[IMAGE MISSING. IT’S HARD TO FIND AN IMAGE OF THE COLUMBIA BOARD OF TRUSTEES]
I wrote this op-ed at the invitation of Columbia’s student newspaper, the Spectator. But the editors asked me to explain or justify so many things that it became clear everyone’s time was being wasted. Please let me know if you find anything here confusing or unjustifed.
Since Lee Bollinger stepped down in 2023, Columbia has had three presidents. Each one has been a woman. Bollinger served for 21 years. So far, no female president has served for more than 13 months. It’s hard not to suspect that when the Board of Trustees chose these recent presidents, it was thinking of them as disposable, and that it was thinking of them as distractions—distractions because those of us who were (very properly) enthusiastic about having a female president would be less attentive to the fact that the real power behind the university lies with them, the Board of Trustees. When the Board announces a new president, people think they might be announcing a radical change in the administration. But the Board of Trustees is still there. It remains to be seen whether there will be any daylight between the new President and the old Board.
Recognizing the Board’s unelected power and its recent history of using that power to questionable ends, Columbia’s branch of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has launched a call for its reform. There are good grounds for this call. In July 2025, when Acting President Shipman (also a longstanding member of the Board) capitulated to the Trump administration’s demands for money and oversight to resolve supposed Title VI infractions and release frozen grant money, many faculty members, myself included, saw her not so much as capitulating but rather as colluding, given the eagerness to weaponize charges of antisemitism that certain members of the Board had expressed and a history of financial involvement with, for example, Lockheed Martin, a major supplier of arms to Israel. Acting President Shipman had already begun to surrender the university’s autonomy by announcing a review of the University Senate, which the pro-Israel lobby had been accusing of being too scrupulous about disciplinary procedures, which amounted to being too supportive of the protesters. Rumor had it that trustees and big donors, often the same people, thought the university would run better if the Senate—instituted in response to the student protests of 1968—could be brought to heel or even abolished.
Aside from the custom of granting a honeymoon period to a new president, there are reasons for feeling somewhat more hopeful about incoming President Mnookin. Her legal background resembles Bollinger’s. A president who takes the Constitution seriously could only help Columbia stand up in the face of a new McCarthyism. Like Minouche Shafik Jennifer Mnookin called the cops on the Gaza protesters when she headed the University of Wisconsin in 2024. But when the Wisconsin students set up a second encampment, she chose, unlike Shafik, to negotiate with the protesters in what appears to have been good faith. If there are more protests at Columbia this semester, as is not unlikely, given the continuing Israeli violence in Gaza and the continuing involvement of Columbia’s endowment in supporting the Israeli military, incoming President Mnookin will hopefully counsel outgoing Acting President Shipman to use her good judgment, listen to the students, demonstrate that the university still accepts (to quote my colleague Marianne Hirsch, in a letter to Acting President Shipman), “political protest as part of the practice of democratic world citizenship.”
Last but not least, I hope President Mnookin will do what she can to ensure that proper attention is paid to the AAUP’s call to reform the Board of Trustees. Taking off from the Board’s failure to fulfill its fiduciary responsibilities in the long-running sexual abuse case involving CUIMC Ob-Gyn physician Robert Hadden, which resulted in more than $1 billion in survivor settlements and inflicted serious financial, reputational, and institutional harm on Columbia, the AAUP has focused on the Board’s unusually small size, its homogeneous composition (many trustees from finance, few from academia), and its undemocratic, insular selection process. It calls for a publicly visible, board-specific conflict-of-interest policy. It calls in general for greater transparency. President Mnookin has a chance to show that she is indeed ready to lead in her own right, and not merely win the gratitude of the Board that chose her, by opening up a serious discussion of how Columbia is governed.
