Columbia University Demonstrates That The Rot Starts At The Top

If anyone was under any illusions why a place like Columbia University is rotting under the stench of bigotry and anti-Semitism, it begins with the leadership.

We’ve seen the lip service that the leadership – beginning with former president Minouche Shafik, to former interim president Katrina Armstrong, to current interim president Claire Shipman – has paid to being a diverse and tolerant and understanding campus, and discovered that this tolerance goes only one way. If you are a Jewish or Israeli student or staff on campus, your rights and safety come second to the desires of the pro-Hamas LARPers on campus who are busy trying to “free Palestine” by pitching tents and vandalizing buildings.

The leadership of Columbia is where this all begins. We saw former president Shafik be reamed over the coals before Congress, with Shipman sitting there with her, for her inability to deal with the anti-Semitism on campus.

We’ve seen former interim president Armstrong be completely two-faced, telling the federal government one thing, while telling her colleagues on the faculty another, as well as professing her complete ignorance about the anti-Semitism on campus. And now we have seen current interim president Shipman get caught out for her own bigotry against one of her fellow Board of Trustee members, Shoshana Shendelman. The revelation of those WhatsApp messages, and the ugly racism they contain, now has Shipman groveling to “friends and colleagues” in hopes of saving herself.

A House investigation dug up the texts sent by acting president Claire Shipman in January 2024 amidst anti-Israel campus protests where she advocated removing Shoshana Shendelman from the board of trustees.

Shendelman was one of the most vocal members against harassment of Jewish students, but in the private texts Shipman agreed with a text saying she could be a “mole,” called her “extraordinarily unhelpful,” and suggested they “get somebody from the middle east,” according to the Committee on Education and Workforce’s report.

The Post obtained a private email sent Wednesday afternoon by Shipman to “trusted groups of friends and colleagues” in which she said she “made a mistake” and “[promised] to do better,” amid the college losing over $400 million in federal funding for not doing enough to fight antisemitism.

“Let me be clear: The things I said in a moment of frustration and stress were wrong,” Shipman wrote.

“They do not reflect how I feel… 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.”

The email was shared with The Post by an anonymous source at the university. A second person with knowledge of the matter confirmed the legitimacy of the letter to The Post and said it was sent to around a dozen individuals.

In her private email, Shipman said she apologized directly “to the person named in my texts” — presumably referring to Shendelman.

“I have tremendous respect and appreciation for that board member, whose voice on behalf of Columbia’s Jewish community is critically important,” she wrote. “I should not have written those things, and I am sorry.”

Um, I’d argue that “a moment of immense pressure” reveals exactly the kind of character that a person possesses. It’s clear Shipman is weak, craven, and cowardly, and she’s only sorry that her bigotry has been exposed so publicly. This wasn’t just an offhand comment – she wrote it down, texted it out, and reinforced her opinion of Shendelman multiple times in these WhatsApp threads. This is who she is. This is what the Board of Trustees allowed. This is what Columbia University has become, and the fish rots from the head down.

How about because they have no idea their views are noxious and criminal and monstrous and they think they are in the right. And all of this makes them stupid because they don’t know they need to be clever and duplicitous.

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) July 2, 2025

And if you want further proof of what Columbia is, take a look at the faculty’s reaction to the revelation of Shipman’s texts. Guess who the faculty blames? THE JEW. There is a Substack titled “Rise Up, Columbia” which was launched on April 20, 2025. In their most recent post, with authorship credited to the “Columbia Faculty and Staff Alliance,” they speculate that Shendelman released the texts herself. And they are furious that Shipman apologized.

The timing of this leak is suspicious. Who benefits from sending Shipman’s messages to the right wing Free Beacon? Shoshana Shendelman, the disgraced BoT and pharma-investor who flouted FDA rules and tanked her company, leading to a securities fraud lawsuit, has recently come under pressure to resign from Columbia’s board. Desperate to repair her image, over the last week Shendelman managed to get CUMed to promote her on X and shill for RFK Jr’s anti-science MAHA program. She also tried to repair her reputation in a Fox oped, and in recent days repped the BoT and CU on Fox and Breitbart to spread fear and Islamophobic lies about Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s Democratic nominee for mayor, voted for by more than half a million people.

Meanwhile, CU is once again watching a female president being attacked by forces both inside and outside the university, under the thin veneer of bad faith accusations of antisemitism. Elise Stefanik, an upstate NY congresswoman with no connection to CU, demanded Shipman’s resignation on X.

In response to this pressure, Interim President Shipman had the opportunity to stand by her words, and demand Shendelman resign. However, she chose to apologize for everything she wrote.

While we reject the congressional demand for her resignation, we are disappointed in Shipman’s apology. Rather than apologize, Shipman should have continued to advocate for a BOT more representative of Columbia’s student and faculty population (there are currently no Muslim BOT members), freedom of speech, and our students’ right to protest. Instead, she caved and failed to insist on the university’s autonomy. SHAME.

As the Washington Free Beacon points out, there was no “leak” of these texts, because Columbia University ITSELF PROVIDED THEM TO CONGRESS. Once they were in the hands of Congress, Congress could release them as they saw fit. The Free Beacon just happens to be the media outlet who looked.

Shendelman, however, could not have leaked Shipman’s messages, as Columbia itself provided them to the House Committee on Education and Workforce.

The committee first asked Columbia for documents related to campus anti-Semitism in February 2024. By August, the committee determined that Columbia had “failed to produce numerous priority items requested by the Committee” and subpoenaed the school as a result. The subpoena specifically covered text messages from Shipman.

The committee went on to release some of the texts—including one in which Shipman described congressional oversight of campus anti-Semitism as “capital [sic] hill nonsense”—in an October 2024 report. It followed that report up with a July 1 letter to Shipman that included her texts disparaging Shendelman. The Free Beacon’s report on those texts notes that they were “included in a letter sent to Columbia on Tuesday by committee chair Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.).”

Great, so Columbia University has faculty that are malicious, racist, AND stupid. What a magnificent combination to have teaching young skulls full of mush at an Ivy League school.

There is no hope of saving Columbia, because the leadership is convinced that they are right. Even if Shipman is relieved of the interim presidency, whoever comes next will likely have an equal amount of baggage. The Board of Trustees is toxic. Those with the loudest voices on the faculty are arrogant and anti-Semitic. It’s time for anyone left at the univeristy with common sense to abandon ship, and let it self-destruct. You can’t save anyone if they aren’t convinced that they need saving, and they continue to blame the Jews for what is happening to them. The leaders of Columbia are the reason why the campus is the way it is, rotting from the top down. The once venerable institution is collapsing in on itself like a dying star, and nothing can stop it now.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click

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