Columbia College’s new president as soon as referred to as Congressional hearings on campus antisemitism “Capitol Hill nonsense.”
Claire Shipman, a former CNN White Home correspondent married to former Obama Administration press secretary Jay Carney, served as co-chair of the College’s board of trustees earlier than she was appointed Friday night time to interchange interim faculty president Katrina Armstrong.
In a Dec. 28, 2023, textual content message, Shipman wrote to then college president Minouche Shafik she thought Columbia could be spared from the “capital hill nonsense,” referring to December 2023 Congressional hearings that noticed the presidents of Harvard College, College of Pennsylvania and MIT testify about campus protests towards the battle in Gaza.
The tense hearings famously resulted in Harvard’s Claudine Homosexual and Penn’s Liz Magill resigning after they had been grilled on whether or not calling for the killing of Jews would violate their faculty’s bullying and harassment insurance policies — and answered that it relied on the context.
Shipman’s textual content messages concerning the hearings had been revealed in a 325-page October report from the Republican Home Committee on Schooling and the Workforce that included leaked messages between college officers.
Columbia’s leaders had expressed contempt for the congressional investigation, in line with a report.
In the identical textual content message, Shipman additionally advised reinstating scholar teams that had participated within the protests.
“I do suppose we must always take into consideration unsuspending the teams earlier than semester begins to take the wind out of that,” she wrote to Shafik.
Armstrong’s resignation was the second in lower than a yr over the college’s dealing with of campus protests.
Armstrong left days after she caved and informed President’s Trump’s administration she would implement a masks ban throughout campus protests as a situation for retaining $400 million in federal funding — whereas allegedly privately promising college she wouldn’t.
Shafik had resigned from the varsity’s prime put up in August amid the furor over the campus protests.
Shipman and Columbia couldn’t instantly be reached for remark.
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