Even for those who anticipated an extensive backlash among Israel’s detractors after the October 7 attack, the events at Columbia University have proved shocking.
Anti-Israel protests at the institution demonstrators are calling the “People’s University of Palestine” have grown astonishingly violent and threatening towards Jews. Before Passover came in early this week, Elie Buechler, a campus rabbi, advised Jewish students to leave and stay at home since, in his estimation, the university was no longer safe for them.
On Monday, anti-Israel protesters from within and outside the university set up an encampment on the institution’s flagship Morningside Heights main lawn. The protests became so insistently disruptive that Columbia essentially ceased to function, announcing it would offer all classes online to “deescalate the rancour”.
Chants emanating from the encampment all week have included: “We are Hamas” and “We don’t want no Zionists here”, while “Go back to Poland” was screamed at Jewish students.
One woman clad in a keffiyah scarf – the symbol of solidarity with Palestinians – was filmed holding a sign that read ‘al-Qassam’s next targets’ – with an arrow pointing at the Jewish counter protestors (the al-Qassam brigades are the military wing of Hamas). On marches, some students had their hands raised in what some have compared to a Nazi salute. “You’re f—— baby killers, that’s what you are,” yelled a keffiyah-sporting student at a Jewish alumnus on the other side of the campus gate.
This nastiest and most tumultuous time in Columbia’s history has been presided over by a British peer, the Egyptian-born economist Baroness Shafik, who became president of the university in July 2023. Shafik is a dual US-UK citizen, born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1962 to a wealthy Egyptian landowner who moved to the southern United States in the mid-1960s after the Egyptian state seized his land.
After graduating from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a degree in economics and politics, Shafik began her route to the very top of the international elite, first with a masters in economics from the London School of Economics (LSE), and then a PhD in Oxford. At Oxford, she began working for the World Bank of which she eventually became its youngest-ever vice president.
She then went to the Department for International Development (DFiD) on secondment, becoming its permanent secretary in 2008, and overseeing 2,400 staff and a budget of £38 billion. The next stop was the International Monetary Fund (IMF) where she was in charge of its vast operations in Europe and the Middle East. In 2014, Shafik became deputy governor of the Bank of England, leaving in 2017 to become president of LSE – where she presided over a significant increase in the number of academics on casual contracts.
Scrutiny of Shafik has intensified in the last few weeks as the situation at Columbia has become uglier. While she was praised by critics of the protest when police were called in on April 18 to clear an initial encampment, the move drew ire from those on the other side of the argument, and the situation has since descended into chaos once again.
Last week, all 10 of New York’s Republican members of Congress called for Shafik, 61, to resign insisting that “while the rot is systemic, the responsibility rests squarely on your shoulders.”
For those seeking an explanation of how the chaos could unfold on her watch, Shafik’s performance at the April 17 congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism seemed illuminating.
On one hand, she appeared to be sincere in grappling with the situation. “We have a responsibility to listen and to respond to our Jewish community,” she said in her statement. “Anti-Semitism is antithetical to Columbia’s mission, goals, values, and teachings. It has no place on our campus, and I am committed to doing everything that I can to confront it directly.”
But she appeared to be uncertain and hesitant about key points, such as what constitutes rabid anti-Semitism and thus what is and is not permissible on her campus.
In one exchange, she was asked by Lisa McClain, a congresswoman from Michigan: “Are mobs shouting from the ‘River to the Sea Palestine, will be free’ or ‘Long live the intifada [sic]’ … anti-Semitic comments?” Her reply appeared weak, if plausibly well-meaning: “When I hear those terms, I find them very upsetting.”
“That’s a great answer to a question I didn’t ask, so let me repeat the question,” McClain went on, to which a beleaguered Shafik replied: “I hear them as such. Some people don’t.”
She was also questioned about the continued tenure of Joseph Massad, a Jordanian professor of Middle Eastern Studies who wrote an article on October 8 describing the actions of Hamas terrorists a day earlier as “remarkable” and “incredible”. Shafik said he was under investigation for making “discriminatory remarks” and had been removed from a leadership role at the university – a post that Massad, who denies any wrongdoing, later said was still due to end at the end of the current term. “I have not been informed or contacted by anyone from the university to inform me of this alleged investigation,” Massad added. He says his remarks about October 7 were simply “descriptive”.
Shafik is being seen by Republicans as presiding over a prime example of a leftist toxicity viewed as poisoning America.
“It is crystal clear that Columbia University – previously a beacon of academic excellence founded by Alexander Hamilton – needs new leadership,” Republican representative Elise Stefanik, widely praised for her clear-cut questions to Shafik and other Ivy League presidents during these congressional hearings, said in a statement.
On Monday, New York’s Republican Congressional delegation wrote a letter to Shafik insisting the current situation “is a direct product of your policies and misguided decisions”.
Regardless of how we interpret her personal politics or intentions, she is being seen by her critics as ineffectual in an hour requiring acute leadership and action.
She set a deadline of Wednesday night for the self-titled “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” to disband – a decree that appeared to be roundly ignored by protesters.
What has Shafik proposed to do? Monday’s statement announcing the start of virtual classes said that: “During the coming days, a working group of deans, university administrators and faculty members will try to bring this crisis to a resolution.”
“That includes continuing discussions with the student protestors and identifying actions we can take as a community to enable us to peacefully complete the term and return to respectful engagement with each other.”
But it’s not entirely clear what any of that actually means in practice. Shafik will undoubtedly consider herself between a rock and a hard place.
In the statement she described herself as “deeply saddened by what is happening on our campus” and said “we have announced additional actions we are taking to address security concerns.”
She added: “The decibel of our disagreements has only increased in recent days. These tensions have been exploited and amplified by individuals who are not affiliated with Columbia who have come to campus to pursue their own agendas. We need a reset.”
She warned that while “many are experiencing deep moral distress … we cannot have one group dictate terms and attempt to disrupt important milestones like graduation to advance their point of view.”
But the police intervention on April 18, as well as her subsequent comments about the protests, prompted fury among those on the other side of the argument who insist that the demonstrations must be allowed in the name of free speech.
Now she is facing the prospect of a motion of censure accusing her of violating “the fundamental requirements of academic freedom” and staging an “unprecedented assault on student rights”.
Some clues to the current mess may lie in Shafik’s professional past in Britain, where she has traded on shying away from anything too strident either in words or actions. “Problems often arise when experts try to be politicians or when politicians try to be experts,” she said in a speech at the Oxford Union in 2017.
“If experts cross that line, they undermine the credibility of their expertise and their accountability to their professional standards. And if politicians cross that line, they risk misleading the public who elected them to look out for their interests.”
As the newly-appointed deputy governor of the Bank in 2014, she was asked if she was more hawk or dove on interest rate rises, and replied that she was an “owl”, explaining: “I asked my children and they said ‘Mummy, you should say you’re an owl’. Look at the data, try to be wise.”
Not everyone saw her as wise. Shafik was known in Bank circles for being studiedly inoffensive, according to Mark Littlewood, former head of the Institute of Economic Affairs, which, suggests Littlewood, translates to the state of perpetual moral fuzziness that her detractors now see in her leadership at Columbia.
“Her time at the Bank was neither especially distinguished nor particularly controversial,” Littlewood tells The Telegraph.
“She appears both to be a reflection and projection of contemporary mainstream thinking in terms of both economics and culture.
“That may have made her successful in her career, but when it clashes with reality on the ground – which it increasingly does – the consequences are predictable and awful.”
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