Columbia University has selected University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor Jennifer Mnookin as its next president, according to three people familiar with the decision. Mnookin, the former dean of UCLA School of Law, will be Columbia’s fourth president in two years.
Her appointment comes at a tumultuous time for the university, which is still recovering from its protracted battle with the Trump administration.
As UW-Madison chancellor, Mnookin struck a deal with the school’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” after it occupied a major campus thoroughfare, framing the protesters as well-intentioned activists who were “motivated by understandably passionate feelings about the devastation in Gaza.” In exchange for their cooperation, the school pledged to go easy on the protesters and host at least three guest scholars from Palestinian universities.
Mnookin also threw her support behind the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, telling black students at UCLA Law, “we see you. Black Lives Matter.”
“As members of a law school community in particular, we must recognize and grapple with the complicity of the legal system and law enforcement in acts of racism and violence,” she wrote to the school. “These recent horrifying instances are, sadly, not aberrations; our legal system has been part and parcel of our nation’s shameful history of institutionalized racism.”
She would strike a different tone five years later in a November conversation with the New York Times that took place while she was being considered for the Columbia job. She told the paper that universities had over-indexed on identity politics.
“I think that many universities, not all, but many, were for a period of time deeply focused on identity diversity, and really not so focused on viewpoint diversity or belief diversity,” she said in an interview. “[U]niversities should be spaces where ideas, and different ideas, embodied by people from different backgrounds, come together.”
A spokesman for Columbia University did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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