“[We need] to get somebody from the middle east [sic] or who is Arab on our board. Quickly I think. Somehow.”
“I just don’t think [Shoshana Shendelman, a vocal decrier of antisemitism] should be on the board… [she has been] extraordinarily unhelpful… I am tired of her.”
Those are excerpts of emails that were sent by Columbia University’s acting president, Claire Shipman, last year, when she was on the school’s board of trustees. She also expressed agreement with a colleague who suggested that Ms. Shendelman, an acclaimed Jewish scientist and board member who had spoken out against the harassment of Jewish students, was a “mole” and a “fox in the henhouse.”
When Ms. Shipman was appointed acting president, after Minouche Shafik resigned in the summer of 2024, and then her successor, Katrina Armstrong, did the same this past March, the newest acting president issued a statement published by Columbia’s Office of Public Affairs in which she pledged her “steadfast commitment to… integrity.”
Integrity would not seem to cuddle very comfortably with insisting that a member of a particular ethnicity or national origin be appointed to a board. Or with deriding a fellow trustee’s principled stance against Jew-hatred.
In fact, the first of those things would arguably be in violation not only of personal integrity but of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
That possibility was raised by House Republican Leadership Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, in a letter that she and Representative Tim Walberg, chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, sent to the acting president, asking her to clarify her “Arab” comment.
They also called out Ms. Shipman’s criticism of Ms. Shendelman, whom they characterized as one of the board’s “most outspoken members against the bullying, harassment and intimidation of Jewish students.”
The committee says the comment raises “the question of why you appeared to be in favor of removing one of the board’s most outspoken Jewish advocates at a time when Columbia students were facing a shocking level of fear and hostility.”
Good question.
And one not exactly answered by a Columbia University spokesperson, who said that the emails, “from more than a year ago” are now “being published out of context.” The context? That they “reflect a particularly difficult moment in time for the University when leaders across Columbia were intensely focused on addressing significant challenges.”
That difficult moment in time, as it happens, was when anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment was raging on campus. A good time for seeking out an Arab to be part of a board? For badmouthing an opponent of Jew-hatred?
And here we thought that folks who oversee major universities were supposed to be smart.
The committee also cited a message from October 30, 2023—mere weeks after the October 7 Hamas massacre—in which Ms. Shipman told then-president Minouche Shafik that “People are really frustrated and scared about anti-Semitism on our campus and they feel somehow betrayed by it. Which is not necessarily a rational feeling but it’s deep and it is quite threatening.”
“Somehow?” “Not necessarily a rational feeling”? Curiouser and curiouser.
But leave those thoughts hanging. Ms. Shipman has offered an apology.
It doesn’t address the possible violation of the Civil Rights Act nor the characterization of Jewish collegiates’ fears as less than rational, only the derision of Ms. Shendelman. “The things I said in a moment of frustration and stress,” she admits, “were wrong.”
“They do not reflect how I feel,” she continued, and explained that “I have apologized directly to the person named in my texts.”
And she expressed hope that “salacious headlines will not obscure my deep commitment to fighting anti-Semitism and protecting our Jewish students and faculty.”
She may have such a commitment, but the headlines about her past actions were factual, not “salacious,” and the actions to which they referred have eaten away at the integrity she professed to embrace when she was appointed.
The honorable thing for Ms. Shipman to do is to follow her predecessors out the door. Maybe the next appointee will finally get things right.
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