HOW TRUMP DEFEATED COLUMBIA

 

HOW TRUMP DEFEATED COLUMBIA

The inside story of an unconditional surrender.

By Nick Summers, a writer and editor in New York City. 

5:00 A.M.

 

On the morning of April 1, Katrina Armstrong entered a crowded conference room in Washington, D.C., sat down at a long table, and prepared to be deposed by the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, a panel President Trump had formed to investigate and punish America’s universities. Armstrong had just resigned under pressure as the acting president of Columbia University — the administration’s No. 1 target and the first to yield to its demands. Those in the room understood she was in Washington to take a beating, but what transpired was still painful to behold.

As the deposition got underway, Armstrong seemed unable to answer the government’s increasingly hostile questions, as if the experience of running Columbia had shattered her. “The last weeks, if not the last months, or a year — it’s just incredibly challenging for me to remember anything in specificity,” Armstrong said in one of many evasions. “It has been the most challenging time of my life.”

Her questioner, Sean Keveney, a member of the task force and the acting general counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services, was unmoved. “I appreciate that, ma’am,” he said. “You’ve said that a couple of times.”

Armstrong had led Columbia for eight fraught months, bringing a measure of stability to a campus that had torn itself apart over the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The university’s trustees, at their annual retreat in February, had come close to promoting Armstrong from interim to full president — the 21st in the university’s history. Armstrong hadn’t yet made up her mind whether to accept when Trump’s sudden assault on the school in March made the question moot. Armstrong watched as his administration cut $400 million of Columbia’s research funding and sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents onto campus to arrest student activists. She received a list of government ultimatums full of contempt for the university’s academic mission. She announced that Columbia would comply. And then, when she nearly blew up the deal by privately telling faculty that it wasn’t a capitulation, that in fact there was some wiggle room, she lost her job. On March 28, the same day Armstrong resigned, she learned that Trump’s task force had demanded she appear in Washington without delay.

Armstrong is 59, and in her years running Columbia’s medical center, she had cultivated a bedside manner that was upbeat, kinetic, approachable. Her short time triaging the entire university’s problems had taken a visible toll. “She looked like she was on the verge of collapse,” someone who dealt with her regularly said. To another, “she seemed like a person who desperately needed friends and allies and felt like she was very alone.”

In the deposition room, Armstrong seemed determined, most of all, to avoid perjuring herself. She could not recall when she had become acting president. She struggled to say who is truly in charge of Columbia — the president or the trustees. Pressed by Keveney to admit that Columbia was indifferent to antisemitism, Armstrong described her tenure as a “blur” five times and as “challenging” or “difficult” 11 times and said she didn’t recall at least 28 times.

“I’m just trying to understand,” Keveney said acidly, “how you have such a terrible memory of specific incidents of antisemitism when you’re clearly an intelligent doctor?”

A partial transcript quickly leaked to a conservative outlet and was read by America’s academic elite. Those I spoke with were horrified less by Armstrong’s self-pitying performance than by Columbia’s apparent willingness to sacrifice her. “She definitely was not prepared for this, and honestly, I think that’s Columbia,” the former president of a research university told me. “They threw her under the bus. She had just resigned!” Armstrong was represented during the session by her personal lawyers, who intervened often on her behalf, while two attorneys from Columbia in the room remained silent. Before her ordeal in Washington, Armstrong had planned to return to lead the medical center. Afterward, Columbia issued a terse update to the public: She was taking an indefinite sabbatical.

Columbia’s feebleness this spring has dismayed the many students, faculty, and alumni who wish it would wage a more principled fight against Trump — as Harvard has done by suing his administration in federal court. But even Trump’s allies failed to predict how much of a pushover it has been. “I was surprised by how quickly and how completely the university folded,” Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who helped develop the strategy to crush Columbia, told me.

As recently as October 6, 2023 — the day before Hamas attacked Israel — Columbia seemed a juggernaut. After decades of growth, the endowment was a fat $14 billion and buildings named for a new generation of megadonors were rising across 17 acres of new campus. After a global search, the university had selected a cosmopolitan new president, Minouche Shafik of the London School of Economics, to lead it into the future. But since that golden moment, the turmoil has been almost too much to catalogue. Endless protest and counterprotest. Campus lockdowns. Police raids. A president paraded before Congress. Students dragged before secretive discipline panels. One canceled commencement, two presidential resignations, and countless students wondering if ICE is inside their dorms. The strife is ongoing, and the campus is as miserable as ever. Columbia is a broken place.

I wanted to know why the university had buckled so comprehensively — why, at no point after October 7, it ever seemed to be in control of its campus, message, or strategy. But another way the school has failed is in telling its own story, and it declined to make its leaders available for interviews. Instead, this account is based on conversations with more than 60 people, including those who either are, or have close knowledge of, Columbia’s most influential figures: its presidents, trustees, administrators, and senior faculty. They describe a collapse in three acts. A period of vertiginous success that hid underlying problems. A steady burn through the months after October 7. And a blitz by adversaries in government who understood Columbia’s vulnerability better than anyone.

After another embittered class has its commencement on May 21, Columbia will lurch into a summer of ugly possibilities. Students are still attempting major disruptions on campus, and the school has laid off 180 employees whose pay relied on federal funding. Scientists are hoarding supplies. “Everything is pretty much being held together with Scotch tape,” the director of a research institute at Columbia said. “The only thing that’s saving us from a wholesale exodus is they’re not funding any new grants at Harvard either, but we’re very worried about the flight of our most outstanding people. The Europeans and Chinese are both circling like mad.”

The talent crunch is acute, and not just in the sciences. One star academic at a rival school, who had all but decided to take a position at Columbia this year, changed his mind after Katherine Franke, a professor at the law school, said she had been fired for her advocacy. “I want to be in a place that I know has the faculty’s back when it comes to their ability to speak,” he said.

Faculty are withering in their assessment of the board of trustees, which has ultimate power over the university’s affairs. Courtney Cogburn, a highly regarded associate professor at the School of Social Work, was among a small delegation of faculty invited to address the board in June 2024 — a stilted proceeding in a grand room where participants had to lean forward and activate a microphone to be heard. “The decisions we’ve made over the past year have disregarded what it means to be a university and how universities engage and try to solve complicated problems,” she said. “It felt like so many decisions were being made in panic and fear.”

Jean Howard, a former department chair and vice-provost for diversity initiatives, said that the concessions the trustees have offered to the Trump administration are “antithetical to everything the university stands for.” Another senior member of the faculty said, “There’s no principle. There’s no guiding light. There’s no strategic vision that is guiding the decisions they make. Once you’ve conceived the principle that the government has a right to say anything about the internal governance of an academic department at a private research institution, you’ve lost.”

For many faculty, the single most damaging change the trustees have made involves the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department, or MESAAS, where the subjects range from introductory Wolof to intensive courses on “the Zionist-Palestinian conflict” and postcolonial theory. The Trump administration demanded the unit be put into academic receivership — a formal declaration that it is too dysfunctional to manage its own affairs. Instead, Columbia appointed a new senior vice-provost to oversee the department. Defenders of the trustees see this as proof they have some backbone. Inside MESAAS, however, the arrangement is considered even worse than what Trump asked for. “There’s a very good argument to be made that they took the things that receivership takes away from the department and scaled it up,” a professor there said.

Already, many students understand that the Columbia they’re getting — and paying as much as $93,417 for annually — is less than the Columbia they were promised. The brand is tainted, and in the Ivy League, every bit of reputation slippage matters. “For parents,” said Elizabeth Doe Stone, who runs the consultancy Top Tier Admissions, “Columbia used to feel like a safe prestige play. And now it might be a talking point they’d have to explain at a family dinner.”

Columbia is now led by another temporary president, Claire Shipman, a former TV journalist. The Trump administration seems to like her. One member of the antisemitism task force has said she is “very pleased” with Columbia’s recent actions, and the group praised Shipman’s swift handling of a pro-Palestinian protest at Butler Library, which led to the suspension of more than 65 students. Despite this, many members of the Columbia community have seen hopeful signs that there are some lines Shipman and the trustees won’t cross. “We would reject any agreement that would require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy as an educational institution,” she wrote in a public letter on April 14.

The government has reportedly threatened Columbia with a consent decree that would allow Trump’s people to reach deeply into the university’s operations, from the sort of students it admits to what they are taught. What’s at stake is Columbia as we know it — New York’s most ambitious center of inquiry and knowledge. There is no obviously correct strategy, given the options. Stand up to the federal government and be crushed; surrender and self-destruct. Lose-lose is where Columbia finds itself today. A stated goal of the university’s enemies was to “simply destroy Columbia,” and in some sense they have already succeeded.

The investiture of Shafik as the university’s 20th president, on October 4, 2023, was an occasion for gale-force Columbiana. Deans and provosts processed out of Low Library, the neoclassical masterpiece at the center of campus, and a trustee emerita in special costume bore the Columbia mace, a two-foot scepter decorated with a king’s crown and leaves of acanthus. Shipman was then the co-chair of the board of trustees, and she paused her remarks to acknowledge the multiple protests that were loudly disrupting the ceremony. One involved a labor dispute; another, the school’s failure to protect hundreds of women from a sexual predator Columbia employed for a quarter-century. “One incredible part of Columbia’s reputation, for those of you who are new to campus, is that we welcome all voices at all times, especially voices of dissent,” Shipman said. “This is part of the Columbia tapestry.” When Shafik spoke, she thanked her longtime friend Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, for teaching her “how to lead with clarity and compassion, how to take incoming fire with grace, and how to always do the right thing even when it’s very hard.”

Three days later, Hamas attacked Israel, killing some 1,200 civilians and taking some 250 hostages. It’s possible that nobody could have successfully led the university through what happened next. But Columbia had a host of long-standing, long-neglected problems that primed Shafik for failure.

Even by the cats-in-a-bag standard of modern research universities, Columbia is a cursed place to govern. It’s huge, with 17 schools to manage, and its endowment is the second smallest in the Ivy League on a per-student basis, after Cornell. There’s never enough funding, which means Columbia has an extra-toxic version of a common university problem: resentment between the liberal-arts programs, which are prestigious and lose money, and the cash-cow units that subsidize them.

Then there are the ghosts of Columbia’s uniquely tortured history. After 1968, when antiwar activists took over five buildings, the trustees made a big change to Columbia’s governance structure. They created a senate with a supermajority of faculty and students and gave it the power to oversee discipline and draft university policies. Over the decades, though, many of these delegated powers eroded, replaced by folkways and presidential work-arounds. The result has been that Columbia has shared governance on paper but not really in practice. It was a legitimacy bomb, waiting to go off in a crisis.

In 2002, after decades of financial struggles, the trustees installed Lee Bollinger as president, and he began to make the university bigger and more ambitious in almost every way. He seemed less interested in day-to-day academic management than in pushing Columbia into exciting new fields, like neuroscience, and creating interdisciplinary centers around the world. He developed a new campus in Manhattanville and paid for it with multibillion-dollar capital campaigns. To accomplish this, Bollinger mostly bypassed the senate and his fractious faculties. It earned Bollinger a reputation as the greatest university president of his generation; it came at the cost of professors and deans feeling disenfranchised. An org chart that circulated among deans and the president’s office each year showed a tangle surrounding Bollinger. Dozens of people reported directly to the president, many of them floating off to the side, outside any recognizable hierarchy.

In his two decades leading Columbia, Bollinger outlasted more and more of the trustees, and he was able to shape the group in his image. “Lee basically seizes control,” an alumnus who has interacted with the board over many years said. “If you’re a trustee, you can yell at your chief executive, but your only recourse is to fire him. And Lee basically would say to the trustees, ‘Oh, you want to fire me? Go right ahead. Guess what? Manhattanville is still not done. And anyone whom you hire as a successor is not going to want to spend the first five years of his or her reign fundraising for my legacy.’”

The trustees weren’t oblivious. They knew that Columbia’s economic position was fragile and that success had masked a worrying level of institutional rot. When Bollinger was finally ready to retire in 2023, the board replaced him with Shafik, then the president of the London School of Economics. That school was small and simple compared to Columbia, but Shafik was sophisticated and had a compellingly globalist biography that matched the political moment. An Egyptian-born member of the British peerage, she’d been educated in America and England and held a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford. She would be Columbia’s first female president and its first of color. Her brief was to keep Columbia growing around the world while modernizing its operations in Morningside Heights.

The night before her investiture, Shafik hosted an intimate dinner in the courtyard of the president’s house, a McKim, Mead & White mansion on West 116th Street. In his later years, Bollinger had become notorious for conducting much of his business there and seldom appearing in his office. One attendee recalled a member of Shafik’s family toasting how they had “quite literally pulled back the curtains and let the light in.” From the perspective of Columbia’s senior leaders, there was a plan in place to shore up the school’s foundation. It would just take time.

For a moment, it was possible to think that Shafik was well equipped to lead Columbia through the aftermath of October 7. She had superb knowledge of the conflicts in the Middle East: She had been involved in the Oslo peace process and written books about the economic possibilities of a regional accord. But her perspective was from the Davos-y orbit of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, where debate and respect abound because you’re handing out money. Shafik had no experience of the Israel-Palestine issue as it played at Columbia and on the Upper West Side, with the tabloids and Congress watching. The university is home to both a large population of observant Jewish students and a cohort of professors who are avid supporters of Palestinian statehood. Those two groups were not going to wait for their new president to get up to speed.

What happened in those first few weeks, before Israel’s formal counteroffensive, convinced many in the Jewish community that Columbia was home to irredeemably antisemitic faculty and students. One day after 10/7, the most prominent Palestinian advocate on the faculty, Joseph Massad, a professor in MESAAS, wrote an op-ed for The Electronic Intifada that called the Hamas operation “innovative,” “stunning,” “astonishing,” and “incredible.” On the second day, two student groups called for Columbia to divest from Israel and end its academic activity in Tel Aviv, where the university was planning to open a satellite campus. Soon, the first “From the river to the sea” chants were heard at protests. Students, faculty, and outsiders aligned with Israel argue that the pro-Palestinian activists’ claims to be motivated by concern about genocide are false because they showed their colors in this period, before the full invasion of Gaza.

For Shafik and others in university leadership, managing the torrent of activity was not just difficult but perhaps impossible. Every administrative action boomeranged. On October 12, after a protest and counterprotest on campus, public-safety officials directed demonstrators toward separate exits. But that sent the pro-Palestinian side onto West 115th Street, headed toward the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life. The problem was compounded when Jewish students there were locked inside, which several said made them feel unsafe.

A dynamic of parallel realities took hold. Pro-Palestinian groups felt that Shafik was so exclusively pro-Israel that she wouldn’t even mention their cause in letters that referenced, obliquely, “violence that is affecting so many people.” “We feel deeply hurt by your one-sided University-wide emails that left us feeling excluded from our own university,” students wrote her. The same week, a zealously pro-Israel business-school professor, Shai Davidai, burst on the scene with a viral speech condemning Shafik as a “coward” for not standing up to “pro-terror” forces on campus.

One way to understand this contradiction is ineptness. Columbia was taking action, but many of those actions were inadequate and poorly communicated, and so the people they were intended to reach were either not aware or not impressed, while the other side could point to the moves as proof of support for the enemy. One example involves doxing. A truck circled campus displaying pro-Palestinian students’ names and faces under the heading COLUMBIA’S LEADING ANTISEMITES, and one of its targets wrote to a dean: “I truly cannot even wrap my head around how careless the entire school is about the situation. I have been making calls, sending emails, finding new contacts for help nonstop and am yet to hear anything from Columbia. As an Arab and Muslim student, I know I’m not the priority here.” Within a week, Columbia created a Doxing Resource Group, but students who tried to contact it found their messages weren’t going through. One student waited 15 days for a response.

Shafik held regular listening sessions with students, but many Columbians considered her walled off and unreachable. She seemed isolated, too, at the administrative level. Shafik had not brought a team of loyal staff from her old job, and throughout the never-ending uproar, she was still hiring for core positions. She selected a chief operating officer and provost in January 2024. One source of candid advice was the regular gatherings of an “Ivy plus” presidents group, which one participant described as part strategy session, part group therapy. They met in person once a month at the Penn Club in midtown and every Sunday via Zoom when the crisis ran especially hot.

Early on, Shafik had been lucky to dodge a congressional hearing at which the presidents of Harvard and Penn addressed reports of antisemitism in lawyerly terms and later resigned. But it meant that when the House Committee on Education and the Workforce returned to the issue, it held a hearing focused exclusively on Columbia. Shafik, Shipman, and Shipman’s board co-chair, David Greenwald, went to Washington to testify. On the morning of April 17, 2024, before they arrived on Capitol Hill, they learned that pro-Palestinian students had taken over the university’s South Lawn.

In the 30 hours that ensued, Shafik’s presidency was lost and Columbia plunged into true crisis, never to recover. During the hearing, Shafik struck a far different pose from Harvard’s Claudine Gay. She agreed that antisemitism was a major problem at Columbia and discussed disciplinary actions against specific professors without reservation. If this placated congressional Republicans for a nanosecond, it permanently lost whatever goodwill she had left with the Columbia rank and file. As a member of the faculty later put it to me, “A couple other Ivy presidents went to Congress and lost their job. Shafik went to Congress and lost a university.”

Shafik headed back to New York on the Acela and decided to authorize the New York Police Department to enter campus and break up the encampment. It turned a modest demonstration into an international media spectacle. One professor who spoke with Shafik at her home later on asked why she’d brought in the cops. “She didn’t understand what it meant to call the NYPD,” the professor said. “She was from London. The police in London don’t carry guns.” For her part, Shafik told faculty that anyone who imagined the protests could influence real-world events was delusional: In her World Bank days, when she’d sat in on actual peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, nobody had once mentioned a university.

A second encampment formed spontaneously after the bust-up of the first. Protest leaders refused to meet with Shafik. Representatives from student government rendezvoused with her in a clandestine meeting in a basement, leaving their phones outside so nobody could make a recording, but there was no meaningful progress. Shafik authorized a second police raid to end the students’ takeover of Hamilton Hall and canceled commencement. The year was in ruins. Shafik’s chauffeur tailed her around campus on foot, concerned for her safety.

That spring, Columbia’s board began to show signs of dysfunction. Its 24 members are limited to two six-year terms, and none predated the Bollinger era. It was a group assembled in peacetime that had until recently been dealing with a president who ran the university out of the palm of his hand. Now, feeling like Columbia was spiraling out of control, the trustees became much more assertive.

Several people with knowledge of the board’s evolution described a dynamic in which a subset of members was convinced that Columbia had a dangerous concentration of antisemites and that strong action was needed to bring the campus back to order. That circle’s most prominent member is Victor Mendelson, part of a four-generation Columbia lineage, whose father was also a trustee. The billionaire Mendelsons run HEICO, a Florida-based aerospace company and defense contractor. There’s also Shoshana Shendelman, whose child is a current student, and to a quieter degree Greenwald, a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who spent his career at Fried Frank and Goldman Sachs. A more moderate set includes Mark Gallogly, who co-founded the investment firm Centerbridge Partners and who has given millions to Democratic candidates for office; Kathy Surace-Smith, a lawyer and partial owner of the Seattle Mariners whose husband is the president of Microsoft; Abigail Black Elbaum, who runs a real-estate management firm; and Jonathan Rosand, a professor of neurology at Harvard. Two others were more clearly identified with the liberal-coded position that antisemitism was a concern but one that was being used disingenuously to stifle speech: Wanda Marie Holland Greene, who runs a progressive school for girls in San Francisco, and Li Lu, a leader of the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square who became a billionaire investor.

In April 2024, the New York Post painted Columbia’s board as “ultra-liberal” and “stacked with Democratic apparatchiks and megadonors.” (Mendelson recently visited an undergraduate seminar and told the students that as one of the panel’s few registered Republicans, “I’m the one the White House calls to yell at.”) But that doesn’t capture how the board behaved in private. There was not a set of trustees that argued as vociferously on speech rights or Islamophobia as the Mendelson side did on antisemitism. Bollinger, a noted First Amendment scholar, had stocked the board with people who held expansive views on speech, yet in practice they found it difficult to side with protesters who knowingly violated Columbia’s policies on when and where demonstrations could occur. “It would have been easier for the First Amendment absolutists to defend the students if they had respected the university’s time, place, and manner restrictions,” a trustee told me.

Antisemitism became the prevailing concern. In a minuted meeting, with colleagues who were whispering to right-wing publications and Republicans in Washington, it was difficult for trustees to take the position that antisemitism was a small or medium-size problem — even if they honestly saw it that way. Greene and Li quietly rotated off the board last summer, further tilting the balance. “The board lost two of its strong oppositional voices when they left,” a person who interacts with the group said. During one session, the trustees had a preliminary discussion about granting arrest power to campus security officers. Within hours, it was in The Wall Street Journal — a leak that some interpreted as an effort to lock in that outcome.

Some trustees became obsessively focused on discipline and pushed Shafik to discuss individual students’ files in detail. If that was deeply inappropriate, it was also true that discipline was where Columbia was opening itself up to attack. Students’ cases were progressing slowly and uncertainly. The rules codified after 1968 established two tracks for students accused of transgressions: Dean’s Discipline, for issues like cheating on exams, and the University Judicial Board, for violations related to protest. The senate controlled who was appointed to the latter. But big demonstrations happened only every so often, and the group was convened haphazardly. Cases sometimes followed both tracks in parallel; other times, outside arbiters were called in. Administrators looked down on the Judicial Board because they were entitled to just one of its five seats, with the others going to presumably softhearted students and faculty. All this meant that after the October 7 attacks, Shafik routed discipline cases through a relatively new office that she controlled, the Center for Student Success and Intervention. The senate, appalled by Shafik’s testimony before Congress and the police raids, roused itself and demanded the cases be run through its group. In July 2024, Shafik and the trustees conceded the point, and the majority of cases related to the takeover of Hamilton Hall were transferred to the Judicial Board.

Months passed. The delays signaled to Columbia’s gathering adversaries that of all American universities, this was the one least able to get its house in order. “There’s some deep-rooted structural problems,” said Ester Fuchs, a professor who co-chairs an internal group Columbia formed to document antisemitism and recommend reforms. “Everything was broken: the whole freaking administrative infrastructure of the university to deal with protest, the security, the disciplinary process. Why did it take us so long to get that discipline done? Because it was broken. There was nothing there.”

Shafik quit in August after the shortest presidential tenure in more than 200 years. “How weak, how pathetic are these people?” Donald Trump asked the next day at a press conference at one of his golf clubs. He’d been making regular mention of campus unrest during his campaign, often singling out Columbia. Now, for anyone who cared to pay attention, he laid out precisely what he would do if reelected: deport “the foreign jihad sympathizers” and use the issue of antisemitism to cut “every single last penny of federal support.”

 

Katrina Armstrong loves a medical metaphor. When the trustees hurriedly tapped her to replace Shafik as acting president, she’d been running Columbia’s vast Irving Medical Center for two years, and she started to reassure people that the school was now in the ER or ICU and efforts were being made to stop the bleeding. She positioned herself as the anti-Shafik, ultracommunicative and accessible to all. Matthew Connelly, a history professor and vice-dean — “the lowliest administrative role you can have” — told me that Armstrong would reply to his emails immediately: “I’ve never had that experience with any other principal at Columbia.” Armstrong had a politician’s instinct for telling different constituencies what they wanted to hear. She helped freshmen move into their dorms, had dinner at the Chabad brownstone, and gave an interview to the Columbia Daily Spectator apologizing to students who felt “hurt” by the police raids.

Peter Bearman, a sociology professor who had helped start a vote of no confidence in Shafik, was surprised when Armstrong reached out to him. “I thought, Oh, she’s smart,” he recalled. The two developed a working relationship. Bearman complained that the color-coded system Columbia used to signal whether campus was open or closed made the place feel like a TSA checkpoint. As a hospitalist, Armstrong appreciated such heuristics, but she took the note and made a change. Bearman said, “She also pointed out that the security guards were unpleasant, kind of fascistic, and that she was going to make it a rule that they said ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thank you.’ And you know what? They did.” On another occasion, Armstrong called Bearman, who is Jewish, into her office and asked him to explain to her the divide within Jewish faculty — why some felt the school had an unforgivable tolerance for antisemites while others considered the issue overblown, a smoke screen for human-rights abuses in Gaza. At the medical campus Armstrong had run, 50 blocks north of Low Library, Israel-Palestine just hadn’t been an issue her doctors and scientists bothered her with.

While Armstrong was trying to make peace, some student activists were cultivating a more radical style. In October, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of pro-Palestinian groups that had helped organize the South Lawn encampments, announced that it was formally endorsing armed resistance. Back in the spring, in a gesture of moderation, CUAD had distanced itself from one of the saga’s most objectionable characters, a student who had said “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists” during his disciplinary hearing. Now, CUAD reversed that position and apologized to the student, writing that “where you’ve exhausted all peaceful means of resolution, violence is the only path forward.” (CUAD took credit for organizing the May 7 disruption at Butler Library.) A protest on the first anniversary of the October 7 attack brought hundreds of pro-Palestinian students together on campus, some chanting things like “There is only one solution: intifada revolution.”

A Republican blueprint for assailing higher education, with Columbia as its primary target, was coming together. In his first term, Trump had signed an executive order that expanded Title VI protections to victims of antisemitism. Biden rescinded many of Trump’s orders, but he let this one stand. At the end of October 2024, Republican staffers in the House released a 325-page report, “Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed,” which relied on more than 40,000 pages of internal Columbia documents. The report is heavy-handed, but for those inclined to believe, it substantiates the allegation that Columbia is a breeding ground for antisemitism. And if there’s antisemitism, the government can now drive a school into bankruptcy.

How, exactly? A few weeks after Trump was elected to a second term, a relatively unknown fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Max Eden, published an essay titled “A Comprehensive Guide to Overhauling Higher Education.” It focused on Columbia. Eden laid out specific policy ideas for the new administration to implement, ranging from an excise tax on endowments to revoking student visas to capping indirect costs on research grants. (He also called for Bollinger to be imprisoned for his role in a prior controversy involving the U.S. News & World Report college rankings: “Perhaps the college presidents could learn a valuable lesson from the sight of him in an orange jumpsuit.”)

At Columbia, much of the leadership was in denial that an asteroid was heading their way. A group of alumni and faculty had recently formed the Stand Columbia Society, which had excellent back channels to administrators. The group worked up a detailed analysis of Columbia’s exposure to a hostile administration — $250 million in the short term, $3.5 billion in a worst-case scenario — and circulated it as a warning. According to Stand Columbia, senior administrators responded that the math was “cute” but far-fetched.

The false sense of security may have been encouraged by the common view that Armstrong’s tenure was going well. Most people who interacted with her at the time got the impression she was campaigning to get the presidency on a formal basis. There was, however, a nine-figure hitch. Amid an otherwise bleak year for fundraising, Columbia’s single largest benefactors, Roy and Diana Vagelos, had made a $400 million gift to the medical school. They were enthusiastic fans of Armstrong and made the donation contingent on her returning to the medical complex. But Roy Vagelos, the former chairman of Merck, was 95, and that could probably be sorted out. Columbia’s trustees discussed the matter and came close to making Armstrong an offer.

Such plans were obliterated when Trump began his assault. On the right, there was a consensus that among elite universities, Columbia was the weakest link. “Columbia is just the least defensible,” Rufo said. “I mean, the conduct at Columbia, the ideologies from Columbia, the response by Columbia were the least defensible. They showed the maximum weakness. And so I think that’s why the president selected them first.”

Trump’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism moved rapidly, from a warning shot about cutting $50 million in funds on March 3 to canceling $400 million on March 7. Federal agents began knocking on students’ doors and waiting in the lobbies of Columbia buildings. Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian national and Fulbright scholar, fled to Canada, and Yunseo Chung, a junior who has lived in the U.S. since she was 7, went into hiding. ICE agents arrested Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent spokesperson for the lawn encampments, and flew him to a prison in Louisiana to await deportation proceedings. (Another student, Mohsen Mahdawi, was arrested in April; he has since been released.) On March 13, Trump’s task force delivered what faculty refer to as “the extortion letter” or “the ransom note,” a list of nine demands that had to be met before the government would consider reinstating the money, with a one-week deadline.

Many on campus spent that week hoping for a lionhearted response. Bollinger gave interviews to the New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education warning that Columbia faced an “existential threat” and that “we’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover.” A group of law professors wrote a public letter about the legal flimsiness of using Title VI to unilaterally cut grants, especially in areas of Columbia’s operations far from any alleged antisemitism.

But the idea of a defiant legal response was a fantasy. Columbia’s board was already on the same wavelength as the Trump administration. On several of the task force’s demands — including banning masks, restricting protests, stripping disciplinary powers from the senate, and allowing campus police to arrest demonstrators — the group was ready to concede immediately. On March 21, it sent a letter to the government essentially surrendering. Perhaps reflecting an understanding that the letter would not go over well with the Columbia community, nobody signed it. Jack Halberstam, a professor of gender studies and English, was among the faculty aghast at the decision. “It’s more than capitulation,” Halberstam told me a few hours after the letter was released. “It’s anticipating even more demands that might be made and fulfilling them in advance.” The Trump administration’s initial letter hadn’t mentioned “viewpoint diversity,” code words that generally mean hiring more conservatives as professors, but Columbia pledged that searches for new faculty had already begun.

Armstrong’s fall in these weeks was astonishingly fast. There were rumors that she and other members of the administration would be arrested for harboring immigrants. At one point, John Kluge, whose late father had endowed a program for minority scholars at Columbia with what was then the largest gift in Ivy League history, emailed Armstrong for reassurance that there was a strategy for defending it. Armstrong did not write back for four weeks. Khalil’s wife, who gave birth to their first child while he was incarcerated, has never received a note or offer of assistance from Columbia. The members of the university’s internal antisemitism review, concerned that their work could have lent legitimacy to Trump’s attack, took it upon themselves to write a statement. Administrators never issued it.

Faculty who interacted with Armstrong in this period say she was genuinely shocked that the world believed Columbia had caved. It made a certain sense, from the point of view of someone simply trying to survive minute by minute in a crisis: There had been a gun pointed at Columbia’s head, and to get it lowered, all she had to do was agree to some things her trustees already wanted.

Persuaded that the university’s communications shop was not up to the task, Armstrong enlisted a professor to act as her ghostwriter. “Katrina is soliciting the help of faculty to write emails that are going out under her name because she does not feel like she’s getting the right kind of perspective and advice and language from the people that she’s supposed to rely on,” the professor said. “Every single person in a senior leadership position tells me that they know our communications is terrible.” (Columbia’s chief spokesperson, Franz Paasche, resigned in April after just eight months on the job.)

In the end, it was another bit of amateur hour that sank Armstrong. At one of the private faculty meetings where she tried to spin the deal with Trump as a win, participants warned that their videoconferencing software was generating a transcript. “The person who’d set up the meeting said, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to stop that. Can anybody — is there any tech? Can we get any tech?’ And no tech appeared,” recalled one of the professors present. “They allowed a confidential meeting with the faculty to go on, knowing that there was a transcription being made. And then of course it was leaked. I mean, it was such a shambolic event. She wasn’t in control. Isn’t that just an indication of complete discombobulation in our leadership?”

Members of the board of trustees give different accounts of who broke up with whom. Some maintain that Armstrong was forced out; others say there was mutual agreement she could not remain. Either way, she was gone. Only a week earlier, the former research-university president had joked to me that Armstrong’s job was secure: “You can’t fire an interim. You’re really not going to be able to hire a president after you do that.” With few good options, the trustees replaced Armstrong with one of their own. Close observers of Columbia’s demons noted that Armstrong, a creature of the profitable medical division, had been knifed by someone from the underfunded liberal arts.

In her early days on the job, Claire Shipman, an acting president replacing an interim president replacing a failed president, is beating expectations. At 62, a former correspondent for NBC and ABC News, she is a confident, mediagenic speaker, and as a board member since 2013, she knows the institution. She met privately with 300 restive faculty in mid-April, heard them out, and didn’t commit any gaffes worth leaking to the press. She is taking actions that are symbolic — mentioning Khalil and Mahdawi’s names for the first time — and structural. Shipman announced reviews of Columbia’s communications office and financial model and started a website with resources for international students fearful of deportation. Most significantly, Shipman is calling for the senate itself to be reconsidered. In a letter emphasizing that “I am deeply committed to shared governance,” Shipman opened the door to doing away with major elements of it.

What Columbia should do with its governance structure is a wide-open question. The Stand Columbia Society has called for “fundamental reform” and predicted “the end of the University Senate as we know it.” It would likely ignite yet another round of protest on campus if the trustees were to formally reduce the power that faculty and students wield through the senate. And yet the current system, conceived in crisis half a century ago, is clearly not working.

In the meantime, the Columbia community is waiting to see whether Shipman can reverse some of the university’s reputational loss. Harvard is basking in the glory of fighting Trump in court, and Princeton’s president, Chris Eisgruber, gave a humiliating interview to the Times offering his fellow Ivy notes on character. “I understand why Columbia might feel that they had to make concessions under the circumstances,” he said. “You have careers at stake. You have jobs at stake. You have the ability to educate your students at stake. And you may say, ‘Look, I wish I could take a stand on principle, but given what’s at stake, I can’t.’ But then you need to say that.” Cogburn, the social-work professor, suggested that the people running the school are too compromised to be credible: “I don’t know what their intentions are, whether they actually want to dismantle the senate or whether they earnestly want to consider the best way to govern, but they are consistently underestimating how much they’ve damaged their reputations and trust.”

The trustees have promised that a new president will be installed by January 1, 2026. That’s a fast timeline, and it might indicate the person will come from within Columbia. Several people I spoke with seemed to grimace when I asked them to suggest candidates. “I am having trouble imagining the Venn diagram of somebody who would be good and who would want it,” said Page Fortna, a political-science professor. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I mean, I can think of some people who would be great, but they’re friends of mine. And so for their sake — no!” She continued, “For all of the armchair criticism that we can all do of Shafik and Armstrong and now Shipman, I have huge empathy for all of these women. Some of what has made this hard is the attacks on them as women. I kind of feel like the next president needs to be a white guy because I don’t want to see any more women’s careers get derailed by this.”

On a Wednesday evening in April, for the first time, two trustees met publicly with students to hear their concerns about the senate — and everything else that had gone wrong over the past two years. The event was held in the auditorium of the Lee C. Bollinger Forum, a 56,000-square-foot building on West 125th Street designed by Renzo Piano’s firm. It didn’t begin well. There was confusion about the start time, and when a moderator said at 6:40 p.m. that the trustees had to leave at seven, there were angry calls of “Is that a joke?!” One trustee, Keith Goggin, a graduate of the journalism school who went to work on Wall Street, remained and gamely took students’ abuse for an hour. “Please let me get through this so you all understand it and then you can yell at me,” he said. The longest applause of the night came when a student noted that while Columbia had formed its own task force on antisemitism, it had not created one to deal with “the demonization of Palestinians.”

Early on, a student asked, “Why are you not taking action against the government — ” leading to several overlapping calls of “Like Harvard!” “Harvard!” “Harvard!” and “We want you to fight!” Goggin pointed out that Harvard had received more invasive demands from Trump than Columbia had. “If we can do something that we were going to do anyway without having to litigate, and restore the things that we care about here, that is in our opinion — or in my opinion — our best path,” he said. “That is where we are today. It doesn’t mean we’ll be there tomorrow.”

After an hour, Goggin gathered his things. “I think we’ve had a good conversation. You want to yell at me, but I really do appreciate all of you,” he said. Someone in the audience shouted, “Is our money going to kill kids in Gaza or not?” Goggin left to boos. In less than a minute, the students and faculty turned the town hall into an organizing session, and someone was at the microphone calling for a general strike.