Our colleague Aaron Sibarium reported Tuesday on a letter from Reps. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) and Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), chairmen of the House Education and Workforce Committee and House Republican Leadership respectively, to Columbia University president Claire Shipman.
The letter cites text messages from Shipman to several colleagues at Columbia about the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic protests that have roiled the Ivy League school for the past two years.
After two Columbia University presidents bit the dust in the space of eight months, Shipman, a former ABC and NBC news reporter, was elevated to the post in an interim capacity because of her alleged political instincts and ability to navigate Washington. She was—until recently—married to former Obama press secretary Jay Carney.
And yet, in these freshly revealed text messages, we see Shipman with all the instincts of a dodo bird.
She celebrates a New York Times piece about former Columbia University president Minouche Shafik’s sagacity in avoiding the infamous hearing that led to regime change at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, describing it as “pretty amazing given the moment.” Shafik, of course, did not avoid offering her testimony, and resigned months after Shipman prematurely spiked the football in the endzone. In fact, the Washington Free Beacon can report that this same New York Times article all but put a bullseye on Shafik. Oops!
But wait. Shipman had more wisdom to offer. Having avoided those pesky lawmakers, this was the time—December 2023, two months after the Oct. 7 attacks—to “unsuspend the [student] groups before the semester starts” and to “do some things with Rashid. Events.”
The “groups” to which Shipman referred were the Columbia chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. They were suspended in November 2023 after they “repeatedly violated University policies related to holding campus events,” the school said at the time, and they would go on, in the spring of 2024, to lead the student encampment and occupation of a university building.
Rashid, of course, is Rashid Khalidi, the former Palestine Liberation Organization flack and longtime Edward Said professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia who sagely predicted, a week after Oct. 7, that too much American support for Israel would trigger “a much wider regional conflagration.” Yes, more events with this man!
We wonder how eager the Trump administration will be to sign a deal with the former ABC News correspondent and Team Obama WAG whose first response to Oct. 7 and the campus crisis it spawned was to push an outspoken Jew off the Columbia board and fill the spot with an Arab—and any Arab would do. Columbia trustees might wonder whether they’d get a better deal under new leadership.
