‘Who benefits from sending Shipman’s messages to the right wing Free Beacon?’ faculty group asks in response to texts Columbia produced under subpoena
An anonymous group of Columbia University faculty members released a statement suggesting a Jewish member of the school’s board of trustees “leaked” acting president Claire Shipman’s private text messages to the Washington Free Beacon. In reality, Columbia itself provided the messages to a House committee, which released them in a letter, as a Free Beacon report on the texts noted.
The statement came from “a group of Columbia faculty and staff,” according to “Rise Up, Columbia,” a Substack page run by “members of the Columbia community intent on fighting back against attacks on our university.” It says Shipman’s texts were “recently leaked to the press” and calls the “timing” of the leak “suspicious.”
“Who benefits from sending Shipman’s messages to the right wing Free Beacon?” the faculty members ask before answering their own question: “Shoshana Shendelman,” a Jewish member of Columbia’s board who, according to the statement, “has recently come under pressure to resign” and is “desperate to repair her image.”
Shendelman, one of the board’s most outspoken critics of campus anti-Semitism, is a central figure in the texts. In one January 2024 message, Shipman suggested Shendelman should be removed from the board. Months later, in April 2024, Shipman wrote that she believed Shendelman to be “a mole” and a “fox in the henhouse” and told a colleague to keep her in the dark about the school’s plans to negotiate with protesters. “I am tired of her,” Shipman’s colleague wrote in reference to Shendelman. “So so tired,” Shipman replied.
Shendelman, however, could not have leaked Shipman’s messages, as Columbia itself provided them to the House Committee on Education and Workforce.
The committee first asked Columbia for documents related to campus anti-Semitism in February 2024. By August, the committee determined that Columbia had “failed to produce numerous priority items requested by the Committee” and subpoenaed the school as a result. The subpoena specifically covered text messages from Shipman.
The committee went on to release some of the texts—including one in which Shipman described congressional oversight of campus anti-Semitism as “capital [sic] hill nonsense”—in an October 2024 report. It followed that report up with a July 1 letter to Shipman that included her texts disparaging Shendelman. The Free Beacon‘s report on those texts notes that they were “included in a letter sent to Columbia on Tuesday by committee chair Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.).”
Columbia did not respond to a request for comment.
Though the faculty members behind the Substack statement are not known, one Columbia professor, Joseph Howley, linked to the statement in an Instagram post that included a screenshot of the portion accusing Shendelman of leaks. Howley teaches “Literature Humanities in Columbia’s Core Curriculum,” the Ivy League school’s required literature course for undergraduate students. The class is meant to teach Columbia students how to “make sense of literary texts together, on paper and in discussion.”
Howley is also known as one of the most outspoken supporters of anti-Israel student protesters within Columbia’s faculty. When an illegal encampment went up last spring, Howley gave interviews from inside its perimeter and dismissed the idea that the sanctioned demonstration posed a safety risk. He did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to Shipman’s text calling to oust Shendelman, Walberg and Stefanik’s letter included another message in which Shipman argued that Columbia needed to “get somebody from the middle east [sic] or who is Arab on our board. Quickly I think. Somehow.” Shipman apologized for the texts in a private note she sent on Wednesday to a small group of colleagues and donors.
“Let me be clear: The things I said in a moment of frustration and stress were wrong,” Shipman wrote. “They do not reflect how I feel. I have apologized directly to the person named in my texts, and I am apologizing now to you.”
The anonymous faculty group took issue with Shipman’s apology.
“Why does she apologize to a board member who was instrumental in calling for NYPD action against Columbia’s peaceful protesters?” the group said in its statement. “We call on Shipman to stand by her words and not to bow to external pressure.”
Jessica Schwalb contributed to this report.
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