Acting Columbia President Claire Shipman Reportedly Apologizes for Urging Ouster of Jewish Trustee

Columbia University interim president Claire Shipman has reportedly apologized for urging the replacement of a Jewish trustee with “an Arab” during the 2023-2024 academic year, a time when the school was being rocked by a rise in antisemitic incidents and militant anti-Israel activism on the campus.

At the time, Shipman served as the co-chair of Columbia’s board of trustees, a position which afforded her large influence over the direction of the university.

As first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, Shipman disparaged Jewish trustee Shoshana Shendelman, an outspoken critic of campus antisemitism, as “extraordinarily unhelpful” and a “mole” in a series of emails to board vice-chair Wanda Holland Greene and other colleagues.

“We need to get somebody from the middle east [sic] or who is Arab on our board,” wrote Shipman, who was selected in March to be the university’s fourth president since 2023.

“The things I said in a moment of frustration and stress were wrong,” Shipman said on Wednesday in a leaked email obtained by the Jewish Insider, the outlet reported. “They do not reflect how I feel. I have apologized directly to the person named in my texts, and I am apologizing now to you.”

“I have tremendous respect and appreciation for that board member, whose voice on behalf of Columbia’s Jewish community is critically important,” Shipman continued in the email “to several members of the campus community,” according to the news site. “I should not have written those things, and I am sorry. It was a moment of immense pressure, over a year and a half ago, as we navigated some deeply turbulent times. But that doesn’t change the fact that I made a mistake. I promise to do better.”

Lenny Gold, producer of the campus antisemitism documentary “The Blind Spot” called for Shipman’s resignation in a statement to The Algemeiner.

“It’s a sad, sobering reminder of the pervasiveness of the evil of indifference and ignorance at the highest levels of academia regarding the antisemitism faced by so many Jewish students on American campuses today, and how far we still must go to eradicate a prejudice that was unthinkable here not that long ago,” Gold said. “Shame on Ms. Shipman and Columbia if she doesn’t resign now.  There must be consequences for this behavior, as I assume there would be if it was aimed at any other group (or the member of any other group) protected by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Shipman “was right to apologize,” said Jonathan Schulman, executive director of The Jewish Majority, a nonprofit which studies the Jewish experience in the US.

“Columbia University has a large, proudly pro-Israel Jewish student and alumni base,” Schulman told The Algemeiner. “Referring to a board member who reflects those values as a ‘mole,’ on the very same day that students could hear chants of ‘Long live the intifada,’ on campus, demonstrates a staggering insensitivity.”

Last month, Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism released a “campus climate” survey which found that Jewish students remain exceedingly uncomfortable attending the institution.

According to its results, 53 percent of Jewish students said they have been subjected to discrimination because of being Jewish, while another 53 percent reported that their friendships are “strained” because of how overwhelmingly anti-Zionist the student culture is. Meanwhile, 29 percent of Jewish students said they have “lost close friends,” and 59 percent, nearly two-thirds, of Jewish students sensed that they would be better off by electing to “conform their political beliefs” to those of their classmates.

Nearly 62 percent of Jewish students reported “a low feeling of acceptance at Columbia on the basis of their religious identity, and 50 percent said that the pro-Hamas encampments which capped off the 2023-2024 academic year had an “impact” on their daily routines. Also, Jewish Columbia students are more likely than their peers to report these negative feelings and experiences.

Columbia University also recently settled a lawsuit brought by a Jewish student at the School of Social Work who accused faculty of unrelenting antisemitic bullying and harassment.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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