New acting president faces uncertainty over concessions her predecessor made to Trump admin
In her first public message as Columbia University’s acting president, Claire Shipman offered a vague promise to “build on” the “plan outlined to move our community forward” amid the Ivy League school’s ongoing battle with the Trump administration.
Shipman, a former ABC and CNN journalist, assumed her position on Friday after Katrina Armstrong stepped down as interim president. Shipman said Monday that she plans to “continue to build on the significant progress we’ve made, and the plan outlined to move our community forward.” She did not provide additional details about what that plan entails. Asked if the line referenced the series of reforms Armstrong announced earlier this month to jump-start negotiations with Trump officials to restore more than $430 million in lost federal grant money, a Columbia spokeswoman responded “yes.”
Shimpman’s pledge also provided little clarity on how she intends to navigate Columbia’s mounting challenges—or how she’ll handle the predicament her predecessor left her surrounding the reforms. A day after announcing the measures, Armstrong held a private Zoom call with approximately 75 faculty members and downplayed or denied that change was underway. After her comments were reported, she said they lacked “full context” and committed “to seeing these changes implemented.”
Armstrong left her post days later. She was the second president to step down since August 2024, when Minouche Shafik resigned amid criticism of her handling of anti-Semitic protests that gripped the campus in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack.
Shipman in her Monday message thanked Armstrong for “heroic efforts over the past seven months.”
“Ornamental language can’t disguise the fact that this is a precarious moment for Columbia University,” Shipman wrote. “In serving our community and navigating what’s to come, I pledge to be as transparent as possible, and to work as hard as I can to do right by a place that is so critical to all of us, and to the world.”
Shipman testified before the House Education Committee alongside Shafik last April. Several months earlier, in a Dec. 28, 2023, text message to Shafik, Shipman called Republican-led congressional hearings on anti-Semitism “nonsense.” In the same text message, obtained by the House Education Committee, she suggested reinstating student groups that had participated in illegal anti-Israel campus protests.
“I do think we should think about how to unsuspend the groups before semester starts to take the wind out of that,” she wrote to Shafik.
The former journalist was married to former Obama press secretary Jay Carney until March 13 of this year, according to divorce records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Carney left Time magazine in 2008 to serve as Joe Biden’s communications director. He became Barack Obama’s second press secretary three years later and left the White House for CNN in 2014. He now serves as Airbnb’s global head of communications.