Columbia University changed its president on Friday evening, one week after the university bowed to a series of demands from the Trump administration, which had moved to withhold $400 million in essential federal funding.
The abrupt exit of Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, made way for the university’s third leader since August: Claire Shipman, the co-chair of the university’s board of trustees.
The university announced Dr. Armstrong’s departure and Ms. Shipman’s appointment in an email to the campus community Friday night. The letter thanked Dr. Armstrong for her efforts during “a time of great uncertainty for the university” and said that Ms. Shipman has “a clear understanding of the serious challenges facing our community.”
Ms. Shipman, a journalist with two degrees from Columbia, was named acting president and assumed the top job at one of the nation’s pre-eminent universities at an extraordinarily charged moment in American higher education.
The federal government is threatening to end the flow of billions of dollars to universities across the country, many of which are facing inquiries from agencies that range from the Justice Department to the Department of Health and Human Services.
But the Trump administration’s punitive approach to universities is playing out most acutely at Columbia. The university, a hub of last spring’s campus protest movement against the war in Gaza, has spent months confronting accusations that it condoned antisemitic behavior, permitted lawlessness to dominate, and stifled academic and political speech.
The government’s move this month to cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in support to Columbia — which draws roughly a fifth of its operating revenues from Washington — represented a dire threat to the university. The government told Columbia it would consider restarting those grants and contracts only if the university agreed to a list of demands.
Last week, it fell to Dr. Armstrong to announce that Columbia had done so.
Among other steps, Columbia said it would have 36 campus safety officers with arrest powers, a shift with enormous resonance at a university that has a long history of campus activism and fraught ties with law enforcement. The university also said it would adopt a formal definition of antisemitism, review its admissions policies and, in a turn that was especially alarming to professors who cherish academic freedom, impose new oversight of the university’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department.
Although university officials said they had already been considering some of the government’s requests, Columbia’s acquiescence drew significant condemnation on the campus and beyond. Other higher education leaders watched nervously, fearing that the university’s decision, without mounting a court challenge that many felt stood a reasonable chance of success, would provoke the government to target other universities.
Two days before Columbia announced its decision, the government said it would withhold about $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania because the school allowed a transgender woman to be a member of its women’s swim team in 2022.
The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that Dr. Armstrong was leaving her position.
Dr. Armstrong’s departure from the presidency was about as abrupt as her ascension to it last summer. Then, not long before classes began, Nemat Shafik resigned as president, ending a tenure that had led to global criticism of Columbia.
“Dr. Armstrong accepted the role of interim president at a time of great uncertainty for the university and worked tirelessly to promote the interests of our community,” David J. Greenwald, the chair of the board of trustees, said in a statement on Friday. The university said that Dr. Armstrong would remain at Columbia as the head of the university’s medical center.
Before Friday’s announcement, the Trump administration had signaled that it was content with Dr. Armstrong.
“She knew that this was her responsibility to make sure that children on her campus were safe,” the education secretary, Linda McMahon, told CNN last weekend. “She wanted to make sure there was no discrimination of any kind. She wanted to address any systemic issues that were identified relative to the antisemitism on campus. And they have worked very hard in a very short period of time.”
Ms. McMahon said then that Columbia was “on the right track so that we can move forward,” but she stopped short of saying that the government would revive its varied funding agreements with Columbia.
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