On Capitol Hill last April, Claire Shipman, then a co-chair of Columbia University’s board of trustees, testified that she agreed there was a “moral crisis on our campus,” with students and faculty members acting in unacceptable ways that threatened Jewish and Israeli students.
“I can tell you plainly that I am not satisfied with where Columbia is at this moment,” she said at a hearing on campus antisemitism.
Now, she will have even more of an opportunity to address the situation. On Friday, Ms. Shipman, 62, an author and former television journalist, was elevated to become Columbia’s interim president, remaining in the role until a search for a permanent president is completed.
Ms. Shipman is taking the helm at a time of significant peril for the 271-year-old institution. The Trump administration has cut $400 million in federal research grants to Columbia, mostly in the health sciences, because of what it described as the school’s failure to protect Jewish students from harassment. To get the money back, the White House is demanding a series of reforms from Columbia, including a ban on masks that are intended to conceal identity, stricter rules about where and when protests can take place and outside oversight of the university’s Middle Eastern studies department.
Federal officers from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency have detained or attempted to detain several current or former Columbia students in recent weeks, including Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the school’s pro-Palestinian movement who holds a green card and is married to a U.S. citizen.
Katrina Armstrong, who stepped down as the university’s interim president on Friday, had pledged to meet the Trump administration’s conditions for a return of the funding. But the written promises Columbia made, while far-reaching, did not go as far as the government’s demands, and Dr. Armstrong faced criticism last week for appearing to downplay the changes at a faculty meeting, a transcript of which was leaked to the news media.
Ms. Shipman will face the same complicated balancing act, as she tries to appease federal demands while dealing with a robust student protest movement and a strong-willed faculty dedicated to protecting its academic freedom against Washington interference.
Ms. Shipman grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and entered Columbia College as a sophomore. When she arrived in New York, she told Congress, she was “a full financial aid student with little sense about the school, the city or the world.”
Columbia changed that. She majored in Russian studies, graduating in 1986, as one of the first Columbia College classes to include women. She went on to Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs to continue graduate studies in the field.
She got her first big break when she landed a six-month internship in CNN’s Moscow bureau just before the fall of the Soviet Union, she told a Columbia alumni magazine in a wide-ranging interview in 2002. From there, she moved steadily up the ranks, working in Moscow before moving to Washington to cover the Clinton White House for CNN and then NBC.
She later moved to ABC as a reporter, where she was a correspondent and a “Good Morning America” contributor. In the late 1990s, according to the alumni magazine, she married Jay Carney, who served as President Barack Obama’s press secretary from 2011 to 2014. The couple have two children.
Ms. Shipman joined the Columbia board of trustees in 2013, and became a co-chair in 2023. She now takes on what may well be one of the toughest jobs in academia, while Dr. Armstrong returns to her former post as head of the university’s medical center.
“I assume this role with a clear understanding of the serious challenges before us,” Ms. Shipman said in a statement Friday, “and a steadfast commitment to act with urgency, integrity, and work with our faculty to advance our mission, implement needed reforms, protect our students and uphold academic freedom and open inquiry.”
Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City. More about Sharon Otterman
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