Columbia's president, no stranger to complex challenges, walks tightrope on student protests

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“The reason you protest is to call attention to an issue,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education. “And you do that by challenging the normal order of things. It’s not a problem to be solved, but a tension to be managed.” But Columbia’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors responded angrily to her congressional testimony, accusing her of capitulating to demands from lawmakers who they said made “slanderous assaults” on faculty and students. The AAUP submitted a motion of censure against Shafik. While it does not call for her resignation and is largely symbolic, it reflects the intensity of anger on campus toward her actions.

It's not only that she must try to balance principles of free speech and academic freedom with creating a safe environment on campus. Like other college presidents these days, she also is charged with balancing the pillars of shared governance between the faculty, the board and the administration, said Katherine Cho, assistant professor of higher education at Loyola University Chicago.

Her experience in finance, rather than academia, puts her in line with more and more university leaders who come from nonfaculty backgrounds. At the time of Shafik's appointment, Columbia Board of Trustees chair Jonathan Lavine described her as a leader who deeply understood “the academy and the world beyond it.”

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