Columbia University President Minoche Shafiq is resigning after protests over the Gaza war roiled the university community and spread across campuses nationwide and in Europe last spring.
“This time has had a significant impact on my family, as it has on others in our community,” Shafiq said in a letter announcing his resignation Wednesday. “Over the summer, I was able to reflect and decide that my move forward at this point would best enable Columbia to overcome the challenges ahead.”
Shafiq has been under pressure to resign for several months. Both those who supported the spring protests and those who opposed them criticized how Shafiq handled the protests, as did several right-wing politicians, who claimed that the president failed to do enough to protect Jewish students. House Speaker Mike Johnson called his resignation “Long overdue“Wednesday.
All spring protests – which mainly involved students demanding that their schools divest from organizations linked to Israel amid the ongoing war in Gaza – reached their peak in Colombia. some schools He was able to negotiate with the agitators Voluntarily demolishing their pro-Palestinian camps without any police intervention.
In Colombia, however, Shafiq quickly The police called on protesters who had pitched a tent on the university’s main lawn in a show of force that sparked widespread outrage. This decision later provoked protests with more extended tactics and resulted in a Faculty vote of no confidence under his leadership. The situation escalated to a point where eventually some protestors A campus building has been occupied The police arrested them before they were forcibly removed.
Now Shafiq has become several Ivy League presidents is gone their Introduction In the midst of campus excitement. The question is not just where that leaves Columbia — now led by interim president Katrina Armstrong, CEO of Columbia University Irving Medical Center — but whether all of the university will return to campus this fall. War-like protests are expected to resume in Gaza 40,000 Palestinians killedContinued and Another round of ceasefire talks has begun. And it will be the responsibility of administrators to find a way to avoid a repeat of the spring.
“I think the tensions are going to be higher, more than I think they already have been,” said Nico PerinoExecutive Vice President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan group that advocates for free speech. “Hopefully the policies are in place and discussions are underway with students and faculty about how to respond when campuses are escalated or students are being threatened or denied access to different parts of campus.”
Gaza protests could return in autumn. Universities should start preparing now.
Administrators at other universities can take two key lessons from Shafiq’s missteps ahead of what is expected to be a controversial semester:
Universities should communicate openly and clearly with protesters
In the spring, protests escalated to the point that normal university operations could not continue.
held in Columbia Virtual class During the last week of the spring semester. UCLA also canceled classes After pro-Palestinian protesters were attacked by masked protesters and campus police failed to intervene for three hours. USC Abolition of a commencement speech by its pro-Palestinian valedictorian for security concerns.
Universities should plan now how they can prevent this from happening again. If protests lead to this decline in campus public safety or police innovation, “something has already gone horribly wrong,” he said. Frederick LawrenceFormer President of Brandeis University and Georgetown Law Lecturer.
The most important step schools can take now is to set clear ground rules for protests that will be enforced impartially — regardless of who is involved or their cause — such as banning building occupations or preventing students from attending class.
Before the fall semester, Lawrence said, university administrators and protesters should plan a reset, starting with communication.
“This is a good time to reach out to student leaders on all sides of this and other related issues and listen to them, but also try to get them on board, try to find constructive ways to protest. opinion, but to do it in a way that is constructive for them and constructive for the university,” Lawrence said.
Universities need to carefully consider when to weigh
University administrators have a dual responsibility to uphold free speech and protect their communities. Their ability to fulfill those responsibilities is compromised when they are not seen as impartial mediators.
Some university administrators learned this the hard way earlier this year when their statements about the Gaza war were picked apart in the media and at widely publicized congressional hearings — as well as on their own campuses, as some Stanford students protested. occupied the office of their college president.
In the spring, some universities decided that it was not a university’s role to take a stand on issues at the institutional level. For example, Harvard has announced that it will Don’t comment anymore In controversial matters not directly related to the University. The change in policy came after former Harvard President Claudine Gay Widely criticized For his initial statement about the war. upset gay resignation Later after facing a theft scandal.
Perino framed Harvard’s approach as a positive development.
“This will hopefully alleviate some of the messaging concerns around these colleges,” he said. “Universities are hosts and patrons of critics. They are not critics themselves and by being critics they put their thumb on the scale of campus debate.”
Rather than issuing blanket statements, even if permitted under university rules, there may be a more nuanced role for academics by discouraging certain types of speech. For example, Yale President Peter Salovey stated Basant said that “slogans or messages that express hatred, celebrate the killing of civilians or contain calls for genocide of any group are completely against our ideals and certainly not characteristic of our wider community.”
Such precautions may have the effect of lowering the temperature.
“A lot of things are said in the heat of the moment that aren’t helpful, and it’s helpful for administration to defuse that and say, ‘You can communicate in a way that’s not deeply offensive to your classmates,'” Lawrence said.
