“It’s untenable for her to be in this position. And I think it is only going to be a matter of weeks before she is forced to step down as well,” said Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) in March, when Columbia University board of trustees co-president Claire Shipman became that deeply troubled institution’s acting president.

Shipman’s predecessor, interim president Katrina Armstrong, stepped down following the Trump administration’s decision to suspend $400 million in federal funds pending an investigation into whether Columbia unlawfully tolerated the harassment of Jewish students and thus failed to guarantee them equal access to educational opportunity. “They still don’t get it,” Stefanik continued at the time, “the faculty doesn’t get it. These radical, far-left students [don’t] get it.”

Shipman apparently didn’t “get it,” either. Within days of her appointment, a leaked text message from December 2023 to Columbia’s then-president Nemat Shafik revealed that she had described congressional hearings on campus anti-Semitism as “capital hill [sic] nonsense.” Shafik, who dodged those hearings pleading a scheduling conflict, abruptly resigned in August 2024 after just 13 months in office and having failed to manage violent pro-Hamas campus protests.

Last week, additional text messages released by Stefanik and a fellow committee member show Shipman calling for the replacement of a Jewish trustee concerned about campus anti-Semitism with a new trustee who is either “Arab” or “from the middle east [sic].” The Jewish trustee marked for removal, Shoshana Shendelman, is a biotech executive whose family fled religious persecution in Iran following that country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. In a Fox News op-ed, she has stated that her children and their friends, who were attending Columbia, felt unsafe on campus and that she herself had been targeted for her criticism, though it is unknown whether she was aware some of that targeting came from the co-chair of the board on which she serves.

In other texts, Shipman expressed agreement with another trustee’s opinion that Shendelman was a “mole” and a “fox in the henhouse.” Separately, she called her “extraordinarily unhelpful.” “To what?” one might reasonably ask.

After these texts were revealed, Shipman sent an apology email to “some trusted groups of friends and colleagues.” Starting with a clichéd, Obama-esque “Let me be clear,” the email oozes the hackneyed and predictable vocabulary of people who hope to avoid becoming the victims of cancel culture. Shipman, who claims she personally apologized to Shendelman, pleaded that her texts “do not reflect how I feel,” came at “a moment of frustration and stress,” and “were wrong.” She promised to “do better” and assured the recipients that she was committed to “doing the work” and “moving forward.”

Shipman’s email has been widely reported but she has not followed up with any public explanation or apology, nor has she explained how her apparent pattern of downplaying anti-Semitic harassment at her institution squares with either her leadership role there or with the challenging task of convincing the government that Columbia will fully comply with civil rights laws. As of this writing, her personal account on X is listed as “protected” and her posts are unavailable for public view.

As Columbia’s fourth chief executive in less than two years, Shipman inspires little confidence. Stefanik, who predicted her removal, simply posted “RESIGN!” with a link to the text story. The feds can do more, however.

In March, the Education Department compelled Columbia to discipline student agitators more harshly—including with the first expulsions from that institution since 1968—as a preliminary measure to recover federal funds. In May, the civil rights offices of the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services officially determined that Columbia University “acted with deliberate indifference towards the harassment of Jewish students, thereby violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964” and “consequently denied these students’ equal access to educational opportunities.” In June, in accordance with a presidential executive order issued earlier this year, the Education Department notified Columbia’s accreditation authority, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, that the university “is in violation of federal antidiscrimination laws and therefore fails to meet the standards for accreditation.”

A recent report released by Columbia itself in partial compliance with federal requirements indicates that 87 percent of its Jewish students and 83 percent of its Muslim students feel uncomfortable expressing their views on campus. Demonstrations have continued, including at Columbia’s 2025 graduation, where some students burned their diplomas, while demonstrators carrying Palestinian flags clashed with the police.

With official rulings in place and additional evidence out there, the federal authorities can go farther. Last month, the Justice Department forced the resignation of University of Virginia president James Ryan, whom it found insufficiently responsive to directives to dismantle discriminatory DEI programs harming white and Asian students. There is utterly no reason why they cannot now impose the same fate on Shipman, whose position is merely “acting president,” and compel Columbia to install a trustworthy figure who will do the job that its last three chief executives so disastrously failed to do. Action in this case will create further precedent enabling the Trump administration to end other abuses, such as such as the suppression of differing opinions, at colleges and universities. Institutions that are happy to take public funds should not be engaging in practices that abuse the public trust.