Columbia Acting President Shipman Has Some Explaining To Do

Changing leadership at Columbia University is apparently the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig. It doesn’t seem to matter who is in charge, the institutional rot remains the same.

Since the spring of 2024, when Columbia was overrun by pro-Hamas protests that resulted in the “occupation” and vandalism of Hamilton Hall, the university has now gone through one president and one acting president, and is currently on its second acting president, Claire Shipman. Shipman was the co-chair of the Board of Trustees before being appointed acting president, so she has had a front-row seat to all the chaos that Columbia has inflicted upon itself. But now Shipman herself has some explaining to do regarding her comments as a board member.

Thanks to the ongoing investigation and negotiation with the Trump administration over the cutting of federal funding, messages between the Board of Trustee members that stretch back to late 2023 – after the October 7th attack – have been released. In these messages to her fellow board members, Shipman acknowledges the anti-Semitism on campus to former Columbia president Shafik (calling the concerns “not necessarily a rational feeling” in her messages), suggests that the board get an “middle east” or “Arab” member “quickly,” but also expresses her personal desire to remove fellow board member Shoshana Shendelman, who is Jewish and was apparently standing up for the Jewish students on campus during these protests. The comment about putting someone of Arab background on the board occurred in January 2024, and seems to have been a throwaway comment, indicating that Columbia’s Board of Trustees was at least thinking about ways to protect themselves from student critiques by making a quick DEI appointment to the board in the wake of October 7th.

“We need to get somebody from the middle east [sic] or who is Arab on our board,” Shipman, then the co-chair of Columbia’s board of trustees, wrote in a message on January 17, 2024. “Quickly I think. Somehow.” pic.twitter.com/kC6hm8CsaK

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) July 1, 2025

The comments about Shendelman are far more disgusting and much more targeted, and there seems to be no explanation for Shipman’s comments other than her own personal disdain of Shendelman’s position.

Some of the most revealing messages concern Shendelman, the trustee Shipman said should be removed from the board. At the height of the anti-Israel encampment last year, Shipman told vice-chair Wanda Greene to keep Shendelman in the dark about the school’s plans to negotiate with the protesters, claiming that she was “fishing for information” that could force the school’s hand as it resisted calling the police.

“Do you believe that she is a mole?” Greene asked on April 22, 2024. “A Fox in the henhouse?”

“I do,” Shipman replied.

While most faculty wanted to avoid a confrontation with law enforcement, Shipman explained, Shendelman was one of several trustees who felt it was time to restore order. The school did not call police until activists occupied a campus building—and allegedly took a janitor hostage—more than one week later, resulting in dozens of arrests.

Greene and Shipman also expressed their personal dislike of Shendelman, a biotech executive whose family fled Iran during the Iranian Revolution.

“I’m tired of her,” Green texted. “So so tired,” Shipman responded.

Shipman claimed that Shendelman was “extraordinarily unhelpful” only a week after she suggested taking on an Arab board member, and advocated for removing her from the board at that time. But it was during the actual pro-Hamas protests that Shipman accused Shendelman of being “a mole” and that she could “pass on” information that she learned in board discussions – to whom, Shipman doesn’t say.

Representative Elise Stefanik, who has made it her job to put university presidents on the unemployment line, along with fellow chair of the House Education Committee Tim Walberg (R-MI), want some answers from Columbia and Shipman regarding these messages.

Today, I led a letter with @EdWorkforceCmte @RepWalberg exposing @Columbia University Acting President Claire Shipman for her complicity in failing to protect Jewish students on campus, requesting clarification on a variety of alarming text and email messages she sent following… pic.twitter.com/6TbVES8KGA

— Rep. Elise Stefanik (@RepStefanik) July 1, 2025

For their part, Columbia isn’t denying the contents of the messages, only offering a weak excuse.

In a statement to the Washington Free Beacon, Columbia claimed the messages had been taken out of context.

“These communications were provided to the Committee in the fall of 2024 and reflect communications from more than a year ago,” the school said. “They are now being published out of context and reflect a particularly difficult moment in time for the University when leaders across Columbia were intensely focused on addressing significant challenges.”

Columbia declined to provide additional context for the messages on the record.

Saying that the messages are “being published out of context” but not clarifying the circumstances, leads one to believe that nope, we have all the context we need. The dates of the messages line up with the protests, and I don’t know what additional “context” is needed that doesn’t make it sound like Shipman and others were intentionally singling out Shendelman for her defense of the campus and Jewish students, right down to calling her “a fox in the henhouse.” Were there other trustees who were similarly trashed in messages that haven’t been made public yet? Was this a “Mean Girls” chat that was busy tearing down colleagues behind their backs over WhatsApp? That would be the only “context” that Columbia could possibly use, and it would just make the Board of Trustees look even worse.

Let’s just say that the Claire Shipman of these messages is very much at odds with the Claire Shipman who is currently trying to steer the ship as acting president.

Her private messages are certainly undermining her script regarding the rampant campus anti-Semitism. The acting president has some explaining to do, and if some answers are not forthcoming to the House Education Committee, then I’m sure Representative Stefanik would love to bring in Shipman for some quality camera time under oath.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click

The post Columbia Acting President Shipman Has Some Explaining To Do appeared first on Victory Girls Blog.