Steering Columbia University through the choppy waters of anti-Israel student protests was never going to be easy for Minouche Shafik, a member of the UK House of Lords who took over as president of the university in New York after a period of relative calm running the London School of Economics.
During her tenure as LSE director between 2017 and last year, academics largely refused to join the industrial action that dominated campuses across much of the UK.
By contrast Columbia has been at the centre of the student rebellion against America’s foreign policy in Israel. An economist and a liberal with an optimistic outlook, Lady Shafik’s efforts to broker a peaceful resolution to the demonstrations have been hampered by a wider political scene that is increasingly polarised.
While some Conservative politicians in the UK have accused universities of failing to protect free speech, their interventions pale against those of rightwing US politicians and commentators.
Shafik’s decision to call in the police to break up a student protest camp on the university lawn appalled many on both sides of the dispute. Protesters and their supporters among the academic community complained about police brutality and the targeting of pro-Palestinian campaigners, while Republican defenders of Israel accused Shafik of failing to act quickly enough.
During a visit to Columbia, Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, called for her resignation, saying she should go “if she cannot bring order to this chaos”.
Opinion is divided over whether Shafik is successfully navigating the situation. While some feel she has balanced the demands of competing factions others fear she has alienated almost everyone and it is only a matter of time before she departs.
The cards looked stacked against her on Thursday, after the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors called for a vote of no confidence in her leadership. Hours later there was another blow: the Department of Education announced it would be investigating the university for anti-Palestinian discrimination against students.
In her favour is a vote by the university senate, which is made up of academics and students. It supported a highly critical motion that demanded an investigation into recent events, but pulled back from censuring the relatively new president, who is the first woman to hold the post.
There are divisions on the trustee body, which appoints the president and controls the purse strings, and after further confrontations between students and the police this week a majority could opt to draw a line under the dispute by sacking the face of the university.
Claudine Gay was six months into her job at president of Harvard when she quit after an appearance before Congress with two other college chiefs to defend their handling of pro-Palestinian protests. They were accused of equivocating on questions about threats to Jewish students on campus and whether students who called for the genocide of Jews should be punished.
Shafik tried to avoid the same fate when she appeared before Congress last month. Asked whether she considered the oft-chanted slogan “From the river to the sea” to be antisemitic, she agreed that it was but added that some students have a different interpretation.
Nemat Shafik, nicknamed Minouche, has travelled far from her Egyptian roots to arrive at Columbia’s Upper West Side campus.
In an interview with the Observer in 2022, she told of how her businessman father fell foul of President Nasser’s programme of land reform and nationalisations in the mid-1960s, losing his homes and property.
The family moved from Alexandria to Savannah, Georgia on the advice of a friend who studied with her father at Imperial College in London.
Shafik went on to gain a place at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to study economics. After her masters at the LSE, she secured a doctorate from St Antony’s College, Oxford.
She then joined the World Bank in Washington and rose up the ranks to become its youngest ever vice-president.
Later, after lecturing at Georgetown University, she moved to the UK where she joined the government’s Department for International Aid, going on to secure the top post of permanent secretary.
A stint as deputy governor at the Bank of England was marred by rumours of fiery arguments with the then governor, Mark Carney, that neither have spoken about publicly.
She jumped ship to the LSE, saying: “The job offer was too good to miss.”
In 2020 Shafik was given a peerageand took her seat in the House of Lords, a position she has suspended while at her full-time role in New York.
Her 2022 book, What We Owe Each Other, is a critique of capitalism that would appeal to students concerned about inequality in countries such as the US and between the developed and developing world.
Yet it is her role as an administrator that is under the microscope. This week’s eviction of students resulted in more than 200 students being arrested. It will be difficult to build bridges after such a rupture.
Maybe the troubles now erupting at the University of California, Los Angeles will distract from Columbia’s travails. Shafik must be praying they do.
