Jabin Botsford for The Washington Post
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Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, was in Washington on April 17 when she logged in to Zoom to convene her deans.
Earlier in the day, pro-Palestinian demonstrators had erected a tent encampment on the Manhattan quad. They staged their protest just as Shafik - an economist and former vice president of the World Bank who was less than 10 months into her presidency - was preparing to testify before a House committee investigating Columbia and other universities over their response to campus antisemitism inflamed by the Israel-Gaza war.
Hours later, she met with the deans remotely, people familiar with the meeting said, not to solicit advice or seek approval from the university leaders with vast responsibility over their respective schools, in charge of academics, discipline and public relations. Instead, she informed them of her plan: to call police onto campus if the students refused to yield.
By the time she arrived back on campus the next day, Shafik had set in motion a series of events that would fuel protests throughout the country and turn her campus into the center of a national debate over speech, hate, complicity and university governance. This debate is unfolding against the backdrop of a bruising presidential campaign increasingly intertwined with the aftershocks of the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 and the global consequences of the war in Gaza.
Columbia, unlike many large universities, doesn't have its own police force. Shafik's decision to enlist the New York Police Department to clear the student encampment, made swiftly with only a handful of high-level advisers, came over the express disapproval of the university senate, a policymaking body representing faculty, students, administrators and alumni and set up in response to the campus demonstrations in 1968 that made Columbia a landmark in agitation against the Vietnam War.
Shafik's use of force galvanized the protests, with escalating rhetoric soon pitting students against one another and leading a rabbi on campus to urge Jewish students to return home for their safety. The standoff culminated in a second encounter with police nearly two weeks later, after demonstrators occupied Hamilton Hall, a highly symbolic building targeted in previous student protests. And it set off a cascade of similar confrontations with law enforcement nationwide, from Indiana University to the University of Texas at Austin to UCLA.
Interviews with administrators, trustees, donors and others show decision-making at Columbia became increasingly centralized and shrouded even to high-level university officials as the crisis intensified - eroding trust in the president even as she faced what many concede were impossible choices. On Wednesday, the Arts and Sciences faculty agreed to consider a motion of no confidence in Shafik, with voting to take place for a week.
In a Thursday email to faculty, Shafik acknowledged, "I know that many of you are angry, and that you feel let down by me and by other University leaders for many different reasons." A university spokesperson declined to make Shafik available for an interview but wrote in a statement that she "leads through consultation and consensus, and regularly meets with people from across Columbia, including faculty, administration, and trustees, as well as with state, city, and community leaders."
On the April 17 Zoom, some deans warned Shafik about the consequences of police action, asking her to consider the damage done to the university's reputation in 1968, according to people familiar with the discussions.
"This was not a conversation to explore options," said one person who participated in the Zoom session and, like some others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details. "When some tried, it was clear the decision had already been made."
A university official rejected that characterization, saying Shafik continued to consider alternatives as Columbia gave students more time to disband, ultimately enlisting police the next morning. Throughout the crisis, Shafik has faced competing pressures, including from a board of trustees where some floated unorthodox ideas, such as erecting a barrier around the student protesters to prevent them from disrupting university business, according to a trustee. Some trustees saw in the Hamilton Hall occupation echoes of the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to a person familiar with their thinking.
Numerous trustees supported Shafik's move to call police onto campus, but some did not, according to a person familiar with those deliberations. A trustee said Shafik listens patiently and seeks consensus but is a decisive leader who understood that the decision was ultimately hers. Shafik acted, she explained in a letter to the NYPD, to ensure campus safety and compliance with university policies.
Some influential donors wanted firmer action.
"Columbia has been too slow to respond and to recognize these s---heads for what they are," Leon Cooperman, a billionaire investor and Columbia Business School alumnus, said in an interview. Cooperman said he spoke one-on-one with Shafik several weeks before her congressional testimony, after he had threatened publicly to cut off contributions to the university.
Many other university leaders have also involved law enforcement to confront Columbia-style encampments that sprang up after police moved in on the New York campus. But not all of them. The president of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., wrote this week that he would not call the police on students even though their encampment violated the school's rules.
"Cops don't always give people tickets for going a few miles over the speed limit," wrote the president, Michael S. Roth, a historian. "Context matters. … In this case, I knew the students were part of a broad protest movement, and protest movements often put a strain on an institution's rules."
Some students at Columbia, Wesleyan and elsewhere have demanded their universities disclose and sell off holdings in businesses and funds they see as complicit in Israel's war. Nearly all of those demands have gone unmet, though some schools have taken steps to allay student anger, including promises to solicit their input on investments.
Some see in the national showdown centered at Columbia not just echoes of past protests but also omens of an even more fractured future.
"This protest is different from others that have occurred at Columbia, and Columbia's had a lot of protests," said James Valentini, a chemist and former longtime dean of Columbia College. "This is the first protest that wasn't just students against the administration as the object of the action. Now we have students pitted directly against other students in a quite significant and dangerous way."
• 'They'll destroy you'
A scheduling conflict prevented Shafik from joining the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT when they appeared before the Republican-led House Education Committee in December and gave nuanced yet evasive answers about disciplining calls for genocide. Two later resigned.
Four months later, Shafik was determined not to be the committee's third casualty when it was her turn to appear on Capitol Hill, according to people who prepared her for the April 17 testimony or spoke with her team.
In her testimony, Shafik vowed to suppress hateful speech and discipline individual employees who seemed to express support for Hamas or its rampage on Oct. 7. And she stated unequivocally that calls for genocide would violate the university's code of conduct.
A baroness in Britain, where she previously led the London School of Economics, Shafik had less experience with U.S. politics. But her approach drew on the advice of seasoned political strategists.
"The rap on the December hearings was that there were too many lawyers and too few communicators," said Philippe Reines, a former longtime press aide to Hillary Clinton who helped prepare Shafik and others from the university, including the two co-chairs of the university's board of trustees, for their testimony.
Clinton, who teaches at Columbia, recommended Reines to Shafik, he said. He had prepared the former secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee for her testimony about the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and later played Donald Trump during her debate practice in 2016.
Others involved in readying Shafik for the congressional gantlet had previously advised U.S. presidents: Shailagh Murray, Columbia's executive vice president for public affairs who earlier served as a high-level communications adviser to President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden and before that was a Washington Post reporter, and Dana Remus, who until July 2022 served as President Biden's White House counsel and is now a partner at Washington-based Covington & Burling, whose offices served as a makeshift war room on the day of the hearing. The New York Times first reported Covington's involvement.
Shafik's vow to prevent protests from growing abusive - and her rejection of such slogans as "from the river to the sea," a common chant of student protesters that some interpret as an antisemitic call to eliminate Israel - earned praise within the GOP. "Columbia beats Harvard and UPenn," Rep. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.) quipped.
But her disclosure of specific disciplinary decisions rankled many back on campus, who criticized her approach to avoiding conflict with the committee. "I think the feeling was, 'My G od, you can't go toe-to-toe with a congressional committee. They'll destroy you. Your only hope is to give in,'" said a former senior administrator. "It was a capitulation to a committee that was out to condemn universities." A university official said voluminous document requests from the committee had included information about individual employees.
The table had already been set for Shafik to try mollifying critics. After protests began last fall, administrators clarified and tightened rules for campus events, without input from the university senate, and used them to suspend two groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.
Joseph Slaughter, a former faculty senator and director of Columbia's Institute for the Study of Human Rights, described these developments as a "coup" by senior administrators "who don't know our students, and don't know the statutes and norms of Columbia." (A university official said that the groups were in violation of every iteration of Columbia's rules, and that neither group has since agreed to comply, which would enable their reinstatement.)
In early April, the university suspended a handful of students for their alleged involvement in an unauthorized event called "Resistance 101." To gain information about attendees at the event, the university enlisted what an administrator described in a statement as "an outside firm led by experienced former law enforcement investigators."
Students expressed their outrage by beginning their encampment on the day of Shafik's testimony, gaining maximum visibility as Congress turned a spotlight on their university. They labeled an area on the central quad a "liberated zone" in an echo of language used in the 1968 protests.
The university issued an order to disperse at 11 that morning. Plans to bring in the police took shape quickly, devised by Shafik along with the provost, general counsel and other senior university leaders, according to a Columbia official.
That afternoon, members of the university senate's executive committee held an emergency meeting and addressed a joint email to the administration opposing police involvement, indicating they did "not approve the presence of NYPD on our campus at this time." Columbia's governing rules envision "consultation" with the committee before such a decision but preserve the president's "emergency authority to protect persons or property."
Students, initially ordered to disperse at 11 a.m., were given an extension until 9 p.m. University officials spoke with NYPD representatives that evening and asked to talk again in the morning.
After her testimony, Shafik remained in Washington to attend a previously scheduled dinner for the Bezos Earth Fund, a climate philanthropy founded by Amazon Chair Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. She did not return to New York until the next day, April 18, according to people familiar with her whereabouts.
• Fight for 'our university'
That morning, Shafik held another Zoom meeting with deans just as senior staff for New York Mayor Eric Adams were agreeing on an internal call that university leaders would have to put any request for police intervention in writing, according to a city official on the call. The goal, the official said, was to make clear that "we didn't make this decision."
Columbia's written request came at 10:30 a.m. Officers moved in shortly after noon and arrested 108 people, including two law students acting as legal observers whose charges were quickly dropped after pressure from university lawyers, according to people familiar with the process. Charges against the other students were also later dropped.
University leaders knew they had a full-blown crisis on their hands. The 21-member board of trustees held around 15 sessions in the two weeks after the encampment was cleared, two trustees estimated. "The board fully supported Minouche on getting the campus under control," one trustee said, adding there was "robust discussion" about her options.
The governing board's members represent a broad cross-section of industries, including finance, government, medicine and media. One trustee said the board skews center-left. Among its members is Li Lu, a Chinese-born investor who was a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, according to Columbia Magazine. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Shafik did not continue to consult with the cadre of politically savvy advisers who had prepared her for her testimony in Washington, according to Reines and a university trustee. Likewise, she did not involve Lee Bollinger, her immediate predecessor and a First Amendment scholar who had led Columbia for 21 years, before bringing in police, said a person familiar with the deliberations. She did later speak with Bollinger, according to a university official.
By this time, Shafik knew she had taken an extraordinary step by calling in police and wanted to adopt a less confrontational approach to ease campus tensions, according to a senior administrator. But at the very moment that she was looking for compromise, the protests swelled, with a tent city emerging just across from where the previous encampment had been disbanded.
The administration could not escape its "ferocious bunker mentality," said James Applegate, an astronomy professor and member of the university senate's executive committee. On the other side was a "group that just wants confrontation."
Columbia's provost, Angela V. Olinto, who acts as the university's chief academic officer, tasked Josef Sorett, the dean of Columbia College, and Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school, with coordinating negotiations with protesters. A business school professor, Geoff Heal, who specializes in environmental economics, had already been asked to explain the complexities of divestment to the protesters, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Heal did not respond to a request for comment.
Negotiations began on April 19 in Columbia's columned Low Library, according to Sueda Polat, a graduate student. The talks were halting, sometimes lasting for hours and sometimes quickly breaking down.
Meanwhile, campus outrage was boiling over. The Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a professional faculty organization, said it had lost confidence in Shafik and pledged to "fight to reclaim our university."
The new encampment remained mostly peaceful. During the Passover holiday, it played host to Seders held by pro-Palestinian protesters, some of whom were Jewish.
At the same time, some protesters escalated their tactics, according to video and other evidence. An Israeli flag was burned on campus. Chants made clear the encampment was an unwelcome place for Zionists. Some of the most extreme rhetoric was lobbed just outside the campus gates, with students and others told to "go back to Poland" and warned, "The 7th of October is about to be every day for you." Many campus activities went remote.
In the fallout, Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and Columbia benefactor, pledged to withhold support for the university, saying it was "no longer an institution I recognize." Biden also weighed in, condemning what he called "antisemitic protests" while refraining from assessing Shafik's leadership.
By April 27, a Saturday, the administration had presented its final offer to the student protesters, proposing that in exchange for clearing the encampment, the university would accelerate review of student suggestions regarding divestment issues, increase transparency of investments, and fund health and education initiatives in Gaza.
The students voted to reject the deal. Polat said there was no chance of approval. "Not at all," she said. "Students are prepared to confront militarized police violence. I think people underestimate how powerful and tough students are."
The university then ordered students to leave the main campus lawn and, on April 29, said it was beginning to suspend those who refused. Early the next morning, a group of students seized Hamilton Hall, modeling their action on past takeovers of the same building - in 1968 to protest the war in Vietnam and demonstrate for the civil rights movement and again in 1996 to demand the creation of an ethnic studies department.
The 1968 seizure of Hamilton Hall is now memorialized by Columbia as a watershed, a protest against "racism," among other causes, according to the university website, which notes that the student action ended when police "stormed the campus and arrested more than 700 people."
• 'I knew it would be violent'
Shafik again appealed to city police to clear the protests.
In an April 30 letter, she specified that she had the "support of the University's Trustees" and wrote that the building takeover and related protests "pose a clear and present danger to persons, property, and the substantial functioning of the University and require the use of emergency authority to protect persons and property."
She alleged that the takeover was "led by individuals who are not affiliated with the University," and she asked that police remain on campus through at least May 17.
A shelter-in-place warning went out to students shortly after 8 p.m.
The participation of protesters unaffiliated with the university weighed heavily on university leaders, according to a trustee and others familiar with the deliberations. But even deans had limited details about the extent of outside involvement, relying on updates from university leaders or sometimes on public news report, and student protesters deny they were led by outsiders.
That evening, deans reengaged with student representatives, warning them that there were 1,000 police officers surrounding campus and again asking them to take the administration's deal. They refused, according to people involved in the discussions. Mahmoud Khalil, one of the student representatives, said he continued working with mediators from the university senate to learn if evacuating the building would prevent arrests. But he ran out of time.
"No one wants NYPD to come in," Khalil said. "I knew it would be violent."
Shortly before 10 p.m., officers in riot gear entered the building through a back window via a ladder fixed to a police vehicle. They pushed, struck and dragged students, according to witnesses, video and medical records. One suffered an eye socket fracture, according to medical records provided to The Post. Several students said they were concussed. One police sergeant accidentally fired his gun inside the building, the department later disclosed, saying he was not aiming at anyone and no one was injured.
A spokesperson for the police department said that officers acted professionally "when Columbia's administrators asked the NYPD to regain control of the campus they had lost" and suggested that protesters had staged certain injuries while stashing gas masks, knives and hammers inside Hamilton Hall.
Police arrested 22 Columbia students and two employees, along with a handful of students from affiliated institutions and 13 others, according to information later released by the university. The protesters were charged with trespassing, a misdemeanor.
Brian Cohen, the executive director of Columbia's chapter of the Jewish campus organization Hillel, said the crisis that culminated with the sweep of Hamilton Hall resulted not from the involvement of law enforcement but from what he described as the university's failure to act sooner.
"Our students have to be able to sleep, they have to be able to study, they have to be able to participate in their classes, and they need to be able to escape the protests," he said. "The lack of enforcement of the rules just led to this downward trajectory at the university, which ended up in a place of chaos."
At the end of the week, Shafik released a video saying that the previous two weeks had been "among the most difficult in Columbia's history" but emphasizing that the university was resilient, even if it couldn't "single-handedly" resolve ancient forms of hatred.
"What we can do is be an exemplar of a better world, where people who disagree do so civilly," she said.
Still, difficult decisions lay ahead. Three days later, the university said it would cancel its main commencement ceremony, scheduled for May 15.
Not all trustees favored the decision, a person familiar with their discussions said. But when they met Wednesday, trustees commended Shafik for what one trustee called her "steadfast leadership."
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