Free Republic

Seven months after taking office as president of Columbia University, Katherine Armstrong announced her resignation. Armstrong took on the role of interim president of Columbia University last August, after the previous president, Minouche Shafik, resigned following allegations of her mishandling of anti-Semitism on campus. The resignation of the interim president comes just days after Armstrong announced that she decided to adopt the Trump administration's demands regarding the fight against anti-Semitism at Columbia University. The American government revoked grants totaling $400 million from the university after Columbia's administration failed to protect Jewish students who suffered from violence, intimidation, and discrimination since...

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...

Ivy League universities, particularly Harvard and Columbia, have faced a crisis since October 2023, when both institutions revealed themselves as places where blatant anti-Semitism openly flourishes. Amid the anti-Semitic uprisings on campus, the presidents of both schools also faced academic plagiarism charges. Alumni and donors, who expected more from the schools’ leaders and did not share the apparent tolerance for Jew-hatred, have stopped contributing financially. As reputational and financial damage mounted, Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned in disgrace last January, and Columbia President Minouche Shafik followed in August. But with those poison Ivies still trying to find a way to...

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is being slammed as a traitor following damning claims he instructed administrators at Columbia University to dismiss any criticism of the school’s handling of blatant violence and antisemitism on campus in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel. The GOP-lead House Education and Workforce Committee in a 325-page report contended the New York Democrat advised then-university president Minouche Shafik that the school would be spared any scrutiny by Democrats, explaining the elite university’s “political problems are really only among Republicans.”His staff then encouraged Columbia administrators that the “best strategy is to keep...

Columbia University President Dr. Minouche Shafik resigns following months of criticism for her handling of campus antisemitism.

Columbia University President Minouche Shafik has resigned, according to the Washington Free Beacon. In a letter to the Columbia community, Shafik wrote that her tenure has been “a period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.” "This period has taken a considerable toll on my family, as it has for others in our community,” she added. In recent months, Shafik has come under fire for her handling of anti-Semitism on campus following Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israel that began last October. “I have tried to navigate a path that upholds academic principles and...

Some wealthy Jews would like to influence American public opinion. They also appeal to their elected representatives. That is the "news" in a Washington Post "exclusive" that ran Thursday, and the paper makes clear that there is something very untoward about it. The piece, by reporters Hannah Natanson and Emmanuel Felton, is based on an inside look into an online chat that included New York City mayor Eric Adams and several wealthy New York businessmen. In that chat, several people pressed Adams to send the New York Police Department to clear out Columbia University’s dangerous, disgraceful, and violent pro-Hamas encampment,...

Nearly two weeks ago, Columbia University president Minouche Shafik assured members of Congress that an anti-Semitic professor had been terminated. That professor, Mohamed Abdou, was "grading his students' papers" before the end of the semester and would "never teach at Columbia again," Shafik said. Instead, Abdou—a self-described "Muslim anarchist" who teaches a class on "Decolonial-Queerness & Abolition"—has been a regular presence in the unsanctioned "Gaza Solidarity" tent encampment that has plagued Columbia since student protesters constructed it on the day of Shafik's testimony. The Washington Free Beacon has spotted him daily—talking to student leaders, lounging in the sun, and participating...

I have spent the last week walking throughout the area of Columbia University. What I have seen feels like a nightmare of unreality. Only someone who is functionally brain dead or a consummate liar can deny what is blazingly obvious: At the center of the “occupation” and “protest” is compulsively vicious Jew-baiting, Jew-hatred, anti-Americanism and hysterical insistence on Israel’s obliteration. I could literally not walk five paces without seeing or hearing the most horrendous verbal and, in many instances, physical assaults on Jews, Judaism and Israel. In particular, the hitherto inconceivable sentence “We Are Hamas!” was shouted so often, it...

Aidan Parisi pledged to 'resist' and called for 'intifada' after Columbia ordered him to vacate his on-campus apartment.. For more than two weeks, Columbia University graduate student Aidan Parisi has defied the university’s suspension, refusing to vacate his dorm room on the school's Manhattan campus. The school announced Parisi’s suspension on April 4 following his participation in a pro-Hamas event. And while Columbia leaders have pledged to enforce the suspension, they have yet to follow through. In the meantime, Parisi has contributed to the mayhem that has engulfed the campus over the past several days, serving as a leader of...

As Columbia University President Dr. Nemat "Minouche" Shafik faces scrutiny from ongoing campus protests over Israel’s war with Hamas, a more than 20-year-old video is getting renewed attention for remarks on the causes of terrorism. The video, filmed just two months after 9/11, shows Shafik – who was then vice president at the World Bank – discussing the economic roots of terrorism with UC Berkeley’s Harry Kreisler on the program, "Conversations with History." Shafik argued that although terrorism has sprung up in "fairly rich and open societies," its most fertile ground is in countries beset by "economic stagnation and political...