In May 2024, a pro-Palestinian encampment formed on a campus lawn at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When the students refused to leave, Jennifer Mnookin, who was then the chancellor of the flagship state university, called in the police to remove their tents. Thirty-four people were arrested.
But after the students set up their tents again, Dr. Mnookin pivoted. She decided “there were limits to the extent of policing that I was prepared to authorize,” she said, and spent the next nine days negotiating with the students.
The resulting agreement ended the encampment peacefully, in exchange for little more than a chance for the students to present their case for divestment from Israel to university decision makers. The student activists were later critical of the deal, but the crisis was averted.
Her confidence in handling that potential tinderbox, and others like it, impressed the trustees of Columbia University, who appointed Dr. Mnookin to be the 21st president, a role she starts on Wednesday. It is also emblematic of the deliberative leadership style she will seek to pursue at Columbia, she said in a wide-ranging interview last week.
“I am a principled pragmatist,” she said, “and I care about both parts of that sentence.”
Dr. Mnookin, 58, is arriving from the chancellorship of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with the belief that the tools of dialogue and negotiation — tools she honed as a lifelong academic and lawyer — will be integral to succeeding in her new role.
Columbia is emerging from an extraordinarily difficult few years. Its campus was shut down in May 2024 by its own pro-Palestinian encampment crisis, which resulted in more than 200 arrests. It is still navigating the highly divisive deal it struck with the Trump administration, in which it agreed to tighten protest rules and pay $200 million in exchange for the restoration of hundreds of millions in federal research funding.
Dr. Mnookin will be the fifth president to lead Columbia in four years, and there is broad hope she can bring stability.
She is arriving without her own executive team — only her husband, the political theorist Joshua Foa Dienstag, is moving to New York with her — as she ascends to the top job at the notoriously complex 272-year-old institution of about 36,000 students and thousands of faculty members, divided among 17 schools and colleges.
But she knows many people at Columbia from decades in academia, and wants to talk to many more “to hear their thoughts about what’s working at Columbia, where there’s opportunity, what they most hope for, what they’re most worried about,” she said.
There are three areas she said she expects to focus on initially: grappling with artificial intelligence, both its impact on campus and the skills students need to navigate it; developing ways to help teach students how to better handle political differences; and improving the undergraduate experience.
“But those could change,” she added.
Her caveat is typical of the approach that Dr. Mnookin tends to take, former colleagues said.
“She doesn’t just jump at the immediate thing and go off,” said Charles Lee Isbell Jr., the chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who served as provost under Dr. Mnookin in Madison. “She really wants to understand the problem and figure out what we’re going to do. And then once she decides what we’re doing, we’re doing it.”
One key challenge for Dr. Mnookin will be how she handles the locked Columbia gates, among the most visible reminders of the wave of student protests that followed the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. For almost all of Columbia’s history, the public had access to the main campus. Now, students and approved visitors must line up for ID checks.
Dr. Mnookin, calling the issue complex, said that it will be a priority “to bring people together to think about a path forward” to opening the gates. She wants to hear expert and other voices before determining how to make Columbia “more open to the world around it and also protect the safety and security of our students and also our mission.”
It could sound like talk about talk, but underneath that, she said, is a level of pragmatism. A plan is more likely to succeed, she said, if administrators, faculty members, staff and students first develop a consensus about how to handle what could happen if the gates are opened.
Dr. Mnookin, whose father, Robert Mnookin, served as the chair of the program on negotiation at Harvard Law School, had more success in negotiating with her previous campus’s pro-Palestinian students than her counterpart did at Columbia. When negotiations to end an encampment at Columbia failed in 2024, the demonstrators took over a building. Police officers stormed the campus, which went into lockdown. Dr. Nemat Shafik, then the Columbia president, resigned later that year.
While Dr. Mnookin believes that student activism is important, so too are basic restrictions on how, where and when protests can happen, she said. And students, ultimately, do not run the university’s portfolio, she added.
“I don’t think that significant operational questions about investment practices at the university are appropriately decided by student referenda,” she said. In general, she said, she is “skeptical of political litmus tests for investment strategies.”
In Wisconsin, Dr. Mnookin helped lead negotiations with the conservative State Legislature that produced an agreement to modify university diversity and admissions policies in exchange for releasing $800 million in frozen state funding. The deal, which put a freeze on diversity, equity and inclusion positions and ended a program to recruit diverse faculty members, was attacked by some Democrats and others on campus as capitulation to Republican bullying tactics.
“She sold us out,” said Karl Broman, a professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics and president of the American Association of University Professors chapter at U.W.-Madison. “She gave away too much. There are certain things that you should not negotiate on.”
But the compromise impressed Jeh Johnson, the co-chair of Columbia’s board of trustees.
“She’s been at the political crossroads,” he said, “and she found a solution that protects the university and preserves academic and First Amendment freedoms.”
The experience has a parallel in Columbia’s agreement with Washington, which Dr. Mnookin inherits and will have to manage until it sunsets in 2028. She said she had studied the deal, and felt that Columbia could protect its academic freedom, freedom of speech and decision-making autonomy under its terms.
“If I didn’t think that was possible, I would not have taken the job,” she said.
On the rise of artificial intelligence, Dr. Mnookin took what may be her signature “and also” stance. Her husband has returned to using blue books and sometimes oral exams to maintain learning in his classrooms, which she understands.
On the other hand, she sees “real opportunities for universities,” especially Columbia, to lead in the coming transformation, as artificial intelligence expands the need for critical thinking skills and a focus on what is distinctively human. She spearheaded the creation of a College of Computing & Artificial Intelligence at U.W.-Madison, and recently said that every student “should also have classes where A.I. is being used very actively.”
Dr. Mnookin graduated from Harvard College, Yale Law School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which she earned a Ph.D. in the history of science and technology. She was the dean of the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles before moving to Wisconsin.
She and Dr. Dienstag, who will teach at Columbia, will live in the president’s house on Morningside Drive. They have two adult children.
Though she has never lived in New York, her husband grew up on the Upper West Side, and the couple have many friends in the city, she said. She has been made a tenured member of the law school faculty in addition to her five-year initial term as president.
She that said she was motivated to take the job in part because she hopes success at Columbia can point the way for American higher education more broadly.
“This university has been around for longer than our nation, and we need to make sure that it’s making a positive impact on the world way after all of us aren’t here anymore,” she said. “And so what an amazing opportunity.”
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