown of our campus with continuing police presence, have gravely undermined our confidence in her.”

It was just such a vote of no-confidence that drove Lawrence Summers out of the Harvard presidency in 2006. When you lose such a vote, you’re on borrowed time. Shafik prepared her departure, and announced that she would be returning to Britain to take up an economic advisory position with the Foreign Secretary. The statement by her temporary replacement, the CEO of Columbia’s medical center, made it quite clear who must be appeased henceforth: the Columbia faculty. “You are the ultimate keepers of the institution’s values and the stewards of its long and proud history.”

Upon Shafik’s resignation, Stefanik gloated: “THREE DOWN, so many to go.” The other two were the presidents of Harvard and Penn. But not every campus is the same. The pro-Israel stakeholders at Columbia have always been weak, and what Congress thinks doesn’t much matter on Morningside Heights. In my view, Shafik’s fall should actually be counted in the pro-Palestine column. If I’m right, it’s not “three down,” but “two to one.”

Does it get better?

Shafik was born in Egypt to a well-to-do family. In 1966, Nasser’s “Arab revolution” stripped her father, a chemist by training, of his expansive estate and all his property, in a wave of nationalization. The Shafiks arrived on America’s shores “with little money and a few possessions.” Minouche was four years old. “It taught me that you can go from having a lot to having nothing overnight, and you can’t get too attached to stuff because you can lose it.”

Shafik was driven from the land of her birth by an angry and aggrieved nationalism. Now, she’s been driven out of America by another variety of angry and aggrieved nationalism, this time Palestinian. She’ll always be remembered as the president who called in New York’s finest to handcuff some of Columbia’s worst. I’d be surprised if the next president is made of sterner stuff.

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