What Columbia University President Katrina Armstrong Really Told Faculty Members About Changes the School Is Making

Nothing to see here.

That’s what Columbia University president Katrina Armstrong told approximately 75 faculty members who assembled on a Saturday morning Zoom call to hear from her about a letter sent by the school to the Trump administration on Friday outlining a series of steps Columbia says it is taking to address "legitimate concerns raised both from within and without our Columbia community, including by our regulators" about the eruption of anti-Semitism on campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks.

Throughout the conversation, which lasted approximately 75 minutes and included Columbia provost Angela Olinto and general counsel Felice Rosan, Armstrong and Olinto downplayed or denied that change was underway, particularly when it came to meeting the Trump administration’s demand to put the school’s Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership.

"This is not a receivership," Olinto told the group. "The provost will not be writing or controlling anything. It's the faculty," she continued, adding, "Your department is totally independent."

Columbia’s Middle East Studies department has been a flashpoint in the disputes that have roiled the university since Oct. 7, with critics citing its faculty members as a leading source of anti-Semitism. One of them, Joseph Massad, described the Hamas massacre as "awesome."

Armstrong went on to say the school had made "no changes" to rules surrounding the sorts of masked protests that plagued the university last year, though Friday’s letter announced that masks are no longer allowed "for the purpose of concealing one’s identity in the commission of violations of University policies or state, municipal, or federal laws."

The Washington Free Beacon obtained a transcript of the meeting, which seems to have been created because Columbia administrators were unable to disable the Zoom function that generates an audio transcript. The transcript itself captures administrators struggling to prevent the software from creating a transcript and then moving forward without success.

"I am unable to turn it off, for technical reasons, so we’re all just going to have to understand," an unnamed administrator said at the outset. "This meeting is being transcribed. If you are the requester of this, I would ask you to turn it off."

"Yeah, that seems to be the default. I keep telling my people to stop this thing," Olinto, the provost, responded.

Throughout the discussion, Armstrong—who assumed the presidency on an interim basis in August after former Columbia president Minouche Shafik resigned just over a year into the job—fielded questions from furious faculty members. One described the Trump administration’s actions as "the most significant assault on academic culture in my lifetime," while others pressed her about why the university had not countersued the government.

None of the faculty members, however, raised concerns about the treatment of Jewish and Israeli students on campus or about the conduct of protesters, which led to the cancellation of in-person classes and the school’s graduation ceremony at the close of the last academic year, as well as to the Trump administration’s concern about the climate on the Morningside Heights campus. Just a year ago, a rabbi affiliated with Columbia urged Jewish students to leave campus to celebrate Passover and not to return until conditions on campus had improved.

A Columbia spokeswoman pointed the Free Beacon to a statement Armstrong released Tuesday in which she described "a series of decisive actions we have been taking and will take to combat antisemitism and all forms of discrimination and harassment, including immediately strengthening our processes for enforcement of rules on demonstrations, identification and masking."

Armstrong described the current situation—in which the administration has cut off approximately $430 million in grant money to the school and is demanding a series of reforms as a precondition to discuss the recovery of those funds—as "unbearable," and "unwinnable," and said it was "heartbreaking" that Columbia had to respond to the federal government.

"We have an unbearable situation, just truly unbearable and unwinnable situation where the work that we are moving forward and that we are doing is now seen as in response to an authoritarian regime," she said. "Because the lawyers must write a letter in response to an investigation, I just want you all to know that that is obviously heartbreaking and I understand that deeply."

Some faculty members described a sense of befuddlement over the contrast between the posture Armstrong struck on the call and the series of reforms outlined in Friday’s letter.

"There was a massive disconnect between the voice that I heard you start this meeting with, ‘We haven't changed anything, our policies remain the same’ … and what was in the letter," one said. "So if the voice that we heard this morning is actually our voice, I think that's what needs to get said in public, not in a small group like this from you."

Another worried that the Trump administration would catch on to the fact that "there weren’t many substantial changes."

"I think they're going to realize at some point there weren't many substantial changes, as you've been saying. So how will we respond if they come back to us and say that a lot of this is not really substantive?" the faculty member asked. Armstrong described a "Catch-22" in which the school had already been making changes but now appeared to be doing so at the behest of the administration.

Above all, she bemoaned what she described as the "media storm" around Columbia and the press’s distortion of events on campus, faulting herself for "naivete" on the subject and arguing that her own communications pros had fallen down on the job. "I think the media people we had did not anticipate effectively what would happen. Their perception is that you need to let this particular media wave wash over," she said. "I know how heartbreaking it is to see these media portrayals of what we are."

"We need a much, much better media story and situation," she added, "and we have been working very hard over the last weeks to bring in and create better stories and narratives." To that end, the university had retained the Brunswick Group to help in its communications efforts, she said.

That wasn’t good enough for one frustrated faculty member, who lambasted Armstrong for her failure to effectively navigate the politics of the moment.

"I do want to point to one thing that I have found kind of worrying all along, which is that you're repeating a kind of narrative of apology for being naive," the faculty member said. "And that's kind of worrying because we have to be able to count on you to understand the political landscape and to be able to read the room. We need not just lawyers who are good at parsing documents but people who are good at understanding this is a very, very complex, very diverse, very multifocal institution…"

The faculty member urged Armstrong to consult with political scientists including Columbia’s Gregory Wawro and Ira Katznelson, "people who are good at understanding the workings of politics." The two published a book together in 2022, Time Counts: Quantitative Analysis for Historical Social Science.

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