Another one bites the dust. On Friday, Columbia University’s interim president Katrina A. Armstrong became the latest Ivy League president to throw in the towel, just seven months after the departure of her predecessor, Nemat Shafik.

Shafik resigned in disgrace and left the country following her troubled 13-month tenure during which she consistently failed to lead in the face of violent anti-Semitic campus protests. Since December 2023, five other Ivy League presidents have resigned or left their posts ahead of schedule, a depressing showing for a group of just eight institutions that claim to be world leaders in higher education.

Claire Shipman, a television journalist serving as co-chair of Columbia’s board of trustees, was named acting president. She is the troubled university’s fourth chief executive in less than 20 months and the third woman to lead it. Armstrong will return to her old job as CEO of Columbia’s medical center, for which she was paid a handsome $1.3 million per year, according to Columbia’s most recently available tax filing.

A week before Armstrong resigned, Columbia released an unsigned program of institutional reforms in response to the Trump administration’s decision to pause $400 million in federal funds. Federal immigration authorities also detained for prospective deportation Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian national who completed a graduate degree at Columbia in December and has been identified as a vocal supporter of Hamas, the terrorist organization that carried out the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.

Acting in good faith, federal agency officials publicly praised Columbia’s announced reforms as “an important start” that put the university “on the right track” to having its funds restored. Within hours, however, reports suggested that Armstrong was underhandedly telling her distressed faculty members that she would not, in fact, observe at least two of the required terms: a policy banning non-medical masks that can conceal the identities of protestors and the administrative supervision of an academic department responsible for Middle East Studies—a measure that Armstrong reportedly assured her faculty would have no effect on the department’s operations.

She also reportedly said she “could not agree more” that Columbia was being unfairly portrayed despite massive evidence to the contrary and her having previously acknowledged negative government findings about Columbia as “legitimate concerns.”

After The Wall Street Journal revealed Armstrong’s double game last Monday, the government requested that she clarify her views. In a public statement, she reaffirmed that she would abide by the reforms. “Let there be no confusion,” she told a thoroughly confused public the next day, “I commit to seeing these changes implemented, with the full support of Columbia’s senior leadership team and the Board of Trustees.”

Whether the government found this convincing is anyone’s guess, but within 72 hours Armstrong was gone. Neither her waffling nor her departure did anything to calm the situation. Across the country’s academic landscape, Columbia’s leadership was castigated for having “caved in” to Trump, while critics of higher education became even more assured of their objections to the state of things.  

The same day Armstrong reconfirmed her commitment to reform, the usually feckless American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and radical left American Federation of Teachers (AFT) sued the government to have the funds restored. On Thursday, the day before she resigned, dozens of Columbia faculty members held a risible “vigil” at which they declared they would form a national resistance movement to Trump’s policies. A midweek report indicated that Columbia’s applications are down. On Saturday, Shipman’s first day in office, alumni of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) gathered to tear up their diplomas, claiming that Columbia has failed to live up to its values.

The stakes are high. Columbia received a total of over $1.3 billion in federal funds in 2024, a figure equaling about 20 percent of its annual operating budget. If the university fails to comply with federal civil rights laws, it could lose all those funds.

Signs of progress are bleak. Shipman has publicly said that she, too, supports Columbia’s reforms, but a leaked text message from December 2023 reveals that she considered that month’s congressional hearings on anti-Semitism to be “Capitol Hill nonsense.” That “nonsense” resulted in the resignations of Harvard’s president Claudine Gay and the University of Pennsylvania’s president M. Elizabeth McGill and in the angry withdrawal of billions in private donations to elite universities, including Columbia.

In text exchanges with other Columbia leaders, Shipman also appears to have called for lifting suspensions on campus student groups whose members allegedly engaged in anti-Semitic violence and harassment.

Shipman’s career has largely been in mainstream media, an industry in which 69 percent of Americans say they have little or no trust. Until recently she was married to Jay Carney, who left a long mainstream media career of his own to serve as then-Vice President Joe Biden’s communications director before becoming Barack Obama’s White House press secretary. In 2019, Carney, then serving as Amazon’s corporate spokesman, publicly stated his doubts about the patriotism of Trump administration officials.

By Sunday morning, television pundits were already speculating that Shipman won’t last more than a few weeks. How long Columbia will last is another question.