Former Columbia University president Katrina Armstrong will return to her role as CEO of Columbia’s medical center in June, according to people familiar with the matter, just a month after going on sabbatical “to spend time with her family” in the wake of a disastrous deposition in which she said she could not recall in detail a single anti-Semitic incident on campus.
At a deposition conducted by the White House’s anti-Semitism task force in April, Armstrong said that she had “no specific memory” of anti-Israel activists calling for the destruction of Israel. She also could not recall hearing that Jewish students had been spit on or that a faculty member had said, in class, that Jewish donors were “wealthy white capitalists” who “laundered” “blood money”—incidents that were described in the university’s own anti-Semitism report.
After the Free Beacon asked for comment about the deposition, Columbia announced that Armstrong had “decided to take a sabbatical and spend time with her family.” She had previously planned to return to the medical school after stepping down as interim president.
A spokeswoman for the university told the Free Beacon that Armstrong “remains on sabbatical” and that “her contributions to medical education and research at Columbia are deeply valued, and we look forward to her continued contributions here.”
The end of her brief sabbatical comes at a delicate time for the university and could complicate Columbia’s efforts to prove to the Trump administration that it is taking anti-Semitism seriously. More than 80 anti-Israel protesters—including an employee of Columbia’s sister school, Barnard College—were arrested last week after they commandeered a campus library and injured two police officers. University president Claire Shipman has vowed to punish the mob.
Several of the protesters, it turns out, were Columbia students who had been allowed to return to campus after being suspended for previous protests. Their invasion of the library underscored the university’s failure to expel activists who violate school rules, raising the possibility of more disruptions at a campus that has been consumed by them.
Though Columbia did expel some of the students who occupied an administrative building last April, it did so only after the Trump administration cancelled $400 million in grants and contracts to the university.
The school has also been reluctant to bring the hammer down on administrators who flirt with anti-Semitism, firing three deans who exchanged hostile text messages about Jewish panelists but allowing a fourth official, Columbia College dean Josef Sorett, to remain in his post—even though he also took part in the exchange.
The administrators, who sent the messages while attending an event on campus anti-Semitism, attacked the “privilege” of Jewish students, complained about the influence of “$$$$,” and used vomit emojis to refer to an op-ed by a Columbia rabbi. In a series of messages mocking the co-chair of Columbia’s anti-Semitism committee, David Schizer, the officials also stated the school’s rules for managing protests “don’t work.”
Armstrong became interim president of Columbia shortly after the texting scandal, and initially seemed prepared to play ball with the Trump administration. The university said publicly that it had accepted a list of demands from the White House’s anti-Semitism task force—including a ban on masked protests—in an effort to restore the $400 million in federal aid. It also appointed a new provost to oversee its Middle Eastern Studies department, which the Trump administration had demanded be put into receivership.
But at a meeting with 75 faculty members in March, Armstrong appeared to suggest that she had no plans to actually implement the changes. She claimed there would be “no changes” to the rules on masked protests, for example, and implied that the promised oversight of the Middle Eastern Studies department was a bait and switch.
“This is not a receivership,” Columbia provost Angela Olinto said at the meeting. “The provost will not be writing or controlling anything. It’s the faculty.”
Armstrong resigned after a transcript of the meeting leaked to the press. A few days later, she sat for a deposition about her seven-month tenure as president, telling federal investigators that she had no “specific recollections” of what was in the school’s 91-page anti-Semitism report.
Columbia announced Armstrong’s sabbatical from the medical center on the same day that the Free Beacon published a transcript of the deposition.
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