The Columbia Daily Spectator on Tuesday condemned Columbia University’s lack of transparency after administrators denied the student newspaper’s request for an interview with acting university president Claire Shipman.
“We have seen a rise in unilateral administrative decision-making, a hesitancy to publicly engage with constituents, and now, a high-stakes negotiation with President Donald Trump’s administration taking place entirely behind closed doors,” Editor in Chief Shea Vance and Managing Editor Heather Chen wrote Monday in an editorial titled “President Shipman, Speak to Us.”
The Spectator “has historically had access to frequent interviews with Columbia’s top leadership,” the letter reads. “But as of late, that regular access has been interrupted.” The Spectator‘s request for an interview with Shipman was repeatedly ignored and then “declined outright on April 18,” according to the letter.
The rebuke comes as Columbia grapples with public backlash and a significant loss of federal funding over its repeated failure to protect Jewish students and rein in anti-Semitic protests on campus. The Trump administration, which has pledged to cut funding from universities that fail to curb anti-Semitism, revoked more than $430 million in federal funds from the Ivy League school.
Shipman, the ex-wife of Obama administration press secretary Jay Carney, is Columbia’s fourth president in under two years. Minouche Shafik, elected in 2023 to succeed the retiring Lee Bollinger, resigned in August of last year following her disastrous performance at a House panel on combating the anti-Semitic protests that have roiled Columbia’s campus. Her replacement, Katrina Armstrong, resigned this March following a Washington Free Beacon report that, behind closed doors, she had told faculty members that the university wouldn’t make many changes to fight anti-Semitism on campus.
Vance and Chen published their editorial one day after the Pulitzer board, which includes Shipman, the president of the Columbia School of Journalism, and the editor in chief of the Columbia Journalism Review, awarded prizes to several left-wing news reports, including the commentary prize to a Palestinian poet who defended Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel.
Columbia announced this week that it will cut around 180 staff members, adding that “in the coming weeks and months, we will need to continue to take actions that preserve our financial flexibility and allow us to invest in areas that drive us forward.”
The Spectator editors said they are “disappointed” by Shipman’s refusal to accept an entrance interview but “not surprised, as a series of requests for presidential interviews throughout the past two years have been ignored, delayed, or declined.”
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