Columbia University’s new president once called Congressional hearings on campus antisemitism “Capitol Hill nonsense.”
Claire Shipman, a former CNN White House correspondent whose ex-husband is former Obama Administration press secretary Jay Carney, served as co-chair of the University’s board of trustees before she was appointed Friday night to replace interim school president Katrina Armstrong.
In a Dec. 28, 2023, text message, Shipman wrote to then university president Minouche Shafik she thought Columbia would be spared from the “capital hill nonsense,” referring to December 2023 Congressional hearings that saw the presidents of Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania and MIT testify about campus protests against the war in Gaza.
The tense hearings famously resulted in Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill resigning after they were grilled on whether calling for the killing of Jews would violate their school’s bullying and harassment policies — and answered that it depended on the context.
Shipman’s text messages about the hearings were revealed in a 325-page October report from the Republican House Committee on Education and the Workforce that included leaked messages between university officials.
Columbia’s leaders had expressed contempt for the congressional investigation, according to the report.
In the same text message, Shipman also suggested reinstating student groups that had participated in the protests.
“I do think we should think about unsuspending the groups before semester starts to take the wind out of that,” she wrote to Shafik.
Armstrong’s resignation was the second in less than a year over the university’s handling of campus protests.
Armstrong left days after she caved and told President’s Trump’s administration she would implement a mask ban during campus protests as a condition for keeping $400 million in federal funding — while allegedly privately promising faculty she would not.
Shafik had resigned from the school’s top post in August amid the furor over the campus protests.
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